Oh man, I find your hobby-horse-ish takes helpful, but I just quietly upvote rather than saying so every time. I think you’re just experiencing the general phenomenon where people only comment when they have criticism. I think it would be correct to pay more attention to karma than replies as an indicator of whether the community appreciates a comment; I hope you’re psychologically able to do so.
Maybe you’re not aware that authors can unilaterally ban other LWers from commenting on their posts (with no specific site-wide guidelines AFAIK), I was banned once for “charging my hobby horse” already, and the mods were apparently ok with it?
Not a crux, way more people appreciate your contributions? I don’t understand what’s going on in your head. Getting criticized on the internet is unfun but I expected (1) you could deal with it and (2) you recognize that people really appreciate your contributions on net.
A site that allows authors to filter their critics using arbitrary excuses does not meet my epistemic standards, which further reduces my motivations for “dealing with it”. More specifically, I can foresee that in the future I’ll be banned by more authors, and then I’ll have to make a choice of remaining on the site and potentially misleading people (who could reasonably update positively on some post that is of high interest to me by the absence of my criticism on it, without knowing that I’ve been banned by its author), or leaving the site altogether.
I will again remind people that at the bottom of every post, above the comment section, is the “Mentioned In” section, in which all posts that link to a post get displayed in karma order.
You cannot be banned from being listed in the “Mentioned In” section. Yes, this is a somewhat different level of visibility than being in the comments, but I still don’t see any super principled distinction for why this isn’t an adequate substitute for being able to comment on a post. It’s above the comment section! (Yes, a bit smaller, but not by that much, and making a post is higher effort than a comment, but these really don’t seem like dominating chilling effects)
This isn’t currently the case, mostly because there hasn’t been much demand and it’s just a bit of a pain to get right, but if there is an issue with the post format, or the experience of making a top level post (as opposed to a quick take), I think adding quick takes to the “Mentioned In” is something I would be happy to do if that would make you happier.
As a data point, I use LW a lot and wasn’t aware of the “Mentioned In” section. And I think the fact that it’s a different level of visibility than being in the comments actually drops readership by a quite large factor (I’d guess more than 10).
If I’m right, then—insofar as Wei is unhappy about the fact that he can’t respond in a way that gets lots of views—I don’t think the “Mentioned In” section adequately addresses this.
(This comment isn’t meant as an endorsement of the comment from Wei that you’re replying to.)
I also did not know (or remember?) that this existed.
For me I think this is a specific case of general “special section blindness”. Reading enough bad textbooks and growing up with ads everywhere, I am effectively blind to anything in a “special” section.
Maybe “Mentioned in” posts could each appear as their own generated comment containing just the title as a link? On the other side of the equation, authors having the ability to detach a thread into a linked shortform when it’s not very relevant to their post without actually deleting/hiding its existence seems like an improvement
I would take bets against “more than 10” by almost any metric, though IDK, if it turns out to be a crux for any of the age-old moderation disputes to just increase visibility of the mentioned-at section, that also seems probably like a thing we can figure out how to do.
Interesting, I update a lot on you saying that you’d take best against “more than 10”—though I’m surprised.
I would guess that, if one were to look at all recent times that someone has finished reading a post for which there was at least one comment and at least one “mentioned in” post:
Slightly over half of the time, the person then checked out the comments.
The person clicked on a “Mentioned In” post less than 5% of the time.
The delay between a likely critical comment and a likely critical post is probably quite substantial as well, which I have to imagine also makes a large impact on visibility.
What? Of course you would want to control for effort and delay. If you leave a comment on a post a week after it was published because the comment took a while to write, then it will of course also get less visibility.
Of course it will… which means that if that’s the only option, then the criticism will get much less attention in the context of the original post.
Sure, someone could quickly write a comment-tier post, but there is a strong cultural norm (reinforced by the existence of shortform, which strongly suggests that posts should take more effort) against doing such a thing — and going against these sorts of norms impacts how well it is received too. Furthermore, you also need to apply more skill to ensuring a commensurate degree of visibility (e.g. by picking a compelling title). I would expect the typical reaction to be anemic, relative to the same post as a comment.
