I don’t spend enough time in the LW comments to have any idea who Said is or to be very invested in the decision here. I think I agree with the broad picture here, and certainly with the idea that an author is under no obligation to respond to comments, whether because the author finds the comments unhelpful or overly time consuming or for whatever other reason. That said, I am mostly commenting here to register my disagreement with the idea of giving post authors any kind of moderating privileges on their posts. That just seems like an obviously terrible idea from an epistemic perspective. Just because a post author doesn’t find a comment productive doesn’t mean someone else won’t get something out of it, and allowing an author to censor comments therefor destroys value. LW is the last site I would have expected to allow such a thing.
I think ultimately someone needs to do the job of moderation, and in as much as we want to allow for something like an archipelago of cultures, the LW moderation team really can’t do all the moderation necessary to make such things possible.
Note that there are a bunch of restrictions on author moderation:
The threshold for getting the ability to moderate frontpage posts is quite high (2,000 karma)
The /moderation page allows you to find any deleted comments, or users banned from other’s posts
We watch author moderation quite closely and would both change the rules, and limit the ability of an individual to moderate their posts if they abuse it
In general, I am not a huge fan of calling all deletion censorship. You are always welcome to make a new top-level post or shortform with your critique or comments. The general thing to avoid is to not always force everyone into the same room, so to speak.
I do think an alternative is for the LW team to do a lot more moderation, and more opinionated moderation, but I think this is overall worse (both because it’s a huge amount of work, and because it centralizes the risk so that if we end up messing up or being really dumb about something, then now a perspective gets fully excluded from the site, instead of just some well-defined subset of it). I don’t think at least currently voting alone does enough to make for functional discussion spaces.
I don’t spend enough time in the LW comments to have any idea who Said is or to be very invested in the decision here. I think I agree with the broad picture here, and certainly with the idea that an author is under no obligation to respond to comments, whether because the author finds the comments unhelpful or overly time consuming or for whatever other reason. That said, I am mostly commenting here to register my disagreement with the idea of giving post authors any kind of moderating privileges on their posts. That just seems like an obviously terrible idea from an epistemic perspective. Just because a post author doesn’t find a comment productive doesn’t mean someone else won’t get something out of it, and allowing an author to censor comments therefor destroys value. LW is the last site I would have expected to allow such a thing.
I think ultimately someone needs to do the job of moderation, and in as much as we want to allow for something like an archipelago of cultures, the LW moderation team really can’t do all the moderation necessary to make such things possible.
Note that there are a bunch of restrictions on author moderation:
The threshold for getting the ability to moderate frontpage posts is quite high (2,000 karma)
The /moderation page allows you to find any deleted comments, or users banned from other’s posts
We watch author moderation quite closely and would both change the rules, and limit the ability of an individual to moderate their posts if they abuse it
In general, I am not a huge fan of calling all deletion censorship. You are always welcome to make a new top-level post or shortform with your critique or comments. The general thing to avoid is to not always force everyone into the same room, so to speak.
I do think an alternative is for the LW team to do a lot more moderation, and more opinionated moderation, but I think this is overall worse (both because it’s a huge amount of work, and because it centralizes the risk so that if we end up messing up or being really dumb about something, then now a perspective gets fully excluded from the site, instead of just some well-defined subset of it). I don’t think at least currently voting alone does enough to make for functional discussion spaces.