Eh, I think unclear rules and high standards are fine for some purposes. Take a fiction magazine. Good ones have a high standard for what they publish, and (apart from some formatting and wordcount rules) the main rule is it has to fit the editor’s taste. The same is true for scientific publications.
I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works.
I mildly disagree with this. The New Users Guide says
LessWrong is a pretty particular place. We strive to maintain a culture that’s uncommon for web forums[1] and to stay true to our values. Recently, many more people have been finding their way here, so I (lead admin and moderator) put together this intro to what we’re about.
My hope is that if LessWrong resonates with your values and interests, this guide will help you become a valued member of community. And if LessWrong isn’t the place for you, this guide will help you have a good “visit” or simply seek other pastures.
On the margin, is there room for improvement? Seems likely, but doesn’t seem bad. If I was in charge I’d be tempted to open the New Users Guide with like, four bullet points that said ‘This place is for aspiring rationalists, don’t say false things, don’t be a jerk, for examples of what we mean by that read on.’ That’s somewhat stylistic though.
There is no warning that trying to contribute in good faith isn’t sufficient
Wait, now I’m confused. Most forums I’m aware of don’t have much of a Good Faith defense. I looked up the rules for the first one I thought of, Giant In The Playground, and while it’s leaning a bit more Comprehensive and Clear I don’t see a place where it says if you break a rule in good faith you’re fine.
In general, someone trying to contribute to a thing who but doing so badly doesn’t get that much of a pass? Like, I’ve been politely ejected from a singing group before because I was badly off-key. Nobody doubted I was trying to sing well! It doesn’t change the fact that the group wanted to have everyone singing the right notes.
I suggest that instead of making rate-limited users (who used up their rate) unable to comment at all, their additional comments should be invisible, but still visible to other rate-limited users (and users who choose to see them).
Meh. The internet is big. If the kind of thing that got someone rate-limited on LessWrong got them rate-limited or banned everywhere else, I’d be supportive of having somewhere they were allowed to post. Reddit’s right over there, you know?
I think giving special emphasis to rate-limited users for rate-limited users is straightforwardly a bad idea. If someone got rate-limited, in general I assume it’s because they were writing in ways the mods and/or other users thought they shouldn’t do. If someone is going to stick around, I want their attention on people doing well, not doing badly. Imagine a basketball practice; if I’m a lousy shot, the coach might tell me to sit out the drill and watch a couple of the good players for few minutes. If I’m really bad, I get cut from the team. No coach is going to say, “hey, you’re a lousy shot, so pay special attention to these other players who are just as bad as you.”
A big component of this is I tend to think of LessWrong as a place I go to get better at a kind of mental skill, hence analogies to choir or basketball practice. You may have other goals here.
I guess other forums don’t literally have a good faith defence, but in practice they mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/advice they’re told about, or personally insult others repeatedly.
I guess they have more bad moderators who ban people for personal/ideological reasons, and I’m actually impressed by LessWrong’s moderators being less wrong in this regard.
I still think that being rate-limited and told that, “I don’t have a great model of how you can improve at that” is slightly specific to LessWrong.
Many other forums will say things very similar in spirit to
LessWrong is a pretty particular place. We strive to maintain a culture that’s uncommon for web forums[1] and to stay true to our values. Recently, many more people have been finding their way here, so I (lead admin and moderator) put together this intro to what we’re about.
My hope is that if LessWrong resonates with your values and interests, this guide will help you become a valued member of community. And if LessWrong isn’t the place for you, this guide will help you have a good “visit” or simply seek other pastures.
But these forums still implicitly only ban people who have bad faith while advising people with good faith. LessWrong’s warning isn’t strong enough to distinguish it from those forums.
My idea shouldn’t hurt
If you don’t want to see the invisible comments, then don’t see them. In my opinion the only cost is software and bandwidth.
In the basketball practice example, if it was magically possible to let the lousy shots continue playing with each other at very low cost, almost every coach would allow it. They would only remove people who have bad faith.
Speaking of Roko, the reputational costs inflicted on the rational community by trying to censor his Basilisk idea was probably 3 orders of magnitude higher than the actual harm from his idea. But that’s off topic.
I guess other forums don’t literally have a good faith defence, but in practice they mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/advice they’re told about, or personally insult others repeatedly.
I feel like I have encountered fora that had genuinely more active moderation norms. There’s a lot of personal discord servers I can think of with the same rough approach as a dinner party. There are reddit threads
Also, uh, I notice the juxtaposition of “I’ve been banned from other places, hence this attitude” and “in practice [other forums] mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/advice they’re told about, or personally insult others repeatedly” implies you either refuse to follow rules/advice or that you insult others repeatedly. Obviously you said most cases, not all cases.
In the basketball practice example, if it was magically possible to let the lousy shots continue playing with each other at very low cost, almost every coach would allow it. They would only remove people who have bad faith.
Well, yes, and I’ve never heard of a coach saying someone wasn’t allowed to play basketball anywhere. At least where I live, there’s a public court about a ten minute bike ride away and basketballs are cheap. If, say, I’m a student on a college basketball team whose coach asked me to stop doing layups during his practices, I can even use the exact same court later when the team isn’t practicing. The equivalent for LessWrong is, I believe, saying you’re welcome to continue communicating on the internet but that it will happen on some other forum.
Your average basketball coach doesn’t only remove people with bad faith, they also bench people or cut them from the team for not being good at basketball. That’s quite common.
Let’s just think about the pros and cons of picking another forum, vs. continuing to comment on LessWrong, but only being visible by others who choose to see you.
