A lot of forums have open-ended rules which give moderators discretion (hence unclear), but in my opinion LessWrong takes the cake by not only having unclear rules, but unclear rules combined with high standards on a fuzzy “signal to noise” measure.
Just because someone is genuinely trying to contribute to LessWrong, does not mean LessWrong is a good place for them. LessWrong has a particular culture, with particular standards and particular interests, and I think many people, even if they are genuinely trying, don’t fit well within that culture and those standards.
[...]
Signal to Noise ratio is important
Thomas and Elizabeth pointed this out already, but just because someone’s comments don’t seem actively bad, doesn’t mean I don’t want to limit their ability to contribute. We do a lot of things on LW to improve the signal to noise ratio of content on the site, and one of those things is to reduce the amount of noise, even if the mean of what we remove looks not actively harmful.
I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works. There is no warning that trying to contribute in good faith isn’t sufficient, and you may still end up partially banned (rate-limited) if they decide you are more noise than signal. Instead, people invest a lot only to discover this when it’s too late.
I think there should be a clearer warning about this.
Let users decide what to see:
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).
Rate-limited users should see a special emphasis on comments by other rate-limited users, or normal users who choose to see invisible comments. This way they know who are able to read their comments and interact with them. The same applies to posts instead of comments.
I would like to see the comments by rate-limited users, and I think a lot of other users would want to see them. Anyone who once was rate-limited in the past would probably want to, and should be encouraged to.
Believe it or not, I haven’t been rate-limited on LessWrong (yet!), but I’ve been banned from other places, hence this attitude.
EDIT: see RobertM’s reply below, it seems there are pretty clear warnings, I was wrong and I somehow didn’t remember them. (But I still think letting users decide what to see is a worthwhile idea)
EDIT (2025 April 25): actually, today I finally got rate-limited (automatically), since my last 20 comments have −5 karma :)
I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works. There is no warning that trying to contribute in good faith isn’t sufficient, and you may still end up partially banned (rate-limited) if they decide you are more noise than signal. Instead, people invest a lot only to discover this when it’s too late.
In addition to the New User Guide that gets DMed to every new user (and is also linked at the top of our About page), we:
Show this comment above the new post form to new users who haven’t already had some content approved by admins. (Note that it also links to the new user’s guide.)
Open a modal when a new, unreviewed user clicks into a comment box to write a comment for the first time. Note how it’s three sentences long, explicitly tells users that they start out rate limited, and also links to the new user’s guide.
Now, it’s true that people mostly don’t read things. So there is a tricky balance to strike between providing “sufficient” warning, and not driving people away because you keep throwing annoying roadblocks/warnings at them[1]. But it is simply not the case that LessWrong does not go out of its way to tell new users that the site has specific (and fairly high) standards.
On the old internet, you didn’t get advance notice that you should internalize the norms of the community you were trying to join. You just got told to lurk more—or banned without warning, if you were unlucky.
This is fine for new users; what about for existing users?
I just went to the front page of the site, and it’s not obvious to me where to click to find “The Rules”. The “About” page? Doesn’t seem to be a list of rules. The New User’s Guide? Not really. (There’s a “Rules to be aware of” section at the very, very end of that post, but… surely this isn’t meant to be a list of the rules…? It’s just… three kind of random things.) The LessWrong FAQ? Not really…
If I want to know what rules (or guidelines, or… anything, really…) are supposed to be governing my behavior on LW, I actually don’t have any idea where to look. And I’ve been using Less Wrong for a very long time.
Related point: when the rules change, how do existing users learn about this?
P.S.: What happened to the table of contents on LW post pages? Why can’t I see it anymore?
I don’t think much has changed since this comment. Maybe someone will make a new wiki page on the subject, though if it’s not an admin I’d expect it to mostly be a collection of links to various posts/comments.
re: the table of contents, it’s hidden by default but becomes visible if you hover your mouse over the left column on post pages.
