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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for answering my question.