Why do you want this so much in the first place, that it’s worth all this cost and effort and drama? I get trying to entice Eliezer back initially (which is probably why I didn’t object much or any to author mod powers back then[1]) but now he’s asking for a much higher bar and you have no assurance of ever meeting it. If you have a high confidence that the end state will be really good if you can achieve it, I suggest reconsidering it given the lack of relevant empirical evidence, and disagreement from others like me and Zack over the abstract arguments.
BTW on a tangent, what’s the story behind Eliezer not coming back even after you met his demand? At that point this issue of insufficient safety/legitimacy of author mod powers wouldn’t be on his radar yet? Or if it was, then why did he say he would come back if he got these powers?
Since you asked the same question in another thread as well I responded over there:
Please stop invoking Eliezer as the reason why we have the tools. Early on in LW history Eliezer made some arguments for why those tools were important. I found them compelling, and have grown to find them more compelling over time. Indeed, I wish we had built them earlier and made it clearer earlier in LW’s history that author moderation is endorsed, so that people could have formed better expectations earlier.
Eliezer is the reason why we have these tools the same way Eliezer is the reason why I am working on reducing existential risk from AI: Because he made some compelling arguments that brought me over to his side. Please argue against the arguments, and stop invoking this fake alternative where we have this tools because it’s a weird fetish for Eliezer to want these tools. I would honestly be open to doing some things on the site because it’s Eliezer’s weird fetish, if that would get him back on the site, but this is not one of those things.
Like, I really feel like we’ve had this conversation like 5 times at this point. Here are at least 5 times where I have clarified this:
2018
1. Allowing users to moderate their own posts and set their own moderation policies on their personal blogs is something I wanted before we even talked to Eliezer about LW2 the first time.
2. Allowing users to moderate their own front-page posts is not something that Eliezer requested (I think he would be happy with them just being personal posts), but is a natural consequence of wanting to allow users to moderate their own posts, while also not giving up our ability to promote the best content to the front-page and to curated
3. Allowing users to delete things without a trace was a request by Eliezer, but is also something I thought about independently to deal with stuff like spam and repeated offenders (for example, Eugine has created over 100 comments on one of Ozy’s posts, and you don’t want all of them to show up as deleted stubs). I expect we wouldn’t have built the future as it currently stands without Eliezer, but I hadn’t actually considered a moderation logs page like the one Said pointed out, and I actually quite like that idea, and don’t expect Eliezer to object too much to it. So that might be a solution that makes everyone reasonably happy.
June 2025
The thing that it changes is the degree to which the author’s popularity or quality is being used to give a platform to other people, which I think makes a lot of sense to give the author some substantial control over. If you have a critique that people care about, you can make a top-level post, and if it’s good it can stand on its own and get its own karma.
If it’s really important for a critique to end up directly associated with a post, you can just ask someone who isn’t banned to post a link to it under that post. If you can’t find anyone who thinks it’s worth posting a link to it who isn’t yourself, then I think it’s not that sad for your critique to not get seen.
Yes, this puts up a few trivial inconveniences, but the alternative of having people provide a platform to anyone without any choice in the matter, whose visibility gets multiplied proportional to their own reach and quality, sucks IMO a lot more.
My engagement with LW is kind of weird and causes me to not write as many top-level posts as I like, and the ones I do write are site announcements, but if I was trying to be a more standard author on LW, I wouldn’t use it without the ability to ban (and for example, would almost certainly ban Said, who has been given multiple warnings by the moderation team, is by far the most heavily complained user on the site, and I would actively encourage many authors to ban if they don’t want to have a kind of bad time, but I think is providing enough value to the site in other contexts that I don’t think a site-wide ban would make sense).
July 2025
I mean, I have written like 50,000+ words about this at this point in various comment threads. About why I care about archipelagos, and why I think it’s hard and bad to try to have centralized control about culture, about how much people hate being in places with ambiguous norms, and many other things. I don’t fault you for not reading them all, but I have done a huge amount of exposition.
November 2025
Look, I know I wouldn’t want to use LessWrong if I couldn’t ban annoying commenters from my posts. I wouldn’t run LessWrong if I didn’t have the ability to ban annoying commenters from the site.
Yes, if there were trusted enough moderators who would do the job well-enough for me, then I could get away without moderation tools when posting, but currently, if I was an external party, I would not trust even the current LW team with a copy of myself to do this. The LW team is trying to allow a bunch of people with incompatible conversation styles to be on the site, and this means that I cannot expect site-wide bans and deletion to be sufficient for making it so I don’t have run-ins with a bunch of people who will very predictably waste hours of my time.
Like, de-facto we try to compensate a bunch for this by asking people what kind of moderation they would like on their post, and then try to help them with moderation, but it’s a labor intensive process that mostly fails for bandwidth reasons.
November 2025 (later in the month)
Look, we’ve had these conversations.
I am saying the people who are moderating the spaces have the obvious information advantage about their own preferences and about what it’s actually like to engage with an interlocutor, plus the motivation advantage to actually deal with it. “It’s common sense that the best decisions get made by people with skin in the game and who are most involved with the actual consequences of the relevant decision”. And “it’s common sense that CEOs of organizations make hiring and firing decisions for the people they work with, boards don’t make good firing decisions, the same applies to forums and moderators”.
