[Question] Which top authors did Said Achmiz drive away?

[Sting]

Habryka recently decided to ban Said Achmiz. He wrote an extensive post explaining the decision. There were some very good things about this decision at the meta level, such as having one person make the decision and take full responsibility for it, explaining the reasoning in detail, and giving Said a comment thread under which he can respond.

However, I did not find the specific examples given for the ban persuasive. E.g., the example given under

When Said is at his worst, he writes comments like this:

did not seem remotely ban-worthy to me.

The key claim which, if true, would justify a ban, was:

Said has been by far the most complained user on the site, with many top authors citing him as a top reason for why they do not want to post on the site, or comment here

If Said is driving away many top authors, then he is at the very least guilty of being a bad cultural fit. And if someone chooses to act in a way that imposes costs on the website, and those costs are greater than the benefits he provides, he has no right to complain when you ban him.

But the key piece of information missing from the post is: which top authors did Said drive away?

The only example I am aware of is Duncan, but he doesn’t count. Habryka explicitly said:

there is basically no engagement with Duncan that played any kind of substantial role in any of this.

And even more strongly:

My honest best guess is that we would have banned Said somewhat earlier if not for the Duncan thread …. My experience was that Said’s behavior in the Duncan thread was among the most understandable cases of him behaving badly (because I too have found myself ending up drawn into conflicts with Duncan that end up quite aggressive and at least tempt me to behave badly).

So which top authors left? Of course, anyone who permanently left the site would not have left any comments on the post. But a few top authors^[1] did mention bad personal experiences with Said:

Matt Goldenberg (5,600 karma) found Said’s comments unpleasant.

philh (7,800 karma) had mixed experiences:

Like seemingly many others, I found Said a mix of “frequently incredibly annoying, seemingly blind to things that are clear to others, poorly calibrated with the confidence level he expresses things, [...]” and “occasionally pointing out the-Emperor-has-no-clothes in ways that are valuable and few other people seem to do”.

(I had banned him from my personal posts, but not from my frontpaged posts.)

Gordon Seidoh Worley (10,000 karma) also describes a mix of good and bad experiences:

Also FWIW, I’ve had some genuinely positive interactions with Said in the last couple weeks. I was surprised as anyone. I don’t know if it’s because he was trying to be on his best behavior or what, but if that was how Said commented on everything, I’d be very happy to see him unbanned (I had even had the idea that if we continued to have positive interactions I would unban him after whatever felt like enough time for me to believe in the new pattern).

Several other top authors defended Said^[2]. I was not able to find, in either the post or the comments, any firsthand or secondhand examples of top authors who left because of Said. This question has been asked before, by Said himself:

You’re positing a person who is posting things that aren’t, like… vulgarity, or personal insults, or anything bad or crazy like that (because if he were doing that, then the mods would presumably ban him outright—or should, anyway!). And he’s not doing anything else that is rightly ban-worthy (like, say, persistently lying about his interlocutors’ claims, or something along those lines). Yet, despite this, there are authors who find this person’s very presence in a discussion so “unpleasant” that… it’s enough to discourage them from posting on LW altogether?

And yet, despite this, these authors somehow are capable of making useful contributions to the site? Who are these authors??

Can you give some examples of such people? (Are you one of them?)

To which habryka responded (emphasis added):

My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others. This is not a rare position. I would have to dig to give you an exact list, but the list is not short, and it includes large fractions of almost everyone who one might consider strong contributors to the site.

To which Zack replied:

You are making false claims. Two of these claims about the views of specific individuals are clearly contradicted by those individuals’ own statements

Scott Alexander, when asked about Said, said:

I have no direct opinion on him. I have heard his name as someone who’s very confrontational, and I agree that this can make a website less pleasant, but I can’t remember having any personal experience.

And Jacob Falkovich’s view of Said is positive.

The fact that two of the examples on the list were incorrect, throws the rest of the list into doubt.

So the question remains:
Which top authors cite Said as a reason they “do not want to post on the site, or comment here”?

Said is a popular author, with 17,000 karma. Someone whose comments and posts are generally well-received should not be banned lightly. But if someone compiles a list of authors^[3] who left the site because of Said (with direct quotes to that effect), and if those authors collectively have more than 17,000 karma, then that is at the very least a strong argument for banning him.

1. ^

   I am not sure what constitutes a top author, but I will tentatively define it as someone with over 5000 karma.

2. ^

   Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel (5,800 karma) found his comments valuable.

   Wei Dai (41,000 karma) will also miss him.

   Richard_Kennaway (7,800 karma) is sad that Said was banned.

