Step 1. Make it easy and common to take a conversation private if someone is feeling annoyed/threatened/angry/etc
Do people actually agree to offers to do this, if they are not already personally acquainted with their interlocutor? My experience is that they do not.
How do you propose to deal with people refusing or ignoring offers to take a conversation private?
This isn’t intended as a “policy to be enforced” but as “a suggestion for people to try, that will improve communication on the margins.” For the foreseeable future, if people refuse to take something private to hash it out, then… well, you deal with demon threads the normal way: not very well, and occassionally warning/moderating commenters that explicitly cross clearly defined lines.
It is worth noting that many of the demon threads that seemed most disruptive to me over the past 2 years were between people who knew each other (i.e. where not just a few days of people’s time, but longterm reputation of people, organizations or major projects were at stake), so even if it only resulted in people who knew each other resolving things privately, that still seems like a win to me.
My guess/hope is that we see a trend like:
Near Future—This is something people do when they either know each other, or pretty well intentioned. They try to do it publicly enough that it starts occurring to people as an option.
Medium Future—It reaches a saturation point of “enough people in the rationalsphere are doing this sort of thing that it becomes a salient option for people who don’t know each other, and people who don’t know each other but assume they’re talking in reasonably good faith peel off privately before a things start getting heated and angry (so they aren’t recovering from a bitter conversation, they’re just proactively side-stepping a bad one)
(It’s worth noting that in Qiaochu and my case, it’s not that I thought there was risk of us getting into a heated dispute, so much as risk of a public discussion drawing in people with strong opinions about past social drama)
Longer term—I don’t really expect it to progress past the medium-term stage, but if this idea succeeded at the 90+ percentile, then eventually, there’d be enough of a cultural expectation in the rationalsphere that even people who don’t know each other well feel obligated to at least try this sort of thing in good faith. (An obvious failure mode would be people feel obligated to go through the motions without good faith, which may be bad)
(If people try this and it seems like it’s actually helping, it may be practical to build tools to facilitate it. i.e. make it a seamless process to take a set of comments private, and then if-and-only-if both people agree on a summary comment, share the summary comment that appears in the original thread. Some variation of this might make sense even if the original idea needed tweaking)
This isn’t intended as a “policy to be enforced” but as “a suggestion for people to try, that will improve communication on the margins.”
Sure, I get that. When I asked how you propose to deal with it, I meant “how do you, as proponent of this plan, propose that anyone who wishes to adopt your plan deal with this” (rather than “how do you you, as an admin of LW, plan to in fact deal with it”).
Edit: I wrote a longer comment (as an edit to this one), but something went wrong and it got lost. Sorry. I’ll try to re-create it later.
I’d be happy to take this to another forum (email, IRC, the comments section of my blog—whatever you prefer). If you’re interested, feel free to email me at myfirstname@myfullname.net
… I’m not sure how I could possibly be construed as not doing that, or as doing anything else. Your comment baffles me… which, of course, seems to point to another pitfall of Raemon’s proposal!
I saw what you said, it’s the motive I’m asking about. That is, did you suggest this with the goal of making the discussion more productive and less demonic? That’s not what it looked like. I got the impression that you disliked LW for some reason, and I never figured out what “moderation policy” had to do with it. It seemed pointless and a pain to do, so I didn’t bother.
Regardless, if you do want to try applying “step 1”, I think you should first clearly state why you think this would be a good idea, and second, take a minute to set up some sort of place for the discussion to continue (e.g. if you have a blog, you could link to it, create a new thread in it, write your reply, etc).
But, more importantly, I still have no idea how “step 1” is supposed to help with anything.
Yes, you’re right that it would be better (for you) if I had first made a blog post, etc., and linked to it… of course, that takes effort from me, expended with no idea if it will be justified (what if you ignore my overture?). And this seems to generalize: of the two participants, one or both must individually expend effort to “take the conversation private”, but what incentive is there to do so, when one does not know if one’s interlocutor will take up the offer?
This would seem to suggest that a “private chat” feature—easy to use, easy to transition to and from, and requiring no setup effort—would, if added to LW2, be beneficial for such purposes. (Even something so simple as an embedded IRC chat frame would suffice.) A smoothly working (and reliable, etc.) private messaging system might also be helpful (though perhaps less so).