If your goal is to have your criticism read by the people who saw the original thing, I don’t see how this isn’t a significant effect that you would want to consider.
I don’t understand. Like, writing a high-quality thing takes time. Yes, comments are encouraged to be lower-effort, but on the margin I want people to write more critique posts, not more comments, and this clearly is still very important noise in the thing we are trying to measure. Of course you need to do at least some controlling for effort and delay, though I agree how much is tricky (like, there are extra costs, but clearly posting immediately also just gives you a random boost that is anti-correlated with quality).
I would expect the typical reaction to be anemic, relative to the same post as a comment.
I disagree? Making a top-level post a week later would likely create vastly more visibility than leaving a high-effort comment with a shorter delay, because posts get promoted on their own, but comments only get promoted in the context of the post. Posts get a lot more visibility than comments on this site (for good reason, they are usually more valuable to read, and stand more on their own).
And critique posts are extremely popular on the site. A good chunk of the highest karma posts on the site are critique posts. This part honestly seems clearly wrong to me. I would take bets at very high odds that if Wei Dai left a slightly polished version of his comment on Richard’s post as a top-level post, then it would get much more visibility and karma than it had as a comment.
I don’t see how this isn’t a significant effect that you would want to consider.
I am not saying to not consider it! You are the person saying you shouldn’t control for this at all, which seems absurd to me. Obviously we both agree that “recency of publication” is a confounder you want to control for somehow, since it gives you a substantial boost orthogonal to what we are trying to measure here. We can start arguing about the right methodology for controlling for that, but it’s obviously a big effect.
I’m saying it’s not orthogonal to what I’m interested in measuring here, which is the impact of this policy on the visibility of critique. I’ll grant that’s not exactly what Eric seems to be considering in the comment above; sorry for the miscommunication.
Those critique posts seem to mainly be by popular authors, and quite long. I believe they additionally are mainly responses to posts that were themselves unusually popular, which is important because it means the author can assume a sort of common knowledge that a critique of a mid-level post would otherwise have to establish. I agree that Wei Dai could have achieved that, but that you are significantly underestimating the costs to him of doing so. And I’m also concerned about the case where the author does not have as strong of a reputation, of course.
I’ll grant that’s not exactly what Eric seems to be considering in the comment above; sorry for the miscommunication.
Cool, yeah, I was just saying you will have to adjust somehow for timeliness and effort from the baseline that Eric was proposing.
that you are significantly underestimating the costs to him of doing so
I haven’t made any statements about the cost. I think the cost is non-trivial, but it feels like the kind of thing that seems well in-line with other nudges and affordance-shaping we do on the site. In as much as there is a really crucial misunderstanding that people are forming, where they are using Wei’s absence of a response as evidence that a thing is robust or valid or good, then making a post allows you to address that.
Yes, the cost is somewhat higher than with a high-effort comment, but it just seems like an adequate solution to me, the same way that comments seem like an adequate solution to me, and I don’t need a publicly visible “I disendorse this” button at the bottom of each post that provides a minimum-effort way of expressing your opinion on something.
Isn’t chilling effects and/or making unwanted-by-authors replies less visible (while looking at a post) the whole point of allowing author moderation in the first place? Thought experiment: what if instead of just showing links in “mentioned in” (thus requiring the “trivial inconvenience” of expanding the section then clicking on the link), you made “mentioned in” fully expanded by default, and inlined any quick takes (and their reply threads) that would otherwise be linked?
I think your worry about negative replies not being visible enough corresponds to a real thing. On many sites (especially newspaper-style sites) I wind up feeling like it’s outright hazardous to read an article without checking some comments first, because so often the top comment is a refutation or major recontextualization.