   Alicorn (30,000 karma) is disappointed and dismayed by the ban:

   I don’t think it will really affect you if I stay or go. But if I do absentmindedly navigate here out of sixteen year habit I’m going to have a bad taste in my mouth about it.

3. ^

   Excluding Duncan

[Isha Yiras Hashem]

What is the source for the Scott Alexander comment you quoted?

[Sting]

It is from the linked comment by Zack Davis. The original source is a Discord conversation between Zack and Scott.

[habryka]

I do really want to avoid this becoming a recurring topic with lots of disconnected top-level posts doing relitigation, so I’ll by-default move this to a top-level comment on the Said banning post (I think this is the right choice for stuff like this, though feel free to argue with me about this, and a top-level shortform post complaining about that policy will not be moved and is something I am happy to debate on).

Also, I’ve spent much much more than my allotted 10 hours answering questions and digging into things here, so I won’t respond much more on the Said topic, though this random thread I had with Said is probably worth reading and has a few examples of other public comments to this effect, though I’ll again reiterate that most comments on this topic have been in private (including comments I remember from both Scott and Jacob Falkovich to this effect, which I mention in the relevant thread with Zack).

Edit: This is now done. I unlisted this post, e.g. it still exists but is only accessible via link, since that seemed like the simplest way to maintain any context I might have forgot to move over.

[Sting]

When I hover over the “Personal Blog” tag at the top of this post, a tooltip pops up which says, in part:

Members can write whatever they want on their personal blog. Personal blogposts are a good fit for:

• Meta-discussion of LessWrong (site features, interpersonal community dynamics)

And when I click that tag, it redirects to this guide which states:

Posts on practically any topic are welcomed on LessWrong[1].

The footnote in the quote states:

We will remove material of the following types:

• Calls for direct violence against others

• Doxing of people on the internet

• Material we are not legally able to host

• To a very limited degree, material that seriously threatens LessWrong’s long-term values, mission and culture.

Thus, I do not think that the decision to unlist this post is in accordance with standard LessWrong moderation guidelines for what is acceptable in a personal blogpost. Of course, you are the dictator, and can make whatever exceptions to the standard guidelines that you wish. But I would encourage you to adopt the policy of Frederick the Great:

“My people and I … have come to an agreement which satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please.”

On the object level, it is natural enough to want to avoid sinking tons of time into eternal relitigiation of the decision to ban Said. But if you already answered a question, you can just link to the place where you already answered it.

E.g., for this post you could have said something like:

“Your question is partially answered here, and unfortunately I have already spent dozens of hours on this and lack the time to go digging for additional receipts. Author complains were not a load-bearing part of the decision in any case, which is why I did not include much in the way of examples in my original post.”

This would have been a fine response! It also would not have taken long to write.

Also, I was not addressing the question to you. I would have welcomed (and would still welcome, although it is less likely to happen now) comments by top authors who found Said’s presence intolerable, or links to statements by such authors.

After reading through your full post (except for the collapsed sections in the Appendix) as well as several thousand words of comments^[1], I identified the key crux which to me would decisively justify a ban. To the degree that other users of LessWrong also find the “top authors no longer wanting to post or comment” claim to be a key crux on whether the decision to ban was a good one, it is useful to have a dedicated post where we can crowd-source an answer. Since you have stated elsewhere that author complaints were not load-bearing, this may not matter to you, but it does matter to us.

1. ^

   Despite all this, I believe I missed your partial answer linked above.

[habryka]

To be clear, we relatively routinely merge and move comment threads (as is common practice on most internet forums). The guidelines above are primarily about what kind of content we will delete, not about the exact ways we are going to list the content on the frontpage. I would never delete a post like this, and have indeed not done so!

In this case I merged it with an existing comment section and just left this post as unlisted for convenience to leave this meta-discussion intact as a reference. My best guess is that it will get somewhat more visibility in the long-run as a result of being on the Said post, while getting a bit less visibility in the short run, and most importantly having it there will make it so that answers will be available to people who want to build a model of the Said comment discussion and the context of the previous discussion will be available to people reading this comment.

Feel free to start a shortform somewhere with discussion about me moving this, or continue discussion about the meta-level issue on the comment thread on the Said post. The visibility of the comments on this post will be very weird and kind of jank, since unlisted posts aren’t designed to have active discussion under them.

[Sting]

The guidelines above are primarily about what kind of content we will delete, not about the exact ways we are going to list the content on the frontpage.

This is a Personal Blog post, which the guide states “Are not displayed by default on the homepage”, unlike Frontpage posts which “Are displayed by default to all users”. Therefore, unlisting my post does not affect the homepage, but it does prevent it from showing up on my user profile.

