All proposals dealing with this imply multiple conversations and people having to model different states of knowledge in others, unless those commenters are just silenced altogether
No, what are you talking about? The current situation, where people can make new top level posts, which get shown below the post itself via the pingback system, does not involve any asymmetric states of knowledge?
Indeed, there are lots of ways to achieve this without requiring asymmetric states of knowledge. Having the two comment sections, with one marked as “off-topic” or something like that also doesn’t require any asymmetric states of knowledge.
seem very reluctant to directly address the concern that people like me have that even great authors are human and likely biased quite strongly
Unmoderated discussion spaces are not generally better than moderated discussion spaces, including on the groupthink dimension! There is no great utopia of discourse that can be achieved simply by withholding moderation tools from people. Bandwidth is limited and cultural coordination is hard and this means that there are harsh tradeoffs to be made about which ideas and perspectives will end up presented.
I am not hesitant to address the claim directly, it is just the case that on LessWrong, practically no banning of anyone ever takes place who wouldn’t also end up being post-banned by the moderators and so de-facto this effect just doesn’t seem real. Yes, maybe there are chilling effects that don’t produce observable effects, which is always important to think about with this kind of stuff, but I don’t currently buy it.
The default thing that happens is when you leave a place unmoderated is just that the conversation gets dominated by whoever has the most time and stamina and social resilience, and the overall resulting diversity of perspectives trends to zero. Post authors are one obvious group to moderate spaces, especially with supervision from site moderators.
There are lots of reasonable things to try here, but a random blanket “I don’t trust post authors to moderate” is simply making an implicit statement that unmoderated spaces are better, because on the margin LW admins don’t have either the authority or the time to moderate everyone’s individual posts. Authors are rightly pissed if we just show up and ban people from their posts, or delete people’s content without checking in with them, and the moderator-author communication channel is sufficiently limited that if you want most posts to be moderated you will need to give the authors some substantial power to do that.
There maybe are better ways of doing it, but I just have really no patience or sympathy for people who appeal to some kind of abstract “I don’t trust people to moderate” intuition. Someone has to moderate if you want anything nice. Maybe you would like the LW admins to moderate much more, though I think the marginal capacity we have for that is kind of limited, and it’s not actually the case that anyone involved in this conversation wouldn’t also go and scream “CENSORSHIP CENSORSHIP CENSORSHIP” if the site admins just banned people directly instead.
Overall the post authors having more moderation control means I will ban fewer people because it means we get to have more of an archipelago. If you want a more centralized culture, we can do that, but I think it will overall mean more people getting banned because I have blunter tools and much much less time than the aggregate of all LessWrong post authors. In my ideal world post authors would ban and delete much more aggressively so that we would actually get an archipelago of cultures and perspectives, but alas, threads like this one, and constant social attacks on anyone who tries to use any moderation tools generally guarantee that nobody wants to deal with the hassle.
And to be clear, I really value the principle of “If anyone says anything wrong on LessWrong, you can find a refutation of it right below the post”, and have always cared about somehow maintaining it. But that principle is just achieved totally fine via the pingback system. I think de-facto again almost no one is banned from almost anywhere else so things end up via the comment system, and I would probably slightly change the UI for the pingback system to work better in contexts like mobile if it became more load-bearing, but it seems to me to work fine as an escape valve that maintains that relationship pretty well.
I do think there is a bit of a hole in that principle for what one should do if someone says something wrong in a comment. I have been kind of into adding comment-level pingbacks for a while, and would be kind of sold that if more banning happens, we should add comment-level pingbacks in some clear way (I would also find the information otherwise valuable).
In the discussion under the original post, some people will have read the reply post, and some won’t (perhaps including the original post’s author, if they banned the commenter in part to avoid having to look at their content), so I have to model this.
Sure, let’s give people moderation tools, but why trust authors with unilateral powers that can’t be overriden by the community, such as banning and moving comments/commenters to a much less visible section?
“Not being able to get the knowledge if you are curious” and “some people have of course read different things” are quite different states of affairs!
I am objecting to the former. I agree that of course any conversation with more than 10 participants will have some variance in who knows what, but that’s not what I am talking about.
It would be easy to give authors a button to let them look at comments that they’ve muted. (This seems so obvious that I didn’t think to mention it, and I’m confused by your inference that authors would have no ability to look at the muted comments at all. At the very least they can simply log out.)
I mean, kind of. The default UI experience of everyone will still differ by a lot (and importantly between people who will meaningfully be “in the same room”) and the framing of the feature as “muted comments” does indeed not communicate that.
The exact degree of how much it would make the dynamics more confusing would end up depending on the saliency of the author UI, but of course commenters will have no idea what the author UI looks like, and so can’t form accurate expectations about how likely the author is to end up making the muted comments visible to them.
Contrast to a situation with two comment sections. The default assumption is that the author and the users just see the exact same thing. There is no uncertainty about whether maybe the author has things by default collapsed whereas the commenters do not. People know what everyone else is seeing, and it’s communicated in the most straightforward way. I don’t even really know what I would do to communicate to commenters what the author sees (it’s not an impossible UI challenge, you can imagine a small screenshot on the tooltip of the “muted icon” that shows what the author UI looks like, but that doesn’t feel to me like a particularly elegant solution).
One of the key things I mean by “the UI looking the same for all users” is maintaining common knowledge about who is likely to read what, or at least the rough process that determines what people read and what context they have. If I give the author some special UI where some things are hidden, then in order to maintain common knowledge I now need to show the users what the author’s UI looks like (and show the author what the users are being shown about the author UI, but this mostly would take care of itself since all authors will be commenters in other contexts).