One feature we have that might nto have been on your radar in this context: If a comment is above a karma threshold and it exactly blockquotes something inside the post, we show a comment icon in the margin next to the text that it quoted, which you can hover over to see the comment. When I built this feature, one of the goals I had in mind was “if the post is bad, you get a chance to see the pushback early”. (The karma threshold, and the unobtrusive presentation, are a balance we deliberately struck between allowing people to read posts without always getting sidetracked, and surfacing pushback.)
Isn’t chilling effects and/or making unwanted-by-authors replies less visible (while looking at a post) the whole point of allowing author moderation in the first place?
No, not quite. A major goal is to have any place where the author can shape the moderation norms and do anything with the discussion on the site on purpose. I feel like we discussed this a few times in the past. (There is also the component of not wanting to automatically give high levels of visibility to a commenter the author doesn’t really want to boost just because they are commenting on a popular post, which is a real issue, and could be an issue here, though I am not that worried about it on the margin).
I don’t know what you mean by “mentioned in fully expanded”. Like, expand the full post text? That would be terrible, most of the posts in mentioned in are not very good (they don’t have any filter), and it would completely kill comments on popular posts.
In order to create a sense of place you need a page transition, or something similarly substantial. Making the links more prominent seems fine, but you clearly can’t just put the content expanded inline, what distinguishes it from normal comments at that point?
Posts tend to be way longer than comments and you also need to click to read the post and then unclick and click again to read another post thay mentions the post you’re on. Using the “mentioned in” section has therefore way higher expected effort.
I rarely use it myself and when I do it’s mostly either when a post looks particularly interesting for some reason or when I’m deliberately descending down a rabbit hole and want to sample from the entire network of LW discussions on the topic.
Is this a deeply considered view? It’s very confusing to me and it threatens something I value very highly (wei dai engaging with the alignment community on LW). What if you simply make only short form or top level posts from here on, for example? I only bring this up to dodge the thing that seems important to you; I remain only able to evaluate your view in far mode, it’s so completely unlike how I think about posts. The thing I value is output from wei dai, I’m not attached to that output being in the form of reply comments, especially if lw mods have a feature you see as childish and I see as irritating but just an ordinary online annoying thing. Like, less wrong is much less annoying than most other sites I post on. If it must maintain standards higher than that to retain you, then that seems like a network connectivity loss that will be a much bigger deal than the split induced by the bad feature?
I’m guessing the problem is the implied cultural generators of the superficial issues, rather than the issues themselves. Given an unwillingness to wage a campaign against these generators and a felt intolerance of their menacing influence, the shallowness of the direct issues is not a crux.
I took a look at the moderation log page and didn’t see any user-to-user blocks currently active on you (I didn’t dig through the history, there may be one that previously existed and then was dropped, also the feature might be buggy.) I view the user-to-user ban feature as basically analogous to blocking on twitter, and is valuable for approximately the same reasons that being able to block people on twitter is valuable. My current belief is that it’s not a problem in practice because it’s barely ever used. If it got more usage, we would probably think more about whether it’s net-good.
If it got more usage, we would probably think more about whether it’s net-good.
Like with laws, the impact of a thing can often be mostly about what takes place in counterfactuals, or about the hypothetical underlying norms/virtues evidenced by it. What happens in actuality (outside of people’s heads) is not a reliable way to measure impact, so when people bring up something as an issue, that should count for a lot even on its own. What to do about it (if anything) can be much more complicated, but the rule of thumb of going from direct usage in actuality is invalid.
but the rule of thumb of going from direct usage in actuality is invalid.
Clearly whether it’s actually being used in concerning ways is a crucial determinant. I agree you need to adjust for chilling effects, but obviously whenever you are worried about a law like this, you should look at whether it is ever actually ever enforced in a relevant way, and at what frequency.
It’s tricky to get calibrated on chilling effects multipliers, but that doesn’t make looking at direct usage invalid. It’s still the first place I would start.
(I had banned Wei from commenting on my posts following an exchange in the comments of one of my posts. After a short period, a couple days I think, I unbanned him, but stated “But I reserve the normative right to block trolling.”.)
