If I were a moderator, I would have banned Jesus Christ Himself if He required me to spend one hundred hours moderating His posts on multiple occasions. Given your description here I am surprised you did not do this a long time ago. I admire your restraint, if not necessarily your wisdom.
This strikes me as either deeply confused, or else deliberately… let’s say “manipulative”[1].
Suppose that I am a moderator. I want to ban someone (never mind why I want this). I also want to seem to be fair. So I simply claim that this person requires me to spend a great deal of effort on them. The rest of the members will mostly take this at face value, and will be sympathetic to my decision to ban this tiresome person. This obviously creates an incentive for me to claim, of anyone whom I wish to ban, that they require me to spend much effort on them.
Alright, but still, can’t such a claim be true? To some degree, yes; for example, suppose that someone constantly lodges complaints, makes accusations against others, etc., requiring an investigation each time. (On the other hand, if the complaints are valid and the accusations true, then it seems odd to say that it’s the complainant/accuser who’s responsible for the workload involved in dealing with the issues.) Of course, that doesn’t apply here; I don’t complain much, on LessWrong.
Well, but surely the LW mods spent all those hours on something, right? Writing comments. Talking to various people. Well, yes. But… LessWrong isn’t a government agency, or a court of law, or a corporation with contractual obligations to members, etc. The mods weren’t obligated to do any of those things. It would have been very easy for them to avoid spending all that effort. The following scenario illustrates how they might’ve done so:
Carol (a LessWronger): I wrote a post on LessWrong, and this one dude wrote a comment on it, where he criticized me unfairly!
Dave (a moderator of LessWrong): People write all sorts of comments
Carol: I found it very unpleasant!
Dave: Downvote it and move on with your life
Carol: But other people upvoted it!
Dave: They’re allowed to do that
Carol: Aren’t you going to do something about this?
Dave: No, why would we
Carol: Because that guy’s comment was wrong!
Dave: Feel free to reply saying that, I guess
Carol: Ugh! That would be even more unpleasant! I shouldn’t have to do that!
Dave:shrug
Carol: Well! I don’t think I’ll be using this website!
Dave: Sure, that’s your right
Pretty easy. Definitely doesn’t require hours, much less tens of hours, much less hundreds of hours.
Of course, Dave could choose to have a longer discussion with Carol, if he wants. He could join the conversation himself, to facilitate communication between Carol and the author of the offending comment. He could do all sorts of things. But he could also… not do any of those things.
And in almost all cases where the LW moderators did anything whatsoever that had anything to do with me, it was the wrong thing to do, and the far superior choice (not necessarily the best choice, but far better than what they in fact did) would have been, precisely, to do absolutely nothing. In pretty much all of the examples given in the OP, doing nothing at all would’ve been a huge improvement. Writing no long comments. Having no long conversations with anyone. Just… nothing.
So, indeed, it is right to question the wisdom of the moderators in the choices they’ve made! But to speak of their “restraint” is absurd. These problems, all of these terrible mountains of effort which they’ve supposedly had to expend—it’s all been self-inflicted.
And to use such self-inflicted problems to justify banning someone—well. It’s approximately as honest as a schoolyard bully saying “I bruised my hand when I was beating you up for your lunch money, so now you owe me, and I’m gonna take your jacket as payment!”.
Suppose that I am a moderator. I want to ban someone (never mind why I want this). I also want to seem to be fair. So I simply claim that this person requires me to spend a great deal of effort on them. The rest of the members will mostly take this at face value, and will be sympathetic to my decision to ban this tiresome person. This obviously creates an incentive for me to claim, of anyone whom I wish to ban, that they require me to spend much effort on them.
Yep, I agree with this as a common and IMO very perverse dynamic. I don’t think someone being “difficult to moderate” is almost ever an appropriate justification for banning someone. At the very least they must also have some property that requires interfacing with them as a subject of moderation that isn’t located solely in the choice of the moderators. Otherwise this becomes a catch-22 with no grounding in reality.
A commenter writes:
This strikes me as either deeply confused, or else deliberately… let’s say “manipulative”[1].
Suppose that I am a moderator. I want to ban someone (never mind why I want this). I also want to seem to be fair. So I simply claim that this person requires me to spend a great deal of effort on them. The rest of the members will mostly take this at face value, and will be sympathetic to my decision to ban this tiresome person. This obviously creates an incentive for me to claim, of anyone whom I wish to ban, that they require me to spend much effort on them.
Alright, but still, can’t such a claim be true? To some degree, yes; for example, suppose that someone constantly lodges complaints, makes accusations against others, etc., requiring an investigation each time. (On the other hand, if the complaints are valid and the accusations true, then it seems odd to say that it’s the complainant/accuser who’s responsible for the workload involved in dealing with the issues.) Of course, that doesn’t apply here; I don’t complain much, on LessWrong.
Well, but surely the LW mods spent all those hours on something, right? Writing comments. Talking to various people. Well, yes. But… LessWrong isn’t a government agency, or a court of law, or a corporation with contractual obligations to members, etc. The mods weren’t obligated to do any of those things. It would have been very easy for them to avoid spending all that effort. The following scenario illustrates how they might’ve done so:
Carol (a LessWronger): I wrote a post on LessWrong, and this one dude wrote a comment on it, where he criticized me unfairly!
Dave (a moderator of LessWrong): People write all sorts of comments
Carol: I found it very unpleasant!
Dave: Downvote it and move on with your life
Carol: But other people upvoted it!
Dave: They’re allowed to do that
Carol: Aren’t you going to do something about this?
Dave: No, why would we
Carol: Because that guy’s comment was wrong!
Dave: Feel free to reply saying that, I guess
Carol: Ugh! That would be even more unpleasant! I shouldn’t have to do that!
Dave: shrug
Carol: Well! I don’t think I’ll be using this website!
Dave: Sure, that’s your right
Pretty easy. Definitely doesn’t require hours, much less tens of hours, much less hundreds of hours.
Of course, Dave could choose to have a longer discussion with Carol, if he wants. He could join the conversation himself, to facilitate communication between Carol and the author of the offending comment. He could do all sorts of things. But he could also… not do any of those things.
And in almost all cases where the LW moderators did anything whatsoever that had anything to do with me, it was the wrong thing to do, and the far superior choice (not necessarily the best choice, but far better than what they in fact did) would have been, precisely, to do absolutely nothing. In pretty much all of the examples given in the OP, doing nothing at all would’ve been a huge improvement. Writing no long comments. Having no long conversations with anyone. Just… nothing.
So, indeed, it is right to question the wisdom of the moderators in the choices they’ve made! But to speak of their “restraint” is absurd. These problems, all of these terrible mountains of effort which they’ve supposedly had to expend—it’s all been self-inflicted.
And to use such self-inflicted problems to justify banning someone—well. It’s approximately as honest as a schoolyard bully saying “I bruised my hand when I was beating you up for your lunch money, so now you owe me, and I’m gonna take your jacket as payment!”.
Not quite right, but the closest I can get without a long digression.
Yep, I agree with this as a common and IMO very perverse dynamic. I don’t think someone being “difficult to moderate” is almost ever an appropriate justification for banning someone. At the very least they must also have some property that requires interfacing with them as a subject of moderation that isn’t located solely in the choice of the moderators. Otherwise this becomes a catch-22 with no grounding in reality.