As a tenured (albeit perhaps now ‘emeritus’) member of the “generally critical commentator crew”, I think this is the wrong decision (cf.). As the OP largely anticipates the reasons I would offer against it, I think the disagreement is a matter of degrees among the various reasons pro and con. For a low resolution sketch of why I prefer my prices of ‘pro tanto’ to the moderators:
I don’t think Said’s commenting, in aggregate, strays that close to the sneer attractor. “Pointed questions with an undercurrent of disdain” may not be ideal, but I have seen similar-to-worse antics[1] (e.g. writing posts which are thinly veiled/naked attacks on other users, routine abuse of subtext then ‘going meta’ to mire any objection to this game with interminable rules-lawyering) from others on this site who have prosecuted ‘campaigns’ against ideologies/people they dislike.[2]
The principal virtue of Said doing this for LW is calling bullshit on things which are, in fact, bullshit. I think there remains too much (e.g.) ‘post’-‘rationalist’ woo on LW, and it warrants robustly challenging/treating with the disdain it deserves. I don’t see many others volunteering for duty.
The principal cost is when this misfires, so the author ends up led into a subthread wasteland by Said thanks to him taking an odd, (unintentionally?) tendentious? line of questioning. In principle, this should not be that costly: if a comment asks for a clarification where I am confident other readers would agree with me the questioner is being very dumb, willfully obtuse, or making a ‘cheap shot’, I can ignore them without fear of third parties making an adverse inference. This applies whether this is the initial exchange or 1+ plys deep.[3]
Even if ‘in principle’ this is fine, maybe (per OP) the scales tilt the other way in practice. But I don’t think doing more to be ‘writer friendly’ by squashing putative gadflies like Said gets you enough marginal high-quality community content to be worth it across the scales of the (admittedly-nebulous) ‘taxing criticism’.
The track record of hewing moderation to cater for authors has not borne much fruit so far: the mod tools were introduced in large part to entice Eliezer back. He’s not. I think I recall a lot of mod effort has been spent on mediating spats between high profile users/contributors, but I think the usual end result is these dramatis personae have faded away.
#
Regardless of all that, it’s your website, and I’m barely a stakeholder worth considering (my last substantial contribution was over a decade ago). I wouldn’t hold it against Pace or Habryka if from arguments we had on the EA forum[4] they thought my judgements better to inverse, and my absence satisfying.
I expect I will continue participating very little in LW, although Said getting banned has little to do with it. Basically I don’t find enough yield of ‘good generalist (i.e. not principally focused on AI) content’ here anymore. I think Said incrementally helped by reducing the volume/prominence of not-so-good generalist content, so this seems a step in the wrong direction.[5] Happy days, and more fool me, if the future proves me wrong.
Although I appreciate mitigating circumstances (and an isolated case), moderator behaviour on this post has been ‘similar-to-worse antics’ too. It seems bad form to (as it appears Habryka has done) strong downvote a large number (most?) comments by Said in the threads he is arguing with him in (can I do this if I get into a fight with someone with much lower vote power than me?). Ditto (as Pace did) use site-admin info to score points against a dissenting user he wanted to be snide to, especially when that user seems to be dissenting in the manner OP requested they do.
I’m not giving examples to avoid prompting a subthread wasteland on whatever I bring up. If widely disbelieved and crucial to the discussion, I am open to being cajoled into naming some names
Aside: it is perhaps unfortunate ‘tapping out’ is the lingo for dropping a discussion. In martial arts, (notwithstanding the gloss on the wiki that it can mean ‘one is tired, or at risk of injury, or has simply had one’s fill’) tapping is typically an admission of defeat.
Regardless of the lingo, there is still the advantage of having the ‘last word’ (cf. OP). I could be odd, but I feel this gets outweighed by the much lower visibility of (e.g.) the 5th+ nested comment being seldom more than ‘you and your interlocutor’. In terms of ‘discussion as social fight’, whoever got ratioed in the first 1-2 back and forths on the thread is the loser, even if they make the last ‘rebuttal’.
FWIW I don’t have the impression that the EA forum is more ‘linkedin-y’ than LW nowadays. Besides roughly similar levels of spats/drama, many of my comments there are much meaner towards the OP than Said’s, and I haven’t had the moderators generally ‘on my case’ about them (e.g.).