I don’t think much has changed since this comment. Maybe someone will make a new wiki page on the subject, though if it’s not an admin I’d expect it to mostly be a collection of links to various posts/comments
That’s… pretty bad. Frankly, I don’t understand how you expect anyone to have any idea of what to expect from the site and the moderation thereof, given this utterly shambolic state of affairs.
I’ll just repeat my question from two years ago (which did not receive any answer at the time):
Here’s a question: if you asked ten randomly selected Less Wrong members: “What are the rules of Less Wrong?”—how many of them would give the correct answer? Not as a link to this or that comment, but in their own words (or even just by quoting a list of rules, minus the commentary)?
(What is the correct answer?)
How many of their answers would even match one another?
re: the table of contents, it’s hidden by default but becomes visible if you hover your mouse over the left column on post pages.
It doesn’t do that for me (might be a browser issue). In any case, is there a way to have it be visible by default? I’d really prefer that.
Shadow-banned means that your comments are invisible to others and you aren’t told about that fact.
I admit that even if users are told that their comments are invisible, some users might fail to notice. But it can be made very clear, maybe they have to click a warning before they see the commenting text-area.
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.
I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works.
The New User Guide, which gets DMd to every user I feel like does get it across pretty well that we have high and particular standards:
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.
Note: I don’t know if everyone is disagreeing with my idea or disagreeing with my opinion on LessWrong.
Maybe click “agree” on this sub-comment if you agree with my idea (independently of whether you agree with my LessWrong opinion), and vice versa for disagree.
I don’t like the idea. Here’s an alternative I’d like to propose:
AI mentoring
After a user gets a post or comment rejected, have them be given the opportunity to rewrite and resubmit it with the help of an AI mentor. The AI mentor should be able to give reasonably accurate feedback, and won’t accept the revision until it is clearly above a quality line.
I don’t think this is currently easy to make (well), because I think it would be too hard to get current LLMs to be sufficiently accurate in LessWrong specific quality judgement and advice. If, at some point in the future, this became easy for the devs to add, I think it would be a good feature. Also, if an AI with this level of discernment were available, it could help the mods quite a bit in identifying edge cases and auto-resolving clear-cut cases.
I like it, it is worth a try because it could be very helpful if it works!
A possible objection is that “you can’t mentor others on something you suck yourself,” and this would require AGI capable of making valuable LessWrong comments themselves, which may be similarly hard to automating AI research (considering the math/programming advantages of LLMs).
This objection doesn’t doom your idea, because even if the AI is bad at writing valuable comments, and bad at judging valuable comments written by itself, it may be good at judging the failure modes where a human writes a bad comments. It could still work and is worth a try!
A lot of forums have open-ended rules which give moderators discretion (hence unclear), but in my opinion LessWrong takes the cake by not only having unclear rules, but unclear rules combined with high standards on a fuzzy “signal to noise” measure.
In this answer by habryka:
I understand the motivation behind this, but there is little warning that this is how the forum works. There is no warning that trying to contribute in good faith isn’t sufficient, and you may still end up partially banned (rate-limited) if they decide you are more noise than signal. Instead, people invest a lot only to discover this when it’s too late.
I think there should be a clearer warning about this.
Let users decide what to see:
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).
Rate-limited users should see a special emphasis on comments by other rate-limited users, or normal users who choose to see invisible comments. This way they know who are able to read their comments and interact with them. The same applies to posts instead of comments.
I would like to see the comments by rate-limited users, and I think a lot of other users would want to see them. Anyone who once was rate-limited in the past would probably want to, and should be encouraged to.
Believe it or not, I haven’t been rate-limited on LessWrong (yet!), but I’ve been banned from other places, hence this attitude.
EDIT: see RobertM’s reply below, it seems there are pretty clear warnings, I was wrong and I somehow didn’t remember them. (But I still think letting users decide what to see is a worthwhile idea)
EDIT (2025 April 25): actually, today I finally got rate-limited (automatically), since my last 20 comments have −5 karma :)
In addition to the New User Guide that gets DMed to every new user (and is also linked at the top of our About page), we:
Show this comment above the new post form to new users who haven’t already had some content approved by admins. (Note that it also links to the new user’s guide.)