Picking another forum:
They fit better in other forums than LessWrong. For most rate-limited users, this is true, but they can go to other forums on their own without being forced.
Less need for LessWrong to write code and increase bandwidth to accommodate them.
Less chance they say really bad things (neoreactionary content) which worsens the reputation of LessWrong? This doesn’t apply to most rate-limited users.
Continuing to comment but only visible to those interested:
They get to discuss the posts and topics they find engaging to talk about.
They don’t feel upset at LessWrong and the rationalist community.
I think whether it’s worth it depends on how hard it is to write the code for them.
Eh, I think unclear rules and high standards are fine for some purposes. Take a fiction magazine. Good ones have a high standard for what they publish, and (apart from some formatting and wordcount rules) the main rule is it has to fit the editor’s taste. The same is true for scientific publications.
I mildly disagree with this. The New Users Guide says
On the margin, is there room for improvement? Seems likely, but doesn’t seem bad. If I was in charge I’d be tempted to open the New Users Guide with like, four bullet points that said ‘This place is for aspiring rationalists, don’t say false things, don’t be a jerk, for examples of what we mean by that read on.’ That’s somewhat stylistic though.
Wait, now I’m confused. Most forums I’m aware of don’t have much of a Good Faith defense. I looked up the rules for the first one I thought of, Giant In The Playground, and while it’s leaning a bit more Comprehensive and Clear I don’t see a place where it says if you break a rule in good faith you’re fine.
In general, someone trying to contribute to a thing who but doing so badly doesn’t get that much of a pass? Like, I’ve been politely ejected from a singing group before because I was badly off-key. Nobody doubted I was trying to sing well! It doesn’t change the fact that the group wanted to have everyone singing the right notes.
Meh. The internet is big. If the kind of thing that got someone rate-limited on LessWrong got them rate-limited or banned everywhere else, I’d be supportive of having somewhere they were allowed to post. Reddit’s right over there, you know?
I think giving special emphasis to rate-limited users for rate-limited users is straightforwardly a bad idea. If someone got rate-limited, in general I assume it’s because they were writing in ways the mods and/or other users thought they shouldn’t do. If someone is going to stick around, I want their attention on people doing well, not doing badly. Imagine a basketball practice; if I’m a lousy shot, the coach might tell me to sit out the drill and watch a couple of the good players for few minutes. If I’m really bad, I get cut from the team. No coach is going to say, “hey, you’re a lousy shot, so pay special attention to these other players who are just as bad as you.”
A big component of this is I tend to think of LessWrong as a place I go to get better at a kind of mental skill, hence analogies to choir or basketball practice. You may have other goals here.
I guess other forums don’t literally have a good faith defence, but in practice they mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/advice they’re told about, or personally insult others repeatedly.
I guess they have more bad moderators who ban people for personal/ideological reasons, and I’m actually impressed by LessWrong’s moderators being less wrong in this regard.
I still think that being rate-limited and told that, “I don’t have a great model of how you can improve at that” is slightly specific to LessWrong.
Many other forums will say things very similar in spirit to
But these forums still implicitly only ban people who have bad faith while advising people with good faith. LessWrong’s warning isn’t strong enough to distinguish it from those forums.
My idea shouldn’t hurt
If you don’t want to see the invisible comments, then don’t see them. In my opinion the only cost is software and bandwidth.
In the basketball practice example, if it was magically possible to let the lousy shots continue playing with each other at very low cost, almost every coach would allow it. They would only remove people who have bad faith.
Even long term users like Roko have complained about rate-limiting (automatic rate-limiting in his case).[1]
Speaking of Roko, the reputational costs inflicted on the rational community by trying to censor his Basilisk idea was probably 3 orders of magnitude higher than the actual harm from his idea. But that’s off topic.
I feel like I have encountered fora that had genuinely more active moderation norms. There’s a lot of personal discord servers I can think of with the same rough approach as a dinner party. There are reddit threads
Also, uh, I notice the juxtaposition of “I’ve been banned from other places, hence this attitude” and “in practice [other forums] mostly only ban people who deliberately refuse to follow the rules/advice they’re told about, or personally insult others repeatedly” implies you either refuse to follow rules/advice or that you insult others repeatedly. Obviously you said most cases, not all cases.
Well, yes, and I’ve never heard of a coach saying someone wasn’t allowed to play basketball anywhere. At least where I live, there’s a public court about a ten minute bike ride away and basketballs are cheap. If, say, I’m a student on a college basketball team whose coach asked me to stop doing layups during his practices, I can even use the exact same court later when the team isn’t practicing. The equivalent for LessWrong is, I believe, saying you’re welcome to continue communicating on the internet but that it will happen on some other forum.
Your average basketball coach doesn’t only remove people with bad faith, they also bench people or cut them from the team for not being good at basketball. That’s quite common.
Let’s just think about the pros and cons of picking another forum, vs. continuing to comment on LessWrong, but only being visible by others who choose to see you.
Picking another forum:
They fit better in other forums than LessWrong. For most rate-limited users, this is true, but they can go to other forums on their own without being forced.
Less need for LessWrong to write code and increase bandwidth to accommodate them.
Less chance they say really bad things (neoreactionary content) which worsens the reputation of LessWrong? This doesn’t apply to most rate-limited users.
Continuing to comment but only visible to those interested:
They get to discuss the posts and topics they find engaging to talk about.
They don’t feel upset at LessWrong and the rationalist community.
I think whether it’s worth it depends on how hard it is to write the code for them.