turns out there are plenty of other mindkillers and banning one doesn’t make the other ones go away
I don’t understand this argument. The claim was never that banning politics would drive out most or all mindkill; just that it would drive out politics-related mindkill and that this was worth the cost.
LW discouraged politics, but didn’t ban it in any consistent way. Consequences included David Gerard’s hate campaign, Eugine_Nier’s long-running sockpuppet voting abuses, and (as far as I can tell mostly false) associations in the public mind with neoreactionaries.
We can also assess our ability to manage what happens when a person is being mindkilled in a comment thread; if we can’t handle it in a political discussion then we probably can’t handle it elsewhere either.
Plenty of political threads already exist in the LW archives. We do have different commenters and a different karma system now (though if the site migrates, the commenter base might return more to what it used to be), so maybe that’s not a good reason not to have another such thread.
I do worry that many harms from political mindkill would be subtle. Political discussion might draw in commenters with different interests from the site, might be divisive in that it creates awareness of people being on different “sides”, might create grudges even if we succeed at downvoting needless hostility, and would take up people’s time and attention. None of those would necessarily be visible in a train wreck kind of way.
The main point I want to make is that politics is an area where we already go in expecting mindkilling to happen, so it’s a good opportunity for us to test our ability to handle it. If it goes poorly then we should be suspicious that similar things are going on in non-politics discussions as well. Also I phrased it as running an experiment for a reason; if it goes really poorly then that’s our experimental result.
I don’t understand this argument. The claim was never that banning politics would drive out most or all mindkill; just that it would drive out politics-related mindkill and that this was worth the cost.
LW discouraged politics, but didn’t ban it in any consistent way. Consequences included David Gerard’s hate campaign, Eugine_Nier’s long-running sockpuppet voting abuses, and (as far as I can tell mostly false) associations in the public mind with neoreactionaries.
Plenty of political threads already exist in the LW archives. We do have different commenters and a different karma system now (though if the site migrates, the commenter base might return more to what it used to be), so maybe that’s not a good reason not to have another such thread.
I do worry that many harms from political mindkill would be subtle. Political discussion might draw in commenters with different interests from the site, might be divisive in that it creates awareness of people being on different “sides”, might create grudges even if we succeed at downvoting needless hostility, and would take up people’s time and attention. None of those would necessarily be visible in a train wreck kind of way.
The main point I want to make is that politics is an area where we already go in expecting mindkilling to happen, so it’s a good opportunity for us to test our ability to handle it. If it goes poorly then we should be suspicious that similar things are going on in non-politics discussions as well. Also I phrased it as running an experiment for a reason; if it goes really poorly then that’s our experimental result.