Oh man, I find your hobby-horse-ish takes helpful, but I just quietly upvote rather than saying so every time. I think you’re just experiencing the general phenomenon where people only comment when they have criticism. I think it would be correct to pay more attention to karma than replies as an indicator of whether the community appreciates a comment; I hope you’re psychologically able to do so.
Maybe you’re not aware that authors can unilaterally ban other LWers from commenting on their posts (with no specific site-wide guidelines AFAIK), I was banned once for “charging my hobby horse” already, and the mods were apparently ok with it?
Not a crux, way more people appreciate your contributions? I don’t understand what’s going on in your head. Getting criticized on the internet is unfun but I expected (1) you could deal with it and (2) you recognize that people really appreciate your contributions on net.
A site that allows authors to filter their critics using arbitrary excuses does not meet my epistemic standards, which further reduces my motivations for “dealing with it”. More specifically, I can foresee that in the future I’ll be banned by more authors, and then I’ll have to make a choice of remaining on the site and potentially misleading people (who could reasonably update positively on some post that is of high interest to me by the absence of my criticism on it, without knowing that I’ve been banned by its author), or leaving the site altogether.
I will again remind people that at the bottom of every post, above the comment section, is the “Mentioned In” section, in which all posts that link to a post get displayed in karma order.
You cannot be banned from being listed in the “Mentioned In” section. Yes, this is a somewhat different level of visibility than being in the comments, but I still don’t see any super principled distinction for why this isn’t an adequate substitute for being able to comment on a post. It’s above the comment section! (Yes, a bit smaller, but not by that much, and making a post is higher effort than a comment, but these really don’t seem like dominating chilling effects)
This isn’t currently the case, mostly because there hasn’t been much demand and it’s just a bit of a pain to get right, but if there is an issue with the post format, or the experience of making a top level post (as opposed to a quick take), I think adding quick takes to the “Mentioned In” is something I would be happy to do if that would make you happier.
As a data point, I use LW a lot and wasn’t aware of the “Mentioned In” section. And I think the fact that it’s a different level of visibility than being in the comments actually drops readership by a quite large factor (I’d guess more than 10).
If I’m right, then—insofar as Wei is unhappy about the fact that he can’t respond in a way that gets lots of views—I don’t think the “Mentioned In” section adequately addresses this.
(This comment isn’t meant as an endorsement of the comment from Wei that you’re replying to.)
I also did not know (or remember?) that this existed.
For me I think this is a specific case of general “special section blindness”. Reading enough bad textbooks and growing up with ads everywhere, I am effectively blind to anything in a “special” section.
Maybe “Mentioned in” posts could each appear as their own generated comment containing just the title as a link? On the other side of the equation, authors having the ability to detach a thread into a linked shortform when it’s not very relevant to their post without actually deleting/hiding its existence seems like an improvement
I would take bets against “more than 10” by almost any metric, though IDK, if it turns out to be a crux for any of the age-old moderation disputes to just increase visibility of the mentioned-at section, that also seems probably like a thing we can figure out how to do.
Interesting, I update a lot on you saying that you’d take best against “more than 10”—though I’m surprised.
I would guess that, if one were to look at all recent times that someone has finished reading a post for which there was at least one comment and at least one “mentioned in” post:
Slightly over half of the time, the person then checked out the comments.
The person clicked on a “Mentioned In” post less than 5% of the time.
Curious which of these is/are the crux.
The delay between a likely critical comment and a likely critical post is probably quite substantial as well, which I have to imagine also makes a large impact on visibility.
That effect is definitely large! If we include that one it would easily be 10x, but I was assuming some metric where we control for this.
Why the hell would you control for that? Isn’t the whole issue at stake the allocation of actual attention?
What? Of course you would want to control for effort and delay. If you leave a comment on a post a week after it was published because the comment took a while to write, then it will of course also get less visibility.
Of course it will… which means that if that’s the only option, then the criticism will get much less attention in the context of the original post.
