In contrast with my fellow mod, I do feel worried about the suppression of criticism as a result of banning. I think that sort of thing is hard to admit to because we generally have pretty hard lines around that sort of thing around here, and it is plausible to me not worth putting any pressure on in this case.
Something on my mind is that sometimes there are people that are extremely unpleasant to deal with? For instance, I know one occasional commenter in this site who I believe stole a bunch of money from another occasional commenter, though they never took it to court. I think that’d be v unpleasant if the former ended up replying to a lot of the latter’s posts.
I would also say that sometimes people can be extremely unpleasant online. I know one person who (I believe) goes around the internet spreading falsehoods attempting to damage the reputation of another person, often directly, and in ways that seem to me a bit delusional, and I think that just based on that behavior it would be reasonable to ban someone.
Perhaps you will say that these are decisions for the mods to make. Perhaps that is so. My guess is that having to send a message to one of the mods making your case, is a much much bigger trivial inconvenience than banning the person, and this is more likely to suppress the person’s contributions. I think this is a strong reason to let users decide themselves, and I would like to give them agency in that. Indeed, on social media sites like Twitter the only way to survive is via massive amounts of blocking, one could not conceivably report all cases to mods and get adjudication.
The counterpoint is that banning can be abused, and conversation in spite of unpleasantness and conflict is critical to LessWrong. If a user banned a lot of good contributors to the site, I would probably desire to disable their ability to be able to do that. So I think it a good default to not allow it. But I think at the very least it should not be thought of as a policy with no downsides, that doesn’t cause a lot of people to feel uncomfortable here because people who have behaved in unpleasant ways that would be unacceptable elsewhere can comment freely here, even though overall it is fantastic.
Babble of alternative ideas.
You should be able to ban users and give a reason, and mods can override your reason.
Banned users can still comment on a post but it goes to a section below the comment section that is collapsed by-default.
Users have a budget for banning, and it is more costly to ban users who have higher karma.
We should build a natural ontology for “response posts” so that a post you write critiquing another post is natively shown on the original post above the comments.
The last idea there is exciting to me. I can imagine in such a world, being much more comfortable with blocking-from-comments, if critique-via-post was proportionally elevated to more than make up for the change in pressure.
We should build a natural ontology for “response posts” so that a post you write critiquing another post is natively shown on the original post above the comments.
Isn’t this just… comments, but worse? (Because surely not all useful comments are written in direct response to a post; many times, they are responses to other people’s comments, or to the OP’s comments which are written in response to other people’s comments, etc.)
The last idea there is exciting to me. I can imagine in such a world, being much more comfortable with blocking-from-comments, if critique-via-post was proportionally elevated to more than make up for the change in pressure.
Do you really think that an author who banned a commenter from commenting on their posts would be more happy if the commenter could instead write “response posts” which would be displayed under that author’s posts (and above the comments, no less!)??
Do you really think that an author who banned a commenter from commenting on their posts would be more happy if the commenter could instead write “response posts” which would be displayed under that author’s posts (and above the comments, no less!)??
Yes. I currently guess that I would prefer that people I find very unpleasant be able to critique my post but I not have to read it in order to read and engage with the comments of ppl I don’t find v unpleasant. I don’t mind that it happens, I mind that I have to read it when reading through all my other comments.
(In case this is the crux: I am imagining the response post to be shown with the same UI as a post on the frontpage, a horizontal box that is much shorter vertically than almost all comments.)
(In case this is the crux: I am imagining the response post to be shown with the same UI as a post on the frontpage, a horizontal box that is much shorter vertically than almost all comments.)
I see. Yeah, that’s not what I thought you were saying.
However, I remain skeptical, simply because a response post titled “Ben Pace’s Recent Post About Foo Bar Is Dumb And He Should Feel Bad About Writing It” (with the post itself being like a paragraph long, so it fits in the popup when someone hovers over it in post listings) does not seem like an improvement over a critical comment—and the feature you suggest would encourage such things.
What is really unclear to me is why this whole alleged problem wouldn’t be solved much more simply by an ignore system? GreaterWrong has one, in fact (you can go to a user’s page and click the “Ignore user” button at the top). When a user is ignored, their comments render like this:
This seems to me like it would completely solve the problem of preventing you from having to read comments from someone you don’t like, while not depriving any readers of the ability to read critical comments without restriction, not depriving commenters of the ability to discuss the post in a straightforward and simple way, etc. (You could even make it so that comments by ignored users don’t generate notifications.)
