My first “homes”, Usenet newsgroups and the Cypherpunks mailing list, were completely unmoderated. Anything went, including totally off topic posts, personal insults, giant flame wars, etc. A lot of that was probably not helpful for my intellectual development (or at least it’s hard to see how), but I suspect being exposed to all sorts of attacks and criticism, and not being able to deal with them except by counterargument or ignoring them, must have played an important role. (Subsequent places probably had more moderation, but mostly still little to none according to my memory.)
There’s simply no way to fully replicate that today, nor would I want to if I could, just for my own QOL, and a lot of it probably is harmful on net. I think having no direct author mod powers (only site modes, or author mods have to get site mod approval for their actions) at least replicates the plausibly most important aspect of that environment, in that it makes you often exposed to critiques that you can’t just make disappear, no matter how much they annoy or frustrate you.
Maybe there are other aspects that are important, but don’t come to my mind for now. I’ll think about this some more.
This post caused me to notice that the online spaces I inhabit today are much more heavily moderated than the online spaces I inhabited ~15 years ago.
I think this is because the floor on how bad a random unmoderated place on the internet is likely to become absent some pretty aggressive moderation has lowered significantly. Flame wars don’t happen because if you’re in a place where they’re permitted to happen, you’ve got much bigger problems (e.g. bots, porn, spam, hate speech), and that place soon after ceases to exist / gives itself over to those parenthetical purposes which drive reason into the shadows.
On the other hand, this often causes forums to devolve into meta-arguments over their own souls, especially in the face of any cultural change (e.g., my favorite music forum is now ~half posts about whether or not AI could ever be a useful tool for music-making, and my favorite people on my favorite rationality forum now spend, on average, ~10-25 percent of their time arguing over bans, maybe more).
I don’t think the equilibrium you actually want is attainable on the modern public internet, and it’s not obvious that your preferred solutions get us closer to that ideal than the current LW setup.
My best guess on what would help is if voting norms stopped rewarding/amplifying things that felt like unassailable dunks on the initial author of a post. I think your disputed comments have value, but I don’t think that this is both what causes them to be upvoted and what causes them to be annoying to the OP; I think your comments are both difficult to evaluate and present plausible disagreement, which creates a sort of ‘dunk’ vibe that the voters love and the authors hate, even though I know that’s not where your heart is.
Licensing the author to decide what feels too dunk-ish and delete it or ban those who generate that kind of thing seems like one way to do this! But probably it sucks for you if others develop the impression that your well-intentioned comments are rewarded by onlookers more for their dunkishness than their content and so take action against you.
The propensity of the audience to upvote things they read as dunks is downstream of the general decay of the public internet. I think I endorse the views, behavior, and votes of the median LW poster less than I do a demographically similar member of the public selected at random, but I endorse the views and behavior of my favorite LW posters (you, Oli, Tsvi, Ray, to name a few) much, much, much more.
Your comments would often serve as important footnotes or great mid-thread reminders, but at the top of the comment queue almost certainly have a cooling effect on further discussion, perhaps because the modern commenter is made of softer stuff than the marauding denizens of usenet, and has trouble salvaging something from the OP to reply to once you’ve reminded them that we could just, in fact, be confused about everything anyway.
[I think I’ve been following this saga in some detail, but apologies if I’m just absurdly off base or have missed some number of important things!]
I’m quite interested in the thinking you’ll arrive at over the course of days of pondering this in the background, but in particular I’m very interested in, 1. what you’d expect would have happened in a counterfactual where that service had happened to have provided something functionally identical to lesswrong’s moderation scheme; and, 2. what moderation scheme you would design in order to remove just the harmful parts, without removing the things that you think critical to how it worked as an important crucible of opinion.
My first “homes”, Usenet newsgroups and the Cypherpunks mailing list, were completely unmoderated. Anything went, including totally off topic posts, personal insults, giant flame wars, etc. A lot of that was probably not helpful for my intellectual development (or at least it’s hard to see how), but I suspect being exposed to all sorts of attacks and criticism, and not being able to deal with them except by counterargument or ignoring them, must have played an important role. (Subsequent places probably had more moderation, but mostly still little to none according to my memory.)
There’s simply no way to fully replicate that today, nor would I want to if I could, just for my own QOL, and a lot of it probably is harmful on net. I think having no direct author mod powers (only site modes, or author mods have to get site mod approval for their actions) at least replicates the plausibly most important aspect of that environment, in that it makes you often exposed to critiques that you can’t just make disappear, no matter how much they annoy or frustrate you.
Maybe there are other aspects that are important, but don’t come to my mind for now. I’ll think about this some more.
This post caused me to notice that the online spaces I inhabit today are much more heavily moderated than the online spaces I inhabited ~15 years ago.
I think this is because the floor on how bad a random unmoderated place on the internet is likely to become absent some pretty aggressive moderation has lowered significantly. Flame wars don’t happen because if you’re in a place where they’re permitted to happen, you’ve got much bigger problems (e.g. bots, porn, spam, hate speech), and that place soon after ceases to exist / gives itself over to those parenthetical purposes which drive reason into the shadows.
On the other hand, this often causes forums to devolve into meta-arguments over their own souls, especially in the face of any cultural change (e.g., my favorite music forum is now ~half posts about whether or not AI could ever be a useful tool for music-making, and my favorite people on my favorite rationality forum now spend, on average, ~10-25 percent of their time arguing over bans, maybe more).
I don’t think the equilibrium you actually want is attainable on the modern public internet, and it’s not obvious that your preferred solutions get us closer to that ideal than the current LW setup.
My best guess on what would help is if voting norms stopped rewarding/amplifying things that felt like unassailable dunks on the initial author of a post. I think your disputed comments have value, but I don’t think that this is both what causes them to be upvoted and what causes them to be annoying to the OP; I think your comments are both difficult to evaluate and present plausible disagreement, which creates a sort of ‘dunk’ vibe that the voters love and the authors hate, even though I know that’s not where your heart is.
Licensing the author to decide what feels too dunk-ish and delete it or ban those who generate that kind of thing seems like one way to do this! But probably it sucks for you if others develop the impression that your well-intentioned comments are rewarded by onlookers more for their dunkishness than their content and so take action against you.
The propensity of the audience to upvote things they read as dunks is downstream of the general decay of the public internet. I think I endorse the views, behavior, and votes of the median LW poster less than I do a demographically similar member of the public selected at random, but I endorse the views and behavior of my favorite LW posters (you, Oli, Tsvi, Ray, to name a few) much, much, much more.
Your comments would often serve as important footnotes or great mid-thread reminders, but at the top of the comment queue almost certainly have a cooling effect on further discussion, perhaps because the modern commenter is made of softer stuff than the marauding denizens of usenet, and has trouble salvaging something from the OP to reply to once you’ve reminded them that we could just, in fact, be confused about everything anyway.
[I think I’ve been following this saga in some detail, but apologies if I’m just absurdly off base or have missed some number of important things!]
I’m quite interested in the thinking you’ll arrive at over the course of days of pondering this in the background, but in particular I’m very interested in, 1. what you’d expect would have happened in a counterfactual where that service had happened to have provided something functionally identical to lesswrong’s moderation scheme; and, 2. what moderation scheme you would design in order to remove just the harmful parts, without removing the things that you think critical to how it worked as an important crucible of opinion.