Sure, someone could quickly write a comment-tier post, but there is a strong cultural norm (reinforced by the existence of shortform, which strongly suggests that posts should take more effort) against doing such a thing — and going against these sorts of norms impacts how well it is received too. Furthermore, you also need to apply more skill to ensuring a commensurate degree of visibility (e.g. by picking a compelling title). I would expect the typical reaction to be anemic, relative to the same post as a comment.
If your goal is to have your criticism read by the people who saw the original thing, I don’t see how this isn’t a significant effect that you would want to consider.
I don’t understand. Like, writing a high-quality thing takes time. Yes, comments are encouraged to be lower-effort, but on the margin I want people to write more critique posts, not more comments, and this clearly is still very important noise in the thing we are trying to measure. Of course you need to do at least some controlling for effort and delay, though I agree how much is tricky (like, there are extra costs, but clearly posting immediately also just gives you a random boost that is anti-correlated with quality).
I disagree? Making a top-level post a week later would likely create vastly more visibility than leaving a high-effort comment with a shorter delay, because posts get promoted on their own, but comments only get promoted in the context of the post. Posts get a lot more visibility than comments on this site (for good reason, they are usually more valuable to read, and stand more on their own).
And critique posts are extremely popular on the site. A good chunk of the highest karma posts on the site are critique posts. This part honestly seems clearly wrong to me. I would take bets at very high odds that if Wei Dai left a slightly polished version of his comment on Richard’s post as a top-level post, then it would get much more visibility and karma than it had as a comment.
I am not saying to not consider it! You are the person saying you shouldn’t control for this at all, which seems absurd to me. Obviously we both agree that “recency of publication” is a confounder you want to control for somehow, since it gives you a substantial boost orthogonal to what we are trying to measure here. We can start arguing about the right methodology for controlling for that, but it’s obviously a big effect.
I’m saying it’s not orthogonal to what I’m interested in measuring here, which is the impact of this policy on the visibility of critique. I’ll grant that’s not exactly what Eric seems to be considering in the comment above; sorry for the miscommunication.
Those critique posts seem to mainly be by popular authors, and quite long. I believe they additionally are mainly responses to posts that were themselves unusually popular, which is important because it means the author can assume a sort of common knowledge that a critique of a mid-level post would otherwise have to establish. I agree that Wei Dai could have achieved that, but that you are significantly underestimating the costs to him of doing so. And I’m also concerned about the case where the author does not have as strong of a reputation, of course.
Cool, yeah, I was just saying you will have to adjust somehow for timeliness and effort from the baseline that Eric was proposing.
I haven’t made any statements about the cost. I think the cost is non-trivial, but it feels like the kind of thing that seems well in-line with other nudges and affordance-shaping we do on the site. In as much as there is a really crucial misunderstanding that people are forming, where they are using Wei’s absence of a response as evidence that a thing is robust or valid or good, then making a post allows you to address that.
Yes, the cost is somewhat higher than with a high-effort comment, but it just seems like an adequate solution to me, the same way that comments seem like an adequate solution to me, and I don’t need a publicly visible “I disendorse this” button at the bottom of each post that provides a minimum-effort way of expressing your opinion on something.
Curious what metrics you’d be happy to use to operationalize such a bet.
Isn’t chilling effects and/or making unwanted-by-authors replies less visible (while looking at a post) the whole point of allowing author moderation in the first place? Thought experiment: what if instead of just showing links in “mentioned in” (thus requiring the “trivial inconvenience” of expanding the section then clicking on the link), you made “mentioned in” fully expanded by default, and inlined any quick takes (and their reply threads) that would otherwise be linked?
I think your worry about negative replies not being visible enough corresponds to a real thing. On many sites (especially newspaper-style sites) I wind up feeling like it’s outright hazardous to read an article without checking some comments first, because so often the top comment is a refutation or major recontextualization.