Open a modal when a new, unreviewed user clicks into a comment box to write a comment for the first time. Note how it’s three sentences long, explicitly tells users that they start out rate limited, and also links to the new user’s guide.
Show new, unreviewed users this moderation warning directly underneath the comment box.
Now, it’s true that people mostly don’t read things. So there is a tricky balance to strike between providing “sufficient” warning, and not driving people away because you keep throwing annoying roadblocks/warnings at them[1]. But it is simply not the case that LessWrong does not go out of its way to tell new users that the site has specific (and fairly high) standards.
On the old internet, you didn’t get advance notice that you should internalize the norms of the community you were trying to join. You just got told to lurk more—or banned without warning, if you were unlucky.
This is fine for new users; what about for existing users?
I just went to the front page of the site, and it’s not obvious to me where to click to find “The Rules”. The “About” page? Doesn’t seem to be a list of rules. The New User’s Guide? Not really. (There’s a “Rules to be aware of” section at the very, very end of that post, but… surely this isn’t meant to be a list of the rules…? It’s just… three kind of random things.) The LessWrong FAQ? Not really…
If I want to know what rules (or guidelines, or… anything, really…) are supposed to be governing my behavior on LW, I actually don’t have any idea where to look. And I’ve been using Less Wrong for a very long time.
Related point: when the rules change, how do existing users learn about this?
P.S.: What happened to the table of contents on LW post pages? Why can’t I see it anymore?
I don’t think much has changed since this comment. Maybe someone will make a new wiki page on the subject, though if it’s not an admin I’d expect it to mostly be a collection of links to various posts/comments.
re: the table of contents, it’s hidden by default but becomes visible if you hover your mouse over the left column on post pages.
That’s… pretty bad. Frankly, I don’t understand how you expect anyone to have any idea of what to expect from the site and the moderation thereof, given this utterly shambolic state of affairs.
I’ll just repeat my question from two years ago (which did not receive any answer at the time):
It doesn’t do that for me (might be a browser issue). In any case, is there a way to have it be visible by default? I’d really prefer that.
Thank you very much for bringing that up. That does look like a clearer warning, somehow I didn’t remember it very well.
I don’t post on LessWrong much but I would much rather be explicitly rate-limited than shadow-banned, if content I was posting needed to be moderated.
Shadow-banned means that your comments are invisible to others and you aren’t told about that fact.
I admit that even if users are told that their comments are invisible, some users might fail to notice. But it can be made very clear, maybe they have to click a warning before they see the commenting text-area.
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.
The New User Guide, which gets DMd to every user I feel like does get it across pretty well that we have high and particular standards:
Note: I don’t know if everyone is disagreeing with my idea or disagreeing with my opinion on LessWrong.
Maybe click “agree” on this sub-comment if you agree with my idea (independently of whether you agree with my LessWrong opinion), and vice versa for disagree.
I don’t like the idea. Here’s an alternative I’d like to propose:
AI mentoring
After a user gets a post or comment rejected, have them be given the opportunity to rewrite and resubmit it with the help of an AI mentor. The AI mentor should be able to give reasonably accurate feedback, and won’t accept the revision until it is clearly above a quality line.
I don’t think this is currently easy to make (well), because I think it would be too hard to get current LLMs to be sufficiently accurate in LessWrong specific quality judgement and advice. If, at some point in the future, this became easy for the devs to add, I think it would be a good feature. Also, if an AI with this level of discernment were available, it could help the mods quite a bit in identifying edge cases and auto-resolving clear-cut cases.
I like it, it is worth a try because it could be very helpful if it works!
A possible objection is that “you can’t mentor others on something you suck yourself,” and this would require AGI capable of making valuable LessWrong comments themselves, which may be similarly hard to automating AI research (considering the math/programming advantages of LLMs).
This objection doesn’t doom your idea, because even if the AI is bad at writing valuable comments, and bad at judging valuable comments written by itself, it may be good at judging the failure modes where a human writes a bad comments. It could still work and is worth a try!