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.
(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.