There’s some cluster of ideas surrounding how authors are informed/encouraged to use the banning options. It sounds like the entire topic of “authors can ban users” is worth revisiting so my first impulse is to avoid investing in it further until we’ve had some more top-level discussion about the feature.
Free Hearing, Not Speech seems like a better approach to me. Give users the affordances to automatically see the kinds of comments they want to interact with, or the conversations they want to have. Users don’t have to see what they believe is bad-faith, low-effort, rude criticism. Users who disagree that can see said criticism. Let people moderate the conversations they want to see themselves, but do not let them moderate the conversations others want to see.
Maybe this doesn’t fully resolve your issues with @Said Achmiz, Habryka. He can still call people out for doing this, and damage their reputation in ways you think are unjust. Fine. But he, at worst, does that rarely. The bulk of your problem with him is that he’s writing really aggravating comments that make it costly for people to post on LW, and more-over claiming that these costs should be paid. Which, in turn, makes it more likely that people who interact with him (believe) they will pay such costs. Letting them hide comments from Said should fix that. Or, if you want to go further, hide comments like Said’s ahead of time by toggling some “no-Gadflys” setting on comment-visibility.[1]
AFAICT, this also seems good by Said’s lights, in the sense that everyone else can see his comments by default. They can see his critique, and judge its merits for themselves. Which are frequently good IMO. But others should be free to make that judgement themselves.
EDIT: Said, I believe you should be able to reply to this comment. If not, my apologies for discussing what you may believe in a comment you can’t reply to. In which case, I can put anything you want to say in an Edit to this post. Just tag me elsewhere, DM me, or, IDK, I can share my email with you by DM or something.
If you put a bunch of work into a post, knowing that most other people are seeing a low-quality but very forceful/sneer-y criticism which you haven’t replied to is a lot of discouragement.
Low priors on this happening + out of sight, out of mind basically resolve the discouragement issue IMO.
Like, this works well enough on Twitter. There are all sorts of people saying stupid stuff that I know would enrage or discourage me. But I’ve muted enough nonsense that I don’t have to see it, and I’ve got no interest in seeking it out. Why not do that here, but better?
Low priors on this happening + out of sight, out of mind basically resolve the discouragement issue IMO.
I think one of the core problems here is authors not believing in “out of sight, out of mind”. If people reasonably believe that the author not responding to a comment is evidence that the author can’t respond to that comment, the visibility of that comment for readers but not the author still generates reader-impressions that the author doesn’t want.
Of course the flip side of this is also problematic—if people reasonably believe that the absence of critical comments is a sign of quality, the invisibility of criticism generates reader-impressions that the readers don’t want. And so moderation involves judging which of those is more important.
Yeah, you’re right.[1] Your point holds strong bc. on LW because you’re trying to reach the entirety of the LW user base with your posts, competing with other posters for the singular front-page/popular comments/recent discussion sections. That’s an important disanalogy to e.g. Twitter or Mastodon. (Another is lack of emphasis on followers/following.) Kinda reminds me of an agora? I’m guessing that’s the sense in which Said compared LW to a public forum.
But @habryka’s kinda giving me the sense that he doesn’t want LW to be like an agora. Honestly, I’m not sure what he wants LW to be. IIRC, sometimes he mentions LW like being a university, sometimes like an archipelago of cultures. But those are more decentralized than LW is. Like, you’ve got all these feeds which give everyone the same reading materials. Which is trying to expose everyone’s work to the whole LW reader base by default. Which is more like a public forum in my mind. So yeah, mixed vibes. Habryka, if you’re reading this, I’d be interested in reading your thoughts on what sort of social system LW is and should be, and how that differs from the examples I gave above.
Returning to my proposal, I still think a lot of the costs people bear when replying to low-effort/disdainful criticism can be addressed by various forms of muting. But definitely not all the costs, and perhaps not even most.
I of course have lots of thoughts! My current tentative take is that ideally I would like LessWrong to be a hierarchy of communities with their own streams and norms, which when they produce particularly good output, feed into a shared agora-like space (and potentially multiple levels of this).
Reddit is kind of structured like this. Subreddits each have their own culture, but the Reddit frontpage and people’s individual feeds are the result of the most upvoted content in each Subreddit bubbling up to a broader audience.
I think Reddit is lacking a bunch of other infrastructure to do this properly for the things I care about, and I would like a stronger universal culture than Reddit currently has, but it’s a decent pointer for one structure that seems promising to me (LessWrong is far away from this for a bunch of different reasons that I could go into, but would take time, so I am going to keep it at this for now).
Thank you for the answer! I do share the sense that LW is far from where Reddit is at, and (separately?) from where you tentatively want it to be. If you’re considering writing this up in more detail, then I’d be glad to read it.
The difference between twitter and lesswrong is that the twitter is more like a random chaos maelstrom, and LessWrong is more like a community. Some random guy saying something obnoxious on twitter is different from someone who’s going to have a lot of repeat interactions and is affecting your reputation in a shared social circle.