One feature we have that might nto have been on your radar in this context: If a comment is above a karma threshold and it exactly blockquotes something inside the post, we show a comment icon in the margin next to the text that it quoted, which you can hover over to see the comment. When I built this feature, one of the goals I had in mind was “if the post is bad, you get a chance to see the pushback early”. (The karma threshold, and the unobtrusive presentation, are a balance we deliberately struck between allowing people to read posts without always getting sidetracked, and surfacing pushback.)
No, not quite. A major goal is to have any place where the author can shape the moderation norms and do anything with the discussion on the site on purpose. I feel like we discussed this a few times in the past. (There is also the component of not wanting to automatically give high levels of visibility to a commenter the author doesn’t really want to boost just because they are commenting on a popular post, which is a real issue, and could be an issue here, though I am not that worried about it on the margin).
I don’t know what you mean by “mentioned in fully expanded”. Like, expand the full post text? That would be terrible, most of the posts in mentioned in are not very good (they don’t have any filter), and it would completely kill comments on popular posts.
In order to create a sense of place you need a page transition, or something similarly substantial. Making the links more prominent seems fine, but you clearly can’t just put the content expanded inline, what distinguishes it from normal comments at that point?
Posts tend to be way longer than comments and you also need to click to read the post and then unclick and click again to read another post thay mentions the post you’re on. Using the “mentioned in” section has therefore way higher expected effort.
I rarely use it myself and when I do it’s mostly either when a post looks particularly interesting for some reason or when I’m deliberately descending down a rabbit hole and want to sample from the entire network of LW discussions on the topic.
Is this a deeply considered view? It’s very confusing to me and it threatens something I value very highly (wei dai engaging with the alignment community on LW). What if you simply make only short form or top level posts from here on, for example? I only bring this up to dodge the thing that seems important to you; I remain only able to evaluate your view in far mode, it’s so completely unlike how I think about posts. The thing I value is output from wei dai, I’m not attached to that output being in the form of reply comments, especially if lw mods have a feature you see as childish and I see as irritating but just an ordinary online annoying thing. Like, less wrong is much less annoying than most other sites I post on. If it must maintain standards higher than that to retain you, then that seems like a network connectivity loss that will be a much bigger deal than the split induced by the bad feature?
I’m guessing the problem is the implied cultural generators of the superficial issues, rather than the issues themselves. Given an unwillingness to wage a campaign against these generators and a felt intolerance of their menacing influence, the shallowness of the direct issues is not a crux.
I took a look at the moderation log page and didn’t see any user-to-user blocks currently active on you (I didn’t dig through the history, there may be one that previously existed and then was dropped, also the feature might be buggy.) I view the user-to-user ban feature as basically analogous to blocking on twitter, and is valuable for approximately the same reasons that being able to block people on twitter is valuable. My current belief is that it’s not a problem in practice because it’s barely ever used. If it got more usage, we would probably think more about whether it’s net-good.
Like with laws, the impact of a thing can often be mostly about what takes place in counterfactuals, or about the hypothetical underlying norms/virtues evidenced by it. What happens in actuality (outside of people’s heads) is not a reliable way to measure impact, so when people bring up something as an issue, that should count for a lot even on its own. What to do about it (if anything) can be much more complicated, but the rule of thumb of going from direct usage in actuality is invalid.
Clearly whether it’s actually being used in concerning ways is a crucial determinant. I agree you need to adjust for chilling effects, but obviously whenever you are worried about a law like this, you should look at whether it is ever actually ever enforced in a relevant way, and at what frequency.
It’s tricky to get calibrated on chilling effects multipliers, but that doesn’t make looking at direct usage invalid. It’s still the first place I would start.
(For other readers: the reply is at this link due to a comment-deletion blip that got reverted; the framing crux of what I was getting at in the above comment is Yudkowsky’s characterization of enforcement as “the sort of force that’s meant to be predictable, predicted, avoidable, and avoided”.)
(I had banned Wei from commenting on my posts following an exchange in the comments of one of my posts. After a short period, a couple days I think, I unbanned him, but stated “But I reserve the normative right to block trolling.”.)