Of course, this still leaves the problem you allude to at the end—that it’s not clear how taking a conversation private helps anything. Perhaps lowering the barriers to doing so might alleviate this as well—if it takes little effort, why not try it?—but perhaps not.
As for what my motive was—I don’t want to turn this thread into a debate on LW moderation policy, so I won’t comment much on the matter, except to say that yes, I certainly hoped that a discussion elsewhere might be more productive, for various reasons (I don’t endorse—and don’t really understand—the term ‘demonic’, so no comment there).
of course, that takes effort from me, expended with no idea if it will be justified (what if you ignore my overture?)
That seems like an easy problem. Say “I think it would be <good> to take this discussion private. What do you think? If you agree, I’ll set up a <place>”.
private chat
Now that I think about it, this might be a good idea—switching from a conversation where we exchange multiple paragraphs every few hours into a conversation where we exchange short sentences in real time. Of course, we can’t expect LW to implement that sort of thing when it has dubious value. I wonder if a private chat might be easy to set up elsewhere.
There’s a LW Slack server and an LW Discord server that both can be used. Discord would be preferable if the goal is to leave a permanent record given that this isn’t possible with free Slack accounts.
I wonder if a private chat might be easy to set up elsewhere.
I already have a personal IRC server with a dedicated webchat interface server, so yes, for me, it is very easy. I think that the next time something like this comes up, I will simply link to it.
Of course, we can’t expect LW to implement that sort of thing when it has dubious value.
To be honest, it would be nigh-trivial to do so: simply embed a Freenode webchat widget. It’s literally one line of code.
Do you want to try continuing our utility discussion that way and see if it helps? There may be timezone issues, I’m in europe, I’ll be available about 8 hours from now, for maybe 4 hours in the evening.
I would be willing to try it, certainly. I am on EST, so that time of day is not very convenient for me… but not impossible. I see you wrote this several days ago, so let me know if this offer still stands, and what time would be convenient—though note that I will be out most of the day this weekend, so it would have to be today (Friday), or next week (Monday+).
Do people actually agree to offers to do this, if they are not already personally acquainted with their interlocutor? My experience is that they do not.
How do you propose to deal with people refusing or ignoring offers to take a conversation private?
This isn’t intended as a “policy to be enforced” but as “a suggestion for people to try, that will improve communication on the margins.” For the foreseeable future, if people refuse to take something private to hash it out, then… well, you deal with demon threads the normal way: not very well, and occassionally warning/moderating commenters that explicitly cross clearly defined lines.
It is worth noting that many of the demon threads that seemed most disruptive to me over the past 2 years were between people who knew each other (i.e. where not just a few days of people’s time, but longterm reputation of people, organizations or major projects were at stake), so even if it only resulted in people who knew each other resolving things privately, that still seems like a win to me.
My guess/hope is that we see a trend like:
Near Future—This is something people do when they either know each other, or pretty well intentioned. They try to do it publicly enough that it starts occurring to people as an option.
Medium Future—It reaches a saturation point of “enough people in the rationalsphere are doing this sort of thing that it becomes a salient option for people who don’t know each other, and people who don’t know each other but assume they’re talking in reasonably good faith peel off privately before a things start getting heated and angry (so they aren’t recovering from a bitter conversation, they’re just proactively side-stepping a bad one)
(It’s worth noting that in Qiaochu and my case, it’s not that I thought there was risk of us getting into a heated dispute, so much as risk of a public discussion drawing in people with strong opinions about past social drama)
Longer term—I don’t really expect it to progress past the medium-term stage, but if this idea succeeded at the 90+ percentile, then eventually, there’d be enough of a cultural expectation in the rationalsphere that even people who don’t know each other well feel obligated to at least try this sort of thing in good faith. (An obvious failure mode would be people feel obligated to go through the motions without good faith, which may be bad)
(If people try this and it seems like it’s actually helping, it may be practical to build tools to facilitate it. i.e. make it a seamless process to take a set of comments private, and then if-and-only-if both people agree on a summary comment, share the summary comment that appears in the original thread. Some variation of this might make sense even if the original idea needed tweaking)
Sure, I get that. When I asked how you propose to deal with it, I meant “how do you, as proponent of this plan, propose that anyone who wishes to adopt your plan deal with this” (rather than “how do you you, as an admin of LW, plan to in fact deal with it”).