(Also, plex’s argument was basically specifically arguing why this strategy didn’t reliably work, and IMO your comment just sort of restated your original argument without engaging with his additional argument)
Free Hearing, Not Speech seems like a better approach to me. Give users the affordances to automatically see the kinds of comments they want to interact with, or the conversations they want to have. Users don’t have to see what they believe is bad-faith, low-effort, rude criticism. Users who disagree that can see said criticism. Let people moderate the conversations they want to see themselves, but do not let them moderate the conversations others want to see.
Maybe this doesn’t fully resolve your issues with @Said Achmiz, Habryka. He can still call people out for doing this, and damage their reputation in ways you think are unjust. Fine. But he, at worst, does that rarely. The bulk of your problem with him is that he’s writing really aggravating comments that make it costly for people to post on LW, and more-over claiming that these costs should be paid. Which, in turn, makes it more likely that people who interact with him (believe) they will pay such costs. Letting them hide comments from Said should fix that. Or, if you want to go further, hide comments like Said’s ahead of time by toggling some “no-Gadflys” setting on comment-visibility.[1]
AFAICT, this also seems good by Said’s lights, in the sense that everyone else can see his comments by default. They can see his critique, and judge its merits for themselves. Which are frequently good IMO. But others should be free to make that judgement themselves.
EDIT: Said, I believe you should be able to reply to this comment. If not, my apologies for discussing what you may believe in a comment you can’t reply to. In which case, I can put anything you want to say in an Edit to this post. Just tag me elsewhere, DM me, or, IDK, I can share my email with you by DM or something.
(I think it is possible to build this now.)
If you put a bunch of work into a post, knowing that most other people are seeing a low-quality but very forceful/sneer-y criticism which you haven’t replied to is a lot of discouragement.
Auto-mute posts replying to the posts you don’t like.
How does that help?
Low priors on this happening + out of sight, out of mind basically resolve the discouragement issue IMO.
Like, this works well enough on Twitter. There are all sorts of people saying stupid stuff that I know would enrage or discourage me. But I’ve muted enough nonsense that I don’t have to see it, and I’ve got no interest in seeking it out. Why not do that here, but better?
I think one of the core problems here is authors not believing in “out of sight, out of mind”. If people reasonably believe that the author not responding to a comment is evidence that the author can’t respond to that comment, the visibility of that comment for readers but not the author still generates reader-impressions that the author doesn’t want.
Of course the flip side of this is also problematic—if people reasonably believe that the absence of critical comments is a sign of quality, the invisibility of criticism generates reader-impressions that the readers don’t want. And so moderation involves judging which of those is more important.
Yeah, you’re right.[1] Your point holds strong bc. on LW because you’re trying to reach the entirety of the LW user base with your posts, competing with other posters for the singular front-page/popular comments/recent discussion sections. That’s an important disanalogy to e.g. Twitter or Mastodon. (Another is lack of emphasis on followers/following.) Kinda reminds me of an agora? I’m guessing that’s the sense in which Said compared LW to a public forum.
But @habryka’s kinda giving me the sense that he doesn’t want LW to be like an agora. Honestly, I’m not sure what he wants LW to be. IIRC, sometimes he mentions LW like being a university, sometimes like an archipelago of cultures. But those are more decentralized than LW is. Like, you’ve got all these feeds which give everyone the same reading materials. Which is trying to expose everyone’s work to the whole LW reader base by default. Which is more like a public forum in my mind. So yeah, mixed vibes. Habryka, if you’re reading this, I’d be interested in reading your thoughts on what sort of social system LW is and should be, and how that differs from the examples I gave above.
Returning to my proposal, I still think a lot of the costs people bear when replying to low-effort/disdainful criticism can be addressed by various forms of muting. But definitely not all the costs, and perhaps not even most.
@plex, if you were pointing at the same thing Vaniver was pointing at, then you were right, too.
I of course have lots of thoughts! My current tentative take is that ideally I would like LessWrong to be a hierarchy of communities with their own streams and norms, which when they produce particularly good output, feed into a shared agora-like space (and potentially multiple levels of this).
Reddit is kind of structured like this. Subreddits each have their own culture, but the Reddit frontpage and people’s individual feeds are the result of the most upvoted content in each Subreddit bubbling up to a broader audience.
I think Reddit is lacking a bunch of other infrastructure to do this properly for the things I care about, and I would like a stronger universal culture than Reddit currently has, but it’s a decent pointer for one structure that seems promising to me (LessWrong is far away from this for a bunch of different reasons that I could go into, but would take time, so I am going to keep it at this for now).
Thank you for the answer! I do share the sense that LW is far from where Reddit is at, and (separately?) from where you tentatively want it to be. If you’re considering writing this up in more detail, then I’d be glad to read it.
The difference between twitter and lesswrong is that the twitter is more like a random chaos maelstrom, and LessWrong is more like a community. Some random guy saying something obnoxious on twitter is different from someone who’s going to have a lot of repeat interactions and is affecting your reputation in a shared social circle.
(Also, plex’s argument was basically specifically arguing why this strategy didn’t reliably work, and IMO your comment just sort of restated your original argument without engaging with his additional argument)