AFAIK there was a wave of rate limits, not bans. I think it’s a huge error to conflate those. Most importantly, you can complain on-site about being rate limited in a way you can’t complain about being banned.
I have complaints about implementation but the theory seems sound. I’d like the team to put more work into implementation or treat false positives as more costly, but that’s easy for me to say since I’m not the one that has to do it.
Complaints:
the combination of imperfect filtering and no communication seems bad to me. How are people supposed to know their ban was a mistake and asking will help, instead of annoying mods further.
“retroactive to a year ago” sounds pretty bad to me. But I don’t think that’s the right frame. I think the team meant to intervene and not rate limit people who’d had an issue 11 months ago but have been great since. habryka described at least one ban as a mistake in comments on this post, so sounds like this was inconsistent. But conceptually I think it was supposed to be “we have a new tool for detecting people who have been below standards this entire time” not “we raised the bar”.
Then we agree about the general moderation of LW.
Did your comment also apply to the latest automated bans?
AFAIK there was a wave of rate limits, not bans. I think it’s a huge error to conflate those. Most importantly, you can complain on-site about being rate limited in a way you can’t complain about being banned.
I have complaints about implementation but the theory seems sound. I’d like the team to put more work into implementation or treat false positives as more costly, but that’s easy for me to say since I’m not the one that has to do it.
Complaints:
the combination of imperfect filtering and no communication seems bad to me. How are people supposed to know their ban was a mistake and asking will help, instead of annoying mods further.
“retroactive to a year ago” sounds pretty bad to me. But I don’t think that’s the right frame. I think the team meant to intervene and not rate limit people who’d had an issue 11 months ago but have been great since. habryka described at least one ban as a mistake in comments on this post, so sounds like this was inconsistent. But conceptually I think it was supposed to be “we have a new tool for detecting people who have been below standards this entire time” not “we raised the bar”.