But there are secular explanations which likely overdetermine, e.g.:
Maybe we’ve run out of useful general things to say, so useful conversation inevitably gets more and more sub-specialised?
Maybe the noughties internet just developed a lot of surplus for places like LW, but nowadays gifted writers want to cultivate their own substack or whatever.
Maybe things have professionalized so the typical commenter who could share interesting takes on AI alignment (or whatever) as an amateur has been recruited to a think tank as a professional.
It seems bad form to (as it appears Habryka has done) strong downvote a large number (most?) comments by Said in the threads he is arguing with him in (can I do this if I get into a fight with someone with much lower vote power than me?)
(Said doesn’t have much lower vote-power than me, I think he currently has a strong-vote strength of 8 or 9, and I have a strong-vote strength of 10)
I also didn’t strong-downvote most of his comments in that thread/on this post, though I have strong-downvoted a few. I do stand behind those votes, as they are the result of reading each of his comments in detail, and only voting so when I do really think they are quite bad. Even invoking standards in which one should justify one’s votes publicly, which I don’t generally ascribe to, I have just written a 15,000 word post about why I think Said’s comments are deserving of downvotes. I also upvoted some of Said’s comments in these discussions.
I can see a somewhat weak case why in this discussion I should not vote, but I really don’t buy it overall. These are bad comments. The resulting discussion has produced little value, much frustration, and in a fitting way for this post has I think resembled many of the worst things that go wrong in discussions with Said. Feel free to upvote them if you do like them, two users of your karma should be enough to cancel them out, so it doesn’t take that much (though I would encourage you to only do that if you actually think they are good[1]). It wouldn’t make sense for the perceived balance of votes to end up skewed away from the usual voting patterns on the side, on this post of all places, and in as much as voting is trying to measure something like net-approval on the site (which to be clear it is at most an extremely noisy approximation of) it would be pretty distortive of that for me to not vote in these threads.[2]
Ditto (as Pace did) use site-admin info to score points against a dissenting user he wanted to be snide to, especially when that user seems to be dissenting in the manner OP requested they do.
I don’t think Ben intended to score points, though I agree his comment was not written in a way that made that clear (and also gave me a mildly bad taste). Separately a user deleting and undeleting their account is public knowledge and can be derived from e.g. archive.org archives of any pages where they commented, there is no site-admin info necessary to derive that information, all it would take is more time (and I would answer any other query about DB info that can be derived such to anyone on LW).
Beyond that, I have hit my time limit on engaging with comments on this post, so I won’t respond further. I would appreciate some courtesy[3] to keep discussion to the principles and decision-level instead of critiques of my personal behavior, as indeed much of the cost of moderation is measured in having any moderation-adjacent action be torn apart and be requested to be justified or defended.
Though I think adjustive-voting is also a fine use of the voting system, so if you merely think they are too far downvoted, it’s IMO a reasonable choice to use your votes to move them to where you think they are supposed to be
I have a short-ish section on bad voting patterns in the OP which I could contrast with what I think is going on here, but I am going to skip for now due to time constraints. I do think that a strong-vote of 10 is often distortively strong, and in many of these threads wish I had a medium-strong vote, but alas the complexity has so far not been worth it to implement such a feature.
I think it would be a good norm to never strong-downvote someone you’re debating, no matter how carefully you’ve read them, because it’s just too easy to be biased in such situations, and it makes people suspicious/resentful/angry (due to thinking that the vote is biased/unfair, and having no recourse or ability to hold anyone accountable), which is not conducive to having calm and productive discussions. Rather surprised that you don’t support or follow this.
I somewhat agree and apply a substantially higher bar to downvoting people I am debating, especially on non-moderation discussions (in the threads on this post, I abstained from voting for a lot of his replies to me, though less on his replies to others, e.g. the Vaniver thread).
As a site-moderator my job is often more messy and I think allows less of this principle than it does for others. In many cases where I would encourage other people to just “downvote and move on”, I often do not have that choice, as the role of actually explaining the norms of the space, or justifying a moderation decisions, or explaining how the site works, falls on me. In many cases, if I didn’t vote on those comments, the author would not get the appropriate feedback at all.
