We’re currently experimenting with a rule that flags users who’ve received several downvotes from “senior” users (I believe 5 downvotes from users with above 1,000 karma) on comments that are already net-negative (I believe that were posted in the last year). We’re currently in the manual review phase, so users are being flagged and then users are having the rate limit applied if it seems reasonable. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this rule has an amazing track record so far, but all the cases in the “rate limit wave” were reviewed by me and Habryka and he decided to apply a limit in those cases.
(We applied some rate limit in 60% of the cases of users who got flagged by the rule).
People who get manually rate-limited don’t have an explanation visible when trying to comment (unlike users who are limited by an automatic rule, I think).
We have explained this to users that reached out (in fact this answer is adapted from one such conversation), but I do think we plausibly should have set up infrastructure to explain these new rate limits.
I have been in the position of trying to moderate a large and growing community—it was at 500k users last I checked, although I threw in the towel around 300k—and I know what a thankless, sisyphean task it is.
I know what it is to have to explain the same—perfectly reasonable—rule/norm again and again and again.
I know what it is to try to cultivate and nurture a garden while hordes of barbarians trample all over the place.
But...
If it aint broke, don’t fix it.
I would argue that the majority of the listed people penalized are net contributors to lesswrong, including some who are strongly net positive.
I’ve noticed y’all have been tinkering in this space for a while, I think you’re trying super hard to protect lesswrong from the eternal september and you actually seem to be succeeding, which is no small feat, buuut...
I do wonder if the team needs a break.
I think there’s a thing that happens to gardeners (and here I’m using that as a very broad archetype), where we become attached to and identify with the work of weeding—of maintaining, of day after day holding back entropy—and cease to take pleasure in the garden itself.
As that sets in, even new growth begins to seem like a weed.
Doesn’t this “in the last year” equate to retroactively creating a rule and applying it?
A year ago the only rule I saw enforced was positive karma. It was fine to get into arguments, fine to post as often as you felt like. Seems like i have been punished a lot retroactively.
It is not “fine to get into arguments”. The FAQ definitely lays out goals of having interactions here be civil and collaborative.
Unfortunately, becoming less wrong (reaching the truth) benefits hugely from not getting into arguments.
If you tell a human being (even a rationalist) something true, with good evidence or arguments, but you do it in an aggressive or otherwise irritating way, they may very well become less likely to believe that true thing, because they associate it with you and want to fight both you and the idea.
This is true of you and other rationalists as well as everyone else.
This is not to argue that the bans might not be overdoing it; it’s trying to do what Habryka doesn’t have time to do: explain to you why you’re getting downvoted even when you’re making sense.
It’s “fine” in the sense that reddit works fine, downvoted arguments just reduces visibility. Users aren’t punished for occasional mass downvoted comments, they are auto hidden. Moderation is bright line and transparent.
So I was simply trying to understand the why. Why be vague on the reason, why not reference the infringing material, why make up new rules and apply retroactively over a year!, what are the benefits, what is the problem being solved or prevented. If you think an argument is bad, ok, how did you know this?
Are you actually getting the smartest content like you intend or a bunch of users with complex theories that sound smart but very likely are subtly but catastrophically wrong. See Titotals posts where he finds examples of this.
I don’t think this is a new insight though I thought of it. The reason physics can “support” complex equations as theories is because the data quality for physics is high : reproducible experiments, many sig figures, the complexity is the simplest found so far.
Something like economics, only the simplest theories probably have any genuine validity. Due to low data quality, inferring past simple ideas like supply and demand or marginal decisions probably heads quickly into “most likely wrong” territory.
This is the problem with AI predictions or any other future predictions. When your data is from the future your quality is very poor, like uncontrolled economics experiments. What you can model is limited or what model can be justified is limited.
It’s ironic that your response doesn’t address my comment. That was one of the stated reasons for your limit. This also addresses why Habryka thought explaining it to you further didn’t seem likely to help.
How to best moderate a website such as LW is a deep and difficult question. If you have better ideas, that might be useful. Just do more, better is not a useful suggestion.
This seems like a really bad idea. If it happened to me, I’d just leave. I’m not looking for echo chambers, and I often am motivated to come out of lurking and say something when my view is contrarian. That’s just who I am. Such comments often get downvoted by senior people. That’s just how contrary views are handled in online communities.
Is this not what LW wants? Then I guess I’ll just delete my account and go somewhere else.
De-facto I think people are pretty good about not downvoting contrarian takes (splitting up/downvote from agree/disagree vote helped a lot in improving this).
But also, we do have a manual review step to catch the cases where people get downvoted because of tribal dynamics and object-level disagreements (that’s where at least a chunk of the 40% where we didn’t apply the rule above came from).