I would never delete a post like this, and have indeed not done so!

Yes, I appreciate that. The fact remains that I would like to post this on my Personal Blog, which you are not allowing.

My best guess is that it will get somewhat more visibility in the long-run as a result of being on the Said post

I very much doubt it will get more visibility in the long-run. Also, since I am not the author of the comment on the Said post, I will not be notified of replies to it.

Feel free to start a shortform somewhere with discussion about me moving this

I plan to do this within the next couple of days. We can continue the discussion there.

[habryka]

Therefore, unlisting my post does not affect the homepage, but it does prevent it from showing up on my user profile.

Personal blogposts show up both in recent discussion, and of course get included in the homepage feed of everyone who has enabled seeing personal blogposts. The naming here is kind of terrible, so I am pretty sympathetic to the confusion, but personal blogposts get a pretty substantial amount of frontpage/​homepage traffic.

I very much doubt it will get more visibility in the long-run.

If we can find an operationalization, I would take a bet. I expect that Said post to get traffic for many years.

[habryka]

Since I am not the author of the comment on the Said post, I will not be notified of replies to it.

(Just subscribe to comments via the triple-dot menu)

[Zack_M_Davis]

Sting, the author of the post, thought a top-level question post was the right choice. If you think the algorithm should deprioritize showing other people Sting’s post because you think it’s bad, you have a strength-10 strong downvote. Why isn’t that enough? On any other topic, if someone makes a post about something other people have also made posts about, you don’t demote later posts to comments. Why is this topic different?

[habryka]

I mean, the algorithm is like one line of math, why would we assume it covers all possible edge-cases? It’s extremely common for forum-moderation to do lots of moving of comments and posts and to concentrate discussion of a topic in a single place in any forum on the internet (see the many times a week dang at hackernews does the same thing with overlapping discussions, or similar meta-topics), or the many times we’ve done the same on LW.

Separately, I don’t think it would be appropriate for this post to get downvoted! The post is asking a reasonable question, just one I think is best asked in the context of all the other discussion on the topic. I don’t think downvoting is the appropriate operation for this.

The default equilibrium of internet discussion like this is that stuff gets eternally relitigated because people show up who don’t want to read the previous context and are looking for some kind of drama, or get drawn in by someone else presenting some isolated facet of the context. The whole reason why I spent 60+ hours writing the previous post is to avoid that exact dynamic. Allowing lots of top-level posts will inevitably then cause me to have to spend another 100+ hours on this, which I do not want to do. Indeed, in this case there are a lot of comments on the banning post that directly address questions in this post, and I strongly expect any discussion situated in that context to go a lot better.

[Zack_M_Davis]

Allowing lots of top-level posts

As it happens, I was planning (in due time) to write my own top-level reaction post to your post of 22 August. I had assumed this would be allowed, as I have written well-received top-level reaction posts to other Less Wrong posts many times before: for example, “Relevance Norms” (which you evidently found valuable enough to cite in your post of 22 August) or “Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think” (which was Curated).

Will I be permitted to post?

will inevitably then cause me to have to spend another 100+ hours on this

I don’t think “have to” is warranted. You don’t have to reply if you don’t want to. But other people have a legitimate interest in publicly discussing your public statements among themselves, independently of whether you think it’s worth your time to reply.

[habryka]

Will I be permitted to post?

A post that aims to make some novel points makes more sense as a top-level post than the kind of question that was this OP.

I do think it’s kind of worse form than responding in comments if you aim for it to be a commentary on the specific moderation decision, though I can’t really judge that without knowing the content. I certainly can imagine lots of good top-level posts and the two posts you link certainly are better for being top-level posts than comments, and my general prior on such a post of yours makes me think it’s a good fit for a top-level post.

But other people have a legitimate interest in publicly discussing your public statements among themselves, independently of whether you think it’s worth your time to reply.

Totally agree.

I do think it’s quite important to provide context as to the efforts already exerted on the topic and associated lack of response, as the norms by which many, if not most, readers will interpret the lack of a response is as some kind of admission of wrongness (as discussed at some length in my Said moderation post).

I can try to provide the context myself by writing comments, though it is costly, and won’t reliably get read, so it seems to me like bad form to not provide it in the top-level post (the same way I cared a bunch about offering Said the option to have his response linked from high up in the moderation post, and present itself in the body of the text, though I don’t think Said has yet taken me up on that). Moving things into the context of the original discussion helps take care of this more naturally and in ways less reliant on goodwill.

[Zack_M_Davis]

Thank you for answering my question.