Another thing that I think is important is to have gradual escalation. It is indeed better for someone to be downvoted before they are banned. As a moderator, voting is the first step of moderation. Moderators should vote a lot, and pay attention to voting patterns, and how voting goes wrong, because it’s a noisy measure and the moderators are generally in the best position to remove the most distortions. Most moderation should be resolved via just the voting system.
There is a whole post I would like to write about trying to somehow grapple with the concept of “contempt of court”. A hugely common experience of any moderator on the internet is that you write some moderation message trying to pretty gently enforce some principle or rule, and are met with extreme contempt and aggression. Having some ability for moderators to enforce some level of cooperativeness in moderation discussion is important. The cost of someone being a dick to moderators is indeed very high, both in terms of the general ability of the site to have any norms and principles, and because moderator energy is often the limiting factor for a functional forum. I currently consider downvoting people who are dicks to moderators really important. Like, if I didn’t do it, a lot of my moderators would quickly quit, I would probably quit moderating myself, and the consequences for the site would be enormous.
And my current take is due to a bunch of underdog dynamics in online discussions, people get to be extreme dicks to moderators without naturally getting downvotes. Conduct that would routinely get someone downvoted and rate-limited to oblivion, when aimed at moderators or authority figures gets routinely tolerated. I understand people’s instinct to do it, but I can’t do my job that way, and if I had to give up the tool of voting in moderation discussion, I do not think I could do this job.
And to be clear, I have a lot of sympathy with concerns about “contempt of court enforcement mechanisms”. It seems like a pretty dangerous set of tools. The current set of tools on the site we have kind of suck, though also, I think Said is a huge outlier in how much he was contemptuous of any attempts to moderate him, so it might just be less of an issue in the future.
(Remember that, IIRC, we still have the misfeature that you can’t strong upvote your own comments. Perhaps you mention this, I haven’t read much of your comment or these threads)
I haven’t mentioned it, and I do hate it as a feature, and we should change it. Having the default outcome of two people being angry at each other being that everyone is somewhere in the super negatives does seem pretty dumb.
As a tenured (albeit perhaps now ‘emeritus’) member of the “generally critical commentator crew”, I think this is the wrong decision (cf.). As the OP largely anticipates the reasons I would offer against it, I think the disagreement is a matter of degrees among the various reasons pro and con. For a low resolution sketch of why I prefer my prices of ‘pro tanto’ to the moderators:
I don’t think Said’s commenting, in aggregate, strays that close to the sneer attractor. “Pointed questions with an undercurrent of disdain” may not be ideal, but I have seen similar-to-worse antics[1] (e.g. writing posts which are thinly veiled/naked attacks on other users, routine abuse of subtext then ‘going meta’ to mire any objection to this game with interminable rules-lawyering) from others on this site who have prosecuted ‘campaigns’ against ideologies/people they dislike.[2]
The principal virtue of Said doing this for LW is calling bullshit on things which are, in fact, bullshit. I think there remains too much (e.g.) ‘post’-‘rationalist’ woo on LW, and it warrants robustly challenging/treating with the disdain it deserves. I don’t see many others volunteering for duty.
The principal cost is when this misfires, so the author ends up led into a subthread wasteland by Said thanks to him taking an odd, (unintentionally?) tendentious? line of questioning. In principle, this should not be that costly: if a comment asks for a clarification where I am confident other readers would agree with me the questioner is being very dumb, willfully obtuse, or making a ‘cheap shot’, I can ignore them without fear of third parties making an adverse inference. This applies whether this is the initial exchange or 1+ plys deep.[3]
Even if ‘in principle’ this is fine, maybe (per OP) the scales tilt the other way in practice. But I don’t think doing more to be ‘writer friendly’ by squashing putative gadflies like Said gets you enough marginal high-quality community content to be worth it across the scales of the (admittedly-nebulous) ‘taxing criticism’.
The track record of hewing moderation to cater for authors has not borne much fruit so far: the mod tools were introduced in large part to entice Eliezer back. He’s not. I think I recall a lot of mod effort has been spent on mediating spats between high profile users/contributors, but I think the usual end result is these dramatis personae have faded away.
