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.
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.
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.
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.
When I hover over the “Personal Blog” tag at the top of this post, a tooltip pops up which says, in part:
And when I click that tag, it redirects to this guide which states:
The footnote in the quote states:
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:
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:
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.
Despite all this, I believe I missed your partial answer linked above.
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.
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.
Yes, I appreciate that. The fact remains that I would like to post this on my Personal Blog, which you are not allowing.
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.
I plan to do this within the next couple of days. We can continue the discussion there.
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.
If we can find an operationalization, I would take a bet. I expect that Said post to get traffic for many years.
(Just subscribe to comments via the triple-dot menu)