Today I was author-banned for the first time, without warning and as a total surprise to me, ~8 years after banning power was given to authors, but less than 3 months since @Said Achmiz was removed from LW. It seems to vindicate my fear that LW would slide towards a more censorious culture if the mods went through with their decision.
Has anyone noticed any positive effects, BTW? Has anyone who stayed away from LW because of Said rejoined?
Edit: In addition to the timing, previously, I do not recall seeing a ban based on just one interaction/thread, instead of some long term pattern of behavior. Also, I’m not linking the thread because IIUC the mods do not wish to see authors criticized for exercising their mod powers, and I also don’t want to criticize the specific author. I’m worried about the overall cultural trend caused by admin policies/preferences, not trying to apply pressure to the author who banned me.
[Reposting my previous comment without linking to the specific thread in question:]
I don’t understand the implied connection to “censorious” or “culture”. You had a prolonged comment thread/discussion/dispute (I didn’t read it) with one individual author, and they got annoyed at some point and essentially blocked you. Setting aside both the tone and the veracity of their justifying statements (<quotes removed>), disengaging from unpleasant interactions with other users is normal and pretty unobjectionable, right?
(Thanks for reposting without the link/quotes. I added back the karma your comment had, as best as I could.)
Previously, the normal way to disengage was to just disengage, or to say that one is disengaging and then stop responding, not to suddenly ban someone without warning based on one thread. I do not recall seeing a ban previously that wasn’t based on some long term pattern of behavior.
This is complicated. I was also banned be someone, even wrote a bug report “hey, I can’t reply to this person, pls fix the bug” and was explained that I was actually banned by that person… it kinda hurt for a moment, but then I shrugged and mostly forgot about it.
I think there are both possible good and bad consequences.
It will be bad if some people start systematically banning e.g. those who call out their bullshit. Because that is a large part of the value of this website: people giving reasonable feedback. If the article is bullshit, someone will likely mention in in the comments. If the comment is bullshit, if it visible enough, someone will likely reply. This mechanism could be broken if some people start banning those who provide this feedback.
On the other hand, some people really are super annoying. But should they be banned from the website? Seems too harsh. But if they become obsessed with some selected targets, those targets may decide to leave, which is also bad. Giving the target the possibility to ban the annoying person seems like a win/win solution.
...no conclusion here.
Maybe allow every user to only ban three people? (If you ban the fourth one, the first one is automatically unbanned.) This is based on assumption that really annoying people are rare and don’t have multiple accounts. So you can deflect the one that annoys you most, without being able to build an echo chamber.
Maybe figure out another way to signal “I consider your behavior annoying” without a ban?
Maybe reduce the meaning of the ban from “you can’t reply to this person at all” to “you can only post one reply per article”? So you can state your objections, but you can’t stay there and keep interacting with the author. When you are writing the reply, you are notified that this is the only one you get under this article.
Maybe reduce the meaning of the ban from “you can’t reply to this person at all” to “you can only post one reply per article”? So you can state your objections, but you can’t stay there and keep interacting with the author. When you are writing the reply, you are notified that this is the only one you get under this article.
could be good, if combined with up to 3 total bans
I think the cultural slide will include self-censorship, e.g., having had this experience (of being banned out of the blue), in the future I’ll probably subconsciously be constantly thinking “am I annoying this author too much with my comments” and disengage early or change what I say before I get banned, and this will largely be out of my conscious control.
(I don’t want to start a fight and hopefully I’ll write a post explaining the behavior I’m talking about, but I’ll say abstractly, my hope in general is for people (me, you, anyone) to try as much as feasible to make fairly precise updates, like “this specific behavior pattern is bad / unhelpful / unwelcome in this context” rather than “I should be vaguely more worried about being vaguely annoying”.)
I think when a human gets a negative reward signal, probably all the circuits that contributed to the “episode trajectory” gets downweighted, and antagonistic circuits get upweighted, similar to AI being trained with RL. I can override my subconscious circuits with conscious willpower but I only have so much conscious processing and will power to go around. For example I’m currently feeling a pretty large aversion towards talking with you, but am overriding it because I think it’s worth the effort to get this message out, but I can’t keep the “override” active forever.
Of course I can consciously learn more precise things, if you were to write about them, but that seems unlikely to change the subconscious learning that happened already.