#
Regardless of all that, it’s your website, and I’m barely a stakeholder worth considering (my last substantial contribution was over a decade ago). I wouldn’t hold it against Pace or Habryka if from arguments we had on the EA forum[4] they thought my judgements better to inverse, and my absence satisfying.
I expect I will continue participating very little in LW, although Said getting banned has little to do with it. Basically I don’t find enough yield of ‘good generalist (i.e. not principally focused on AI) content’ here anymore. I think Said incrementally helped by reducing the volume/prominence of not-so-good generalist content, so this seems a step in the wrong direction.[5] Happy days, and more fool me, if the future proves me wrong.
Although I appreciate mitigating circumstances (and an isolated case), moderator behaviour on this post has been ‘similar-to-worse antics’ too. It seems bad form to (as it appears Habryka has done) strong downvote a large number (most?) comments by Said in the threads he is arguing with him in (can I do this if I get into a fight with someone with much lower vote power than me?). Ditto (as Pace did) use site-admin info to score points against a dissenting user he wanted to be snide to, especially when that user seems to be dissenting in the manner OP requested they do.
I’m not giving examples to avoid prompting a subthread wasteland on whatever I bring up. If widely disbelieved and crucial to the discussion, I am open to being cajoled into naming some names
Aside: it is perhaps unfortunate ‘tapping out’ is the lingo for dropping a discussion. In martial arts, (notwithstanding the gloss on the wiki that it can mean ‘one is tired, or at risk of injury, or has simply had one’s fill’) tapping is typically an admission of defeat.
Regardless of the lingo, there is still the advantage of having the ‘last word’ (cf. OP). I could be odd, but I feel this gets outweighed by the much lower visibility of (e.g.) the 5th+ nested comment being seldom more than ‘you and your interlocutor’. In terms of ‘discussion as social fight’, whoever got ratioed in the first 1-2 back and forths on the thread is the loser, even if they make the last ‘rebuttal’.
FWIW I don’t have the impression that the EA forum is more ‘linkedin-y’ than LW nowadays. Besides roughly similar levels of spats/drama, many of my comments there are much meaner towards the OP than Said’s, and I haven’t had the moderators generally ‘on my case’ about them (e.g.).
But there are secular explanations which likely overdetermine, e.g.:
Maybe we’ve run out of useful general things to say, so useful conversation inevitably gets more and more sub-specialised?
Maybe the noughties internet just developed a lot of surplus for places like LW, but nowadays gifted writers want to cultivate their own substack or whatever.
Maybe things have professionalized so the typical commenter who could share interesting takes on AI alignment (or whatever) as an amateur has been recruited to a think tank as a professional.
(Said doesn’t have much lower vote-power than me, I think he currently has a strong-vote strength of 8 or 9, and I have a strong-vote strength of 10)
I also didn’t strong-downvote most of his comments in that thread/on this post, though I have strong-downvoted a few. I do stand behind those votes, as they are the result of reading each of his comments in detail, and only voting so when I do really think they are quite bad. Even invoking standards in which one should justify one’s votes publicly, which I don’t generally ascribe to, I have just written a 15,000 word post about why I think Said’s comments are deserving of downvotes. I also upvoted some of Said’s comments in these discussions.
I can see a somewhat weak case why in this discussion I should not vote, but I really don’t buy it overall. These are bad comments. The resulting discussion has produced little value, much frustration, and in a fitting way for this post has I think resembled many of the worst things that go wrong in discussions with Said. Feel free to upvote them if you do like them, two users of your karma should be enough to cancel them out, so it doesn’t take that much (though I would encourage you to only do that if you actually think they are good[1]). It wouldn’t make sense for the perceived balance of votes to end up skewed away from the usual voting patterns on the side, on this post of all places, and in as much as voting is trying to measure something like net-approval on the site (which to be clear it is at most an extremely noisy approximation of) it would be pretty distortive of that for me to not vote in these threads.[2]
I don’t think Ben intended to score points, though I agree his comment was not written in a way that made that clear (and also gave me a mildly bad taste). Separately a user deleting and undeleting their account is public knowledge and can be derived from e.g. archive.org archives of any pages where they commented, there is no site-admin info necessary to derive that information, all it would take is more time (and I would answer any other query about DB info that can be derived such to anyone on LW).
