Personal opinion: it’s fine and good for the mods to look at all available evidence when making these calls, including votes and vote patterns. If someone is borderline, I’d rather they be judged based on all available info about them, and I think the more data the mods look at more closely, the more accurate and precise their judgments will be.
I’m not particularly worried about a moderator being incorrectly “biased” from observing a low-quality draft or a suspect referral; I trust the mods to be capable of making roughly accurate Bayesian updates based on those observations.
I also don’t think there’s a particularly strong expectation or implicit promise about privacy (w.r.t mods; of course I don’t expect anyone’s votes or drafts to be leaked to the public...) especially for new / borderline users.
Separately, I feel like the precise policies and issues here are not worth sweating too much, for the mods / LW team. I think y’all are doing a great job overall, and it’s OK if the moderation policy towards new users is a bit adhoc / case-by-case. In particular, I don’t expect anything in the neighborhood of current moderation policies / rate-limiting / privacy violations currently implemented or being discussed to have any noticeable negative effects, on me personally or on most users. (In particular, I disagree pretty strongly with the hypothesis in e.g. this comment; I don’t expect rate limits or any other moderation rules / actions to have any impact whatsoever on my own posting / commenting behavior, and I don’t give them any thought when posting or commenting myself. I suspect the same is true for most other users, who are either unaware of them or don’t care / don’t notice.)
Personal opinion: it’s fine and good for the mods to look at all available evidence when making these calls, including votes and vote patterns. If someone is borderline, I’d rather they be judged based on all available info about them, and I think the more data the mods look at more closely, the more accurate and precise their judgments will be.
I’m not particularly worried about a moderator being incorrectly “biased” from observing a low-quality draft or a suspect referral; I trust the mods to be capable of making roughly accurate Bayesian updates based on those observations.
I also don’t think there’s a particularly strong expectation or implicit promise about privacy (w.r.t mods; of course I don’t expect anyone’s votes or drafts to be leaked to the public...) especially for new / borderline users.
Separately, I feel like the precise policies and issues here are not worth sweating too much, for the mods / LW team. I think y’all are doing a great job overall, and it’s OK if the moderation policy towards new users is a bit adhoc / case-by-case. In particular, I don’t expect anything in the neighborhood of current moderation policies / rate-limiting / privacy violations currently implemented or being discussed to have any noticeable negative effects, on me personally or on most users. (In particular, I disagree pretty strongly with the hypothesis in e.g. this comment; I don’t expect rate limits or any other moderation rules / actions to have any impact whatsoever on my own posting / commenting behavior, and I don’t give them any thought when posting or commenting myself. I suspect the same is true for most other users, who are either unaware of them or don’t care / don’t notice.)