No, what are you talking about? The current situation, where people can make new top level posts, which get shown below the post itself via the pingback system, does not involve any asymmetric states of knowledge?
Indeed, there are lots of ways to achieve this without requiring asymmetric states of knowledge. Having the two comment sections, with one marked as “off-topic” or something like that also doesn’t require any asymmetric states of knowledge.
Unmoderated discussion spaces are not generally better than moderated discussion spaces, including on the groupthink dimension! There is no great utopia of discourse that can be achieved simply by withholding moderation tools from people. Bandwidth is limited and cultural coordination is hard and this means that there are harsh tradeoffs to be made about which ideas and perspectives will end up presented.
I am not hesitant to address the claim directly, it is just the case that on LessWrong, practically no banning of anyone ever takes place who wouldn’t also end up being post-banned by the moderators and so de-facto this effect just doesn’t seem real. Yes, maybe there are chilling effects that don’t produce observable effects, which is always important to think about with this kind of stuff, but I don’t currently buy it.
The default thing that happens is when you leave a place unmoderated is just that the conversation gets dominated by whoever has the most time and stamina and social resilience, and the overall resulting diversity of perspectives trends to zero. Post authors are one obvious group to moderate spaces, especially with supervision from site moderators.
There are lots of reasonable things to try here, but a random blanket “I don’t trust post authors to moderate” is simply making an implicit statement that unmoderated spaces are better, because on the margin LW admins don’t have either the authority or the time to moderate everyone’s individual posts. Authors are rightly pissed if we just show up and ban people from their posts, or delete people’s content without checking in with them, and the moderator-author communication channel is sufficiently limited that if you want most posts to be moderated you will need to give the authors some substantial power to do that.
There maybe are better ways of doing it, but I just have really no patience or sympathy for people who appeal to some kind of abstract “I don’t trust people to moderate” intuition. Someone has to moderate if you want anything nice. Maybe you would like the LW admins to moderate much more, though I think the marginal capacity we have for that is kind of limited, and it’s not actually the case that anyone involved in this conversation wouldn’t also go and scream “CENSORSHIP CENSORSHIP CENSORSHIP” if the site admins just banned people directly instead.
Overall the post authors having more moderation control means I will ban fewer people because it means we get to have more of an archipelago. If you want a more centralized culture, we can do that, but I think it will overall mean more people getting banned because I have blunter tools and much much less time than the aggregate of all LessWrong post authors. In my ideal world post authors would ban and delete much more aggressively so that we would actually get an archipelago of cultures and perspectives, but alas, threads like this one, and constant social attacks on anyone who tries to use any moderation tools generally guarantee that nobody wants to deal with the hassle.
And to be clear, I really value the principle of “If anyone says anything wrong on LessWrong, you can find a refutation of it right below the post”, and have always cared about somehow maintaining it. But that principle is just achieved totally fine via the pingback system. I think de-facto again almost no one is banned from almost anywhere else so things end up via the comment system, and I would probably slightly change the UI for the pingback system to work better in contexts like mobile if it became more load-bearing, but it seems to me to work fine as an escape valve that maintains that relationship pretty well.
I do think there is a bit of a hole in that principle for what one should do if someone says something wrong in a comment. I have been kind of into adding comment-level pingbacks for a while, and would be kind of sold that if more banning happens, we should add comment-level pingbacks in some clear way (I would also find the information otherwise valuable).
In the discussion under the original post, some people will have read the reply post, and some won’t (perhaps including the original post’s author, if they banned the commenter in part to avoid having to look at their content), so I have to model this.
Sure, let’s give people moderation tools, but why trust authors with unilateral powers that can’t be overriden by the community, such as banning and moving comments/commenters to a much less visible section?
“Not being able to get the knowledge if you are curious” and “some people have of course read different things” are quite different states of affairs!
I am objecting to the former. I agree that of course any conversation with more than 10 participants will have some variance in who knows what, but that’s not what I am talking about.
It would be easy to give authors a button to let them look at comments that they’ve muted. (This seems so obvious that I didn’t think to mention it, and I’m confused by your inference that authors would have no ability to look at the muted comments at all. At the very least they can simply log out.)
I mean, kind of. The default UI experience of everyone will still differ by a lot (and importantly between people who will meaningfully be “in the same room”) and the framing of the feature as “muted comments” does indeed not communicate that.
The exact degree of how much it would make the dynamics more confusing would end up depending on the saliency of the author UI, but of course commenters will have no idea what the author UI looks like, and so can’t form accurate expectations about how likely the author is to end up making the muted comments visible to them.
Contrast to a situation with two comment sections. The default assumption is that the author and the users just see the exact same thing. There is no uncertainty about whether maybe the author has things by default collapsed whereas the commenters do not. People know what everyone else is seeing, and it’s communicated in the most straightforward way. I don’t even really know what I would do to communicate to commenters what the author sees (it’s not an impossible UI challenge, you can imagine a small screenshot on the tooltip of the “muted icon” that shows what the author UI looks like, but that doesn’t feel to me like a particularly elegant solution).
One of the key things I mean by “the UI looking the same for all users” is maintaining common knowledge about who is likely to read what, or at least the rough process that determines what people read and what context they have. If I give the author some special UI where some things are hidden, then in order to maintain common knowledge I now need to show the users what the author’s UI looks like (and show the author what the users are being shown about the author UI, but this mostly would take care of itself since all authors will be commenters in other contexts).