Edit: I wrote a longer comment (as an edit to this one), but something went wrong and it got lost. Sorry. I’ll try to re-create it later.
(I have a mediumish comment I thought I had posted in response to this, apologies for apparently not actually doing that)
Wait, is that what you were doing in our utlity discussion a while back?
Given that I literally said
… I’m not sure how I could possibly be construed as not doing that, or as doing anything else. Your comment baffles me… which, of course, seems to point to another pitfall of Raemon’s proposal!
I saw what you said, it’s the motive I’m asking about. That is, did you suggest this with the goal of making the discussion more productive and less demonic? That’s not what it looked like. I got the impression that you disliked LW for some reason, and I never figured out what “moderation policy” had to do with it. It seemed pointless and a pain to do, so I didn’t bother.
Regardless, if you do want to try applying “step 1”, I think you should first clearly state why you think this would be a good idea, and second, take a minute to set up some sort of place for the discussion to continue (e.g. if you have a blog, you could link to it, create a new thread in it, write your reply, etc).
But, more importantly, I still have no idea how “step 1” is supposed to help with anything.
Ah, I understand.
Yes, you’re right that it would be better (for you) if I had first made a blog post, etc., and linked to it… of course, that takes effort from me, expended with no idea if it will be justified (what if you ignore my overture?). And this seems to generalize: of the two participants, one or both must individually expend effort to “take the conversation private”, but what incentive is there to do so, when one does not know if one’s interlocutor will take up the offer?
This would seem to suggest that a “private chat” feature—easy to use, easy to transition to and from, and requiring no setup effort—would, if added to LW2, be beneficial for such purposes. (Even something so simple as an embedded IRC chat frame would suffice.) A smoothly working (and reliable, etc.) private messaging system might also be helpful (though perhaps less so).
Of course, this still leaves the problem you allude to at the end—that it’s not clear how taking a conversation private helps anything. Perhaps lowering the barriers to doing so might alleviate this as well—if it takes little effort, why not try it?—but perhaps not.
As for what my motive was—I don’t want to turn this thread into a debate on LW moderation policy, so I won’t comment much on the matter, except to say that yes, I certainly hoped that a discussion elsewhere might be more productive, for various reasons (I don’t endorse—and don’t really understand—the term ‘demonic’, so no comment there).
That seems like an easy problem. Say “I think it would be <good> to take this discussion private. What do you think? If you agree, I’ll set up a <place>”.
Now that I think about it, this might be a good idea—switching from a conversation where we exchange multiple paragraphs every few hours into a conversation where we exchange short sentences in real time. Of course, we can’t expect LW to implement that sort of thing when it has dubious value. I wonder if a private chat might be easy to set up elsewhere.
There’s a LW Slack server and an LW Discord server that both can be used. Discord would be preferable if the goal is to leave a permanent record given that this isn’t possible with free Slack accounts.
Unfortunately, both Discord and Slack are terrible, terrible chat platforms (Slack is tremendously worse, but Discord is also nigh-intolerable).
Of course, not everyone feels this way. But I certainly would never use either platform.
I already have a personal IRC server with a dedicated webchat interface server, so yes, for me, it is very easy. I think that the next time something like this comes up, I will simply link to it.
To be honest, it would be nigh-trivial to do so: simply embed a Freenode webchat widget. It’s literally one line of code.
The KiwiIRC widget is also one line of code. It’s a lot nicer than Freenode’s own webchat system, but it can still be used with Freenode.
Good point! KiwiIRC is pretty solid as these things go.
Do you want to try continuing our utility discussion that way and see if it helps? There may be timezone issues, I’m in europe, I’ll be available about 8 hours from now, for maybe 4 hours in the evening.
My apologies, I only just saw this comment!
I would be willing to try it, certainly. I am on EST, so that time of day is not very convenient for me… but not impossible. I see you wrote this several days ago, so let me know if this offer still stands, and what time would be convenient—though note that I will be out most of the day this weekend, so it would have to be today (Friday), or next week (Monday+).
The place is chat.myfullname.net.
Ok. To clarify the time, (in EST) I should be mostly available from 10AM to 3PM on weekdays and 3AM to 3PM on weekends.
I will be there at noon EST on Monday, then.