Today I was author-banned for the first time, without warning and as a total surprise to me, ~8 years after banning power was given to authors, but less than 3 months since @Said Achmiz was removed from LW. It seems to vindicate my fear that LW would slide towards a more censorious culture if the mods went through with their decision.
Has anyone noticed any positive effects, BTW? Has anyone who stayed away from LW because of Said rejoined?
Edit: In addition to the timing, previously, I do not recall seeing a ban based on just one interaction/thread, instead of some long term pattern of behavior. Also, I’m not linking the thread because IIUC the mods do not wish to see authors criticized for exercising their mod powers, and I also don’t want to criticize the specific author. I’m worried about the overall cultural trend caused by admin policies/preferences, not trying to apply pressure to the author who banned me.
[Reposting my previous comment without linking to the specific thread in question:]
I don’t understand the implied connection to “censorious” or “culture”. You had a prolonged comment thread/discussion/dispute (I didn’t read it) with one individual author, and they got annoyed at some point and essentially blocked you. Setting aside both the tone and the veracity of their justifying statements (<quotes removed>), disengaging from unpleasant interactions with other users is normal and pretty unobjectionable, right?
(Thanks for reposting without the link/quotes. I added back the karma your comment had, as best as I could.) Previously, the normal way to disengage was to just disengage, or to say that one is disengaging and then stop responding, not to suddenly ban someone without warning based on one thread. I do not recall seeing a ban previously that wasn’t based on some long term pattern of behavior.
This is complicated. I was also banned be someone, even wrote a bug report “hey, I can’t reply to this person, pls fix the bug” and was explained that I was actually banned by that person… it kinda hurt for a moment, but then I shrugged and mostly forgot about it.
I think there are both possible good and bad consequences.
It will be bad if some people start systematically banning e.g. those who call out their bullshit. Because that is a large part of the value of this website: people giving reasonable feedback. If the article is bullshit, someone will likely mention in in the comments. If the comment is bullshit, if it visible enough, someone will likely reply. This mechanism could be broken if some people start banning those who provide this feedback.
On the other hand, some people really are super annoying. But should they be banned from the website? Seems too harsh. But if they become obsessed with some selected targets, those targets may decide to leave, which is also bad. Giving the target the possibility to ban the annoying person seems like a win/win solution.
...no conclusion here.
Maybe allow every user to only ban three people? (If you ban the fourth one, the first one is automatically unbanned.) This is based on assumption that really annoying people are rare and don’t have multiple accounts. So you can deflect the one that annoys you most, without being able to build an echo chamber.
Maybe figure out another way to signal “I consider your behavior annoying” without a ban?
Maybe reduce the meaning of the ban from “you can’t reply to this person at all” to “you can only post one reply per article”? So you can state your objections, but you can’t stay there and keep interacting with the author. When you are writing the reply, you are notified that this is the only one you get under this article.
could be good, if combined with up to 3 total bans
I think that’s fairly limited evidence, would want to see more data than that before claiming anything is vindicated.
Yeah, I would take a bet with you about eg if you’ll be banned by another author in the next 3 years. I think at least 60% on “no”.
I think the cultural slide will include self-censorship, e.g., having had this experience (of being banned out of the blue), in the future I’ll probably subconsciously be constantly thinking “am I annoying this author too much with my comments” and disengage early or change what I say before I get banned, and this will largely be out of my conscious control.
(I don’t want to start a fight and hopefully I’ll write a post explaining the behavior I’m talking about, but I’ll say abstractly, my hope in general is for people (me, you, anyone) to try as much as feasible to make fairly precise updates, like “this specific behavior pattern is bad / unhelpful / unwelcome in this context” rather than “I should be vaguely more worried about being vaguely annoying”.)
I think when a human gets a negative reward signal, probably all the circuits that contributed to the “episode trajectory” gets downweighted, and antagonistic circuits get upweighted, similar to AI being trained with RL. I can override my subconscious circuits with conscious willpower but I only have so much conscious processing and will power to go around. For example I’m currently feeling a pretty large aversion towards talking with you, but am overriding it because I think it’s worth the effort to get this message out, but I can’t keep the “override” active forever.
Of course I can consciously learn more precise things, if you were to write about them, but that seems unlikely to change the subconscious learning that happened already.