Beyond that, I have hit my time limit on engaging with comments on this post, so I won’t respond further. I would appreciate some courtesy[3] to keep discussion to the principles and decision-level instead of critiques of my personal behavior, as indeed much of the cost of moderation is measured in having any moderation-adjacent action be torn apart and be requested to be justified or defended.
Though I think adjustive-voting is also a fine use of the voting system, so if you merely think they are too far downvoted, it’s IMO a reasonable choice to use your votes to move them to where you think they are supposed to be
I have a short-ish section on bad voting patterns in the OP which I could contrast with what I think is going on here, but I am going to skip for now due to time constraints. I do think that a strong-vote of 10 is often distortively strong, and in many of these threads wish I had a medium-strong vote, but alas the complexity has so far not been worth it to implement such a feature.
though of course in as much as something seems egregious, you and others should feel free to call it out
I think it would be a good norm to never strong-downvote someone you’re debating, no matter how carefully you’ve read them, because it’s just too easy to be biased in such situations, and it makes people suspicious/resentful/angry (due to thinking that the vote is biased/unfair, and having no recourse or ability to hold anyone accountable), which is not conducive to having calm and productive discussions. Rather surprised that you don’t support or follow this.
I somewhat agree and apply a substantially higher bar to downvoting people I am debating, especially on non-moderation discussions (in the threads on this post, I abstained from voting for a lot of his replies to me, though less on his replies to others, e.g. the Vaniver thread).
As a site-moderator my job is often more messy and I think allows less of this principle than it does for others. In many cases where I would encourage other people to just “downvote and move on”, I often do not have that choice, as the role of actually explaining the norms of the space, or justifying a moderation decisions, or explaining how the site works, falls on me. In many cases, if I didn’t vote on those comments, the author would not get the appropriate feedback at all.
Another thing that I think is important is to have gradual escalation. It is indeed better for someone to be downvoted before they are banned. As a moderator, voting is the first step of moderation. Moderators should vote a lot, and pay attention to voting patterns, and how voting goes wrong, because it’s a noisy measure and the moderators are generally in the best position to remove the most distortions. Most moderation should be resolved via just the voting system.
There is a whole post I would like to write about trying to somehow grapple with the concept of “contempt of court”. A hugely common experience of any moderator on the internet is that you write some moderation message trying to pretty gently enforce some principle or rule, and are met with extreme contempt and aggression. Having some ability for moderators to enforce some level of cooperativeness in moderation discussion is important. The cost of someone being a dick to moderators is indeed very high, both in terms of the general ability of the site to have any norms and principles, and because moderator energy is often the limiting factor for a functional forum. I currently consider downvoting people who are dicks to moderators really important. Like, if I didn’t do it, a lot of my moderators would quickly quit, I would probably quit moderating myself, and the consequences for the site would be enormous.
And my current take is due to a bunch of underdog dynamics in online discussions, people get to be extreme dicks to moderators without naturally getting downvotes. Conduct that would routinely get someone downvoted and rate-limited to oblivion, when aimed at moderators or authority figures gets routinely tolerated. I understand people’s instinct to do it, but I can’t do my job that way, and if I had to give up the tool of voting in moderation discussion, I do not think I could do this job.
And to be clear, I have a lot of sympathy with concerns about “contempt of court enforcement mechanisms”. It seems like a pretty dangerous set of tools. The current set of tools on the site we have kind of suck, though also, I think Said is a huge outlier in how much he was contemptuous of any attempts to moderate him, so it might just be less of an issue in the future.
(Remember that, IIRC, we still have the misfeature that you can’t strong upvote your own comments. Perhaps you mention this, I haven’t read much of your comment or these threads)
I haven’t mentioned it, and I do hate it as a feature, and we should change it. Having the default outcome of two people being angry at each other being that everyone is somewhere in the super negatives does seem pretty dumb.
Its not obvious this is dumb to me. If two people are super angry at each other, that conversation seems likely to create more heat than light.