This is a discussion as old as time in business and governance and whatever. Framing your position as “common sense” is indeed just a rhetorical move, and I have no problem framing the opposite position in just as much of an “obvious” fashion. Turns out, neither position obviously dominates by common sense! Smart people exist on both sides of this debate. I am not against having it again, and I have my own takes on it, but please don’t try to frame this as some kind of foregone conclusion in which you have the high ground.
Like come on, please. I don’t want to have the same conversation over and over and over again. We have by this point extremely well-considered reasons for our moderation policy. Something being well-considered doesn’t mean it’s right, but after almost a decade of having the same conversation, I feel like we could at least start having a different one.
Since you asked the same question in another thread as well I responded over there:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HbkNAyAoa4gCnuzwa/wei-dai-s-shortform?commentId=hD28769mbcrgyEz8s
Like, I really feel like we’ve had this conversation like 5 times at this point. Here are at least 5 times where I have clarified this:
2018
1. Allowing users to moderate their own posts and set their own moderation policies on their personal blogs is something I wanted before we even talked to Eliezer about LW2 the first time.
2. Allowing users to moderate their own front-page posts is not something that Eliezer requested (I think he would be happy with them just being personal posts), but is a natural consequence of wanting to allow users to moderate their own posts, while also not giving up our ability to promote the best content to the front-page and to curated
3. Allowing users to delete things without a trace was a request by Eliezer, but is also something I thought about independently to deal with stuff like spam and repeated offenders (for example, Eugine has created over 100 comments on one of Ozy’s posts, and you don’t want all of them to show up as deleted stubs). I expect we wouldn’t have built the future as it currently stands without Eliezer, but I hadn’t actually considered a moderation logs page like the one Said pointed out, and I actually quite like that idea, and don’t expect Eliezer to object too much to it. So that might be a solution that makes everyone reasonably happy.
June 2025
The thing that it changes is the degree to which the author’s popularity or quality is being used to give a platform to other people, which I think makes a lot of sense to give the author some substantial control over. If you have a critique that people care about, you can make a top-level post, and if it’s good it can stand on its own and get its own karma.
If it’s really important for a critique to end up directly associated with a post, you can just ask someone who isn’t banned to post a link to it under that post. If you can’t find anyone who thinks it’s worth posting a link to it who isn’t yourself, then I think it’s not that sad for your critique to not get seen.
Yes, this puts up a few trivial inconveniences, but the alternative of having people provide a platform to anyone without any choice in the matter, whose visibility gets multiplied proportional to their own reach and quality, sucks IMO a lot more.
My engagement with LW is kind of weird and causes me to not write as many top-level posts as I like, and the ones I do write are site announcements, but if I was trying to be a more standard author on LW, I wouldn’t use it without the ability to ban (and for example, would almost certainly ban Said, who has been given multiple warnings by the moderation team, is by far the most heavily complained user on the site, and I would actively encourage many authors to ban if they don’t want to have a kind of bad time, but I think is providing enough value to the site in other contexts that I don’t think a site-wide ban would make sense).
July 2025
I mean, I have written like 50,000+ words about this at this point in various comment threads. About why I care about archipelagos, and why I think it’s hard and bad to try to have centralized control about culture, about how much people hate being in places with ambiguous norms, and many other things. I don’t fault you for not reading them all, but I have done a huge amount of exposition.
November 2025
Look, I know I wouldn’t want to use LessWrong if I couldn’t ban annoying commenters from my posts. I wouldn’t run LessWrong if I didn’t have the ability to ban annoying commenters from the site.
Yes, if there were trusted enough moderators who would do the job well-enough for me, then I could get away without moderation tools when posting, but currently, if I was an external party, I would not trust even the current LW team with a copy of myself to do this. The LW team is trying to allow a bunch of people with incompatible conversation styles to be on the site, and this means that I cannot expect site-wide bans and deletion to be sufficient for making it so I don’t have run-ins with a bunch of people who will very predictably waste hours of my time.
Like, de-facto we try to compensate a bunch for this by asking people what kind of moderation they would like on their post, and then try to help them with moderation, but it’s a labor intensive process that mostly fails for bandwidth reasons.
November 2025 (later in the month)
Look, we’ve had these conversations.
I am saying the people who are moderating the spaces have the obvious information advantage about their own preferences and about what it’s actually like to engage with an interlocutor, plus the motivation advantage to actually deal with it. “It’s common sense that the best decisions get made by people with skin in the game and who are most involved with the actual consequences of the relevant decision”. And “it’s common sense that CEOs of organizations make hiring and firing decisions for the people they work with, boards don’t make good firing decisions, the same applies to forums and moderators”.
This is a discussion as old as time in business and governance and whatever. Framing your position as “common sense” is indeed just a rhetorical move, and I have no problem framing the opposite position in just as much of an “obvious” fashion. Turns out, neither position obviously dominates by common sense! Smart people exist on both sides of this debate. I am not against having it again, and I have my own takes on it, but please don’t try to frame this as some kind of foregone conclusion in which you have the high ground.
Like come on, please. I don’t want to have the same conversation over and over and over again. We have by this point extremely well-considered reasons for our moderation policy. Something being well-considered doesn’t mean it’s right, but after almost a decade of having the same conversation, I feel like we could at least start having a different one.