To answer, for now, just one piece of this post:
We’re currently experimenting with a rule that flags users who’ve received several downvotes from “senior” users (I believe 5 downvotes from users with above 1,000 karma) on comments that are already net-negative (I believe that were posted in the last year).
We’re currently in the manual review phase, so users are being flagged and then users are having the rate limit applied if it seems reasonable. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this rule has an amazing track record so far, but all the cases in the “rate limit wave” were reviewed by me and Habryka and he decided to apply a limit in those cases.
(We applied some rate limit in 60% of the cases of users who got flagged by the rule).
People who get manually rate-limited don’t have an explanation visible when trying to comment (unlike users who are limited by an automatic rule, I think).
We have explained this to users that reached out (in fact this answer is adapted from one such conversation), but I do think we plausibly should have set up infrastructure to explain these new rate limits.
I have been in the position of trying to moderate a large and growing community—it was at 500k users last I checked, although I threw in the towel around 300k—and I know what a thankless, sisyphean task it is.
I know what it is to have to explain the same—perfectly reasonable—rule/norm again and again and again.
I know what it is to try to cultivate and nurture a garden while hordes of barbarians trample all over the place.
But...
If it aint broke, don’t fix it.
I would argue that the majority of the listed people penalized are net contributors to lesswrong, including some who are strongly net positive.
I’ve noticed y’all have been tinkering in this space for a while, I think you’re trying super hard to protect lesswrong from the eternal september and you actually seem to be succeeding, which is no small feat, buuut...
I do wonder if the team needs a break.
I think there’s a thing that happens to gardeners (and here I’m using that as a very broad archetype), where we become attached to and identify with the work of weeding—of maintaining, of day after day holding back entropy—and cease to take pleasure in the garden itself.
As that sets in, even new growth begins to seem like a weed.
Are you able in my case to link the comment?
Doesn’t this “in the last year” equate to retroactively creating a rule and applying it?
A year ago the only rule I saw enforced was positive karma. It was fine to get into arguments, fine to post as often as you felt like. Seems like i have been punished a lot retroactively.
It is not “fine to get into arguments”. The FAQ definitely lays out goals of having interactions here be civil and collaborative.
Unfortunately, becoming less wrong (reaching the truth) benefits hugely from not getting into arguments.
If you tell a human being (even a rationalist) something true, with good evidence or arguments, but you do it in an aggressive or otherwise irritating way, they may very well become less likely to believe that true thing, because they associate it with you and want to fight both you and the idea.
This is true of you and other rationalists as well as everyone else.
This is not to argue that the bans might not be overdoing it; it’s trying to do what Habryka doesn’t have time to do: explain to you why you’re getting downvoted even when you’re making sense.
It’s “fine” in the sense that reddit works fine, downvoted arguments just reduces visibility. Users aren’t punished for occasional mass downvoted comments, they are auto hidden. Moderation is bright line and transparent.
So I was simply trying to understand the why. Why be vague on the reason, why not reference the infringing material, why make up new rules and apply retroactively over a year!, what are the benefits, what is the problem being solved or prevented. If you think an argument is bad, ok, how did you know this?
Are you actually getting the smartest content like you intend or a bunch of users with complex theories that sound smart but very likely are subtly but catastrophically wrong. See Titotals posts where he finds examples of this.
I don’t think this is a new insight though I thought of it. The reason physics can “support” complex equations as theories is because the data quality for physics is high : reproducible experiments, many sig figures, the complexity is the simplest found so far.
Something like economics, only the simplest theories probably have any genuine validity. Due to low data quality, inferring past simple ideas like supply and demand or marginal decisions probably heads quickly into “most likely wrong” territory.
This is the problem with AI predictions or any other future predictions. When your data is from the future your quality is very poor, like uncontrolled economics experiments. What you can model is limited or what model can be justified is limited.
The simple explanation is all you can justify.
It’s ironic that your response doesn’t address my comment. That was one of the stated reasons for your limit. This also addresses why Habryka thought explaining it to you further didn’t seem likely to help.
How to best moderate a website such as LW is a deep and difficult question. If you have better ideas, that might be useful. Just do more, better is not a useful suggestion.
This seems like a really bad idea. If it happened to me, I’d just leave. I’m not looking for echo chambers, and I often am motivated to come out of lurking and say something when my view is contrarian. That’s just who I am. Such comments often get downvoted by senior people. That’s just how contrary views are handled in online communities.
Is this not what LW wants? Then I guess I’ll just delete my account and go somewhere else.
De-facto I think people are pretty good about not downvoting contrarian takes (splitting up/downvote from agree/disagree vote helped a lot in improving this).
But also, we do have a manual review step to catch the cases where people get downvoted because of tribal dynamics and object-level disagreements (that’s where at least a chunk of the 40% where we didn’t apply the rule above came from).