I understand that you don’t! But almost everyone else who I do think has those attributes does not have those criteria. Like, Scott Alexander routinely bans people from ACX, even Said bans people from datasecretslox. I am also confident that the only reason why you would not ban people here on LW, is because the moderators are toiling for like 2 hours a day to filter out the people obviously ill-suited for LessWrong.
Sidechannel note: Said wishes it to be known that he neither bans people from DSL nor customarily has the right to, the task being delegated to moderators rather than the sysop. ( https://share.obormot.net/textfiles/MINHjLX7 )
Sure! I was including “setting up a system that bans other people” in my definition here. I am not that familiar with how DSL works, but given that it bans people, and it was set up by Said, felt confident that thereby somehow Said chose to build a system that does ban people.
Though if Said opposes DSL banning people (and he thinks the moderators are making a mistake when doing so) then I would want to be corrected!
I think he just objected to the phrasing. I do think “set up a system where people can be banned by others whom Said does not instruct on who to ban” is a stretch for “Said bans people from DSL.”
I have generally found Said to mean the things he says quite literally and to expect others to do so as well. It’s painful to read a conversation where one person keeps assigning subtext to another who quite clearly never intended to put it there.
Another reason for not wanting to moderate is that I’ve never regretted not moderating on LW, nor can recall any instances where some discussion of my post might have gone much better if I had. For example sometimes a discussion goes off in a direction that I’m not interested in, but I just ignore it and let it develop however the participants want. Or if someone is being dumb or does something wrong, I just downvote it and ignore it (maybe give an explanation if I feel like it). I can’t recall anything particularly bad happening as a result of these decisions.
If the benefits of author moderation are as low as they seem to me from my own experience, I just can’t imagine it being worth the costs. Am I just very lucky, or what?
Did Scott or Said ban people on LW when they were here? If not, then I would amend that part to say that on a platform like LW with moderators doing a reasonable job pre-filtering people, people like me don’t feel a need or desire to ban. Which doesn’t seem to change my point much. If yes, then it would appear that I overgeneralized from my own example.
I don’t know about Scott. Him being personally active on the site was long before my tenure as admin, and I am not even fully sure how moderation or deletion at the time worked.
I don’t think Said ever banned anyone, though he also wrote only a very small number of top-level posts, so there wasn’t much opportunity. My guess is he wouldn’t have even if he had been writing a lot of top-level posts.
More substantively, I think my feelings and policies are fundamentally based on a (near) symmetry between the author and commenter. If they are both basically LW users in good standing, why should the author get so much more power in a conflict/disagreement.[1] So this doesn’t apply to moderating/filtering out users who are just unsuitable for LW or one’s own site.
I mean I understand you have your reasons, but it doesn’t remove the unfairness. Like if in a lawsuit for some reason a disinterested judge can’t be found, and the only option is to let a friend of the plaintiff be the judge, that “reason” is not going to remove the unfairness.
I understand that you don’t! But almost everyone else who I do think has those attributes does not have those criteria. Like, Scott Alexander routinely bans people from ACX, even Said bans people from datasecretslox. I am also confident that the only reason why you would not ban people here on LW, is because the moderators are toiling for like 2 hours a day to filter out the people obviously ill-suited for LessWrong.
Sidechannel note: Said wishes it to be known that he neither bans people from DSL nor customarily has the right to, the task being delegated to moderators rather than the sysop. ( https://share.obormot.net/textfiles/MINHjLX7 )
Sure! I was including “setting up a system that bans other people” in my definition here. I am not that familiar with how DSL works, but given that it bans people, and it was set up by Said, felt confident that thereby somehow Said chose to build a system that does ban people.
Though if Said opposes DSL banning people (and he thinks the moderators are making a mistake when doing so) then I would want to be corrected!
I think he just objected to the phrasing. I do think “set up a system where people can be banned by others whom Said does not instruct on who to ban” is a stretch for “Said bans people from DSL.”
I have generally found Said to mean the things he says quite literally and to expect others to do so as well. It’s painful to read a conversation where one person keeps assigning subtext to another who quite clearly never intended to put it there.
Another reason for not wanting to moderate is that I’ve never regretted not moderating on LW, nor can recall any instances where some discussion of my post might have gone much better if I had. For example sometimes a discussion goes off in a direction that I’m not interested in, but I just ignore it and let it develop however the participants want. Or if someone is being dumb or does something wrong, I just downvote it and ignore it (maybe give an explanation if I feel like it). I can’t recall anything particularly bad happening as a result of these decisions.
If the benefits of author moderation are as low as they seem to me from my own experience, I just can’t imagine it being worth the costs. Am I just very lucky, or what?
Did Scott or Said ban people on LW when they were here? If not, then I would amend that part to say that on a platform like LW with moderators doing a reasonable job pre-filtering people, people like me don’t feel a need or desire to ban. Which doesn’t seem to change my point much. If yes, then it would appear that I overgeneralized from my own example.
I don’t know about Scott. Him being personally active on the site was long before my tenure as admin, and I am not even fully sure how moderation or deletion at the time worked.
I don’t think Said ever banned anyone, though he also wrote only a very small number of top-level posts, so there wasn’t much opportunity. My guess is he wouldn’t have even if he had been writing a lot of top-level posts.
More substantively, I think my feelings and policies are fundamentally based on a (near) symmetry between the author and commenter. If they are both basically LW users in good standing, why should the author get so much more power in a conflict/disagreement.[1] So this doesn’t apply to moderating/filtering out users who are just unsuitable for LW or one’s own site.
I mean I understand you have your reasons, but it doesn’t remove the unfairness. Like if in a lawsuit for some reason a disinterested judge can’t be found, and the only option is to let a friend of the plaintiff be the judge, that “reason” is not going to remove the unfairness.
Ok thanks, I put in an edit to note your point.