As far as I can tell, this is simply a vastly superior solution compared to banning, with basically none of the downside and all of the upside.
Nice idea, but that feels like being in a group conversation and one person ignoring all the contributions of a single other member of the conversation, but everyone else not behaving that way. I don’t think it really works. I’m proposing having two separate group conversations, one without the unpleasant-to-the-author user, and one with.
(To be clear I suspect that the author will sometimes choose to engage on the post by the other user, it’s just something they can prepare themselves for, rather than it being the default.)
Nice idea, but that feels like being in a group conversation and one person ignoring all the contributions of a single other member of the conversation, but everyone else not behaving that way. I don’t think it really works.
I’m in a Discord guild where one guy’s posts are nothing more than spam to me.
I just don’t respond to any of those posts, while others do.
After a few weeks of this I decided to try a built-in muting function (I’m not sure I’m using the exact terminology; there are two “shut this user up” options available to non-moderators) and got Discord to collapse those messages. I still see a “1 ignored message” occasionally, but the signal:noise ratio is improved somewhat.
It’s a bit weird for me having a bunch of notifications of posts instead of actual posts, and I know who it is by process of elimination, but it’s not like me not interacting with this guy is super noticeable.
That feels like being in a group conversation and one person ignoring all the contributions of a single other member of the conversation, but everyone else not behaving that way.
This would be a reasonable concern with a flat commenting system, but LW has a threaded system, so this objection seems very odd to me. If Alice dislikes Bob, she can ignore all comment threads and subthreads started by Bob. (Or, if she wants, she can “prepare herself”, and then un-collapse a particular comment thread that Bob started, to see if there’s anything interesting being said there.)
In other words, in a threaded comment system, we already have multiple “separate group conversations”, and you can already just ignore any of those conversations—indeed, any individual branches of those conversations!—that involve someone you don’t like.
As far as I can tell, this solution satisfies all of your stated desiderata.
That doesn’t sound like my universal experience of threads. I feel like it often goes 1-2-1-3-1-2-1-2 where a third person interjects and the second person replies to them and then the author replies again. I suspect I wouldn’t want the convo to route through such a person at all.
Again, I’m not confident that this generalizes, I’m coming around to your proposal a bit, but it still feels like everyone else would be confused about an author not engaging on pertinent threads, and eventually over time infer that it was because they find a person unpleasant rather than because they can’t find a good response/rebuttal.
From the author perspective, I think I’d rather ask them to move to a different conversation thread. But I expect a second, lower down, “unpleasant” comment thread would be quite an unpleasant experience for the folks relegated there, to be blatantly a second-class citizen. Instead, having their own post for a response if they want it seems nicer for them, which doesn’t necessarily imply that they had to do so, and also in that post they would be treated as any other commenter.
I feel like it often goes 1-2-1-3-1-2-1-2 where a third person interjects and the second person replies to them and then the author replies again. I suspect I wouldn’t want the convo to route through such a person at all.
Yes, of course, but the same thing happens on a “response post”, too; an author might want to respond to a third party’s comment on a “response post”, etc. (But then they’d have to expose themselves to the critical post!)
You could even have the ignore feature collapse only the ignored person’s comments, and not any subthreads originating therefrom (perhaps this could even be a toggleable option; I am not sure which setting should be the default, but that is surely something you could iterate on).
(Also, worrying about this seems rather inconsistent with the notion that banning a commenter is a good idea in the first place. Like, if you’re Alice, you’re ok with banning Bob from your posts and thereby unrecoverably losing all the conversations that Bob’s comments would’ve started, all comments by all commenters that would’ve been posted in those comment threads… but you’re not ok with not reading such comments/threads when they’re collapsed? Doesn’t really make much sense. If you don’t think that Bob’s ability to comment on your posts is contributing anything that you don’t care to lose, then ignoring all comments downthread of Bob’s is clearly unproblematic!)
it still feels like everyone else would be confused about an author not engaging on pertinent threads.
Yes, of course people would be confused. This is good! People should wonder why an author isn’t responding to critical comments (if those comments aren’t obviously dumb or nonsensical, aren’t getting answered satisfactorily by other people, etc.). If an author wishes to avoid this, he can write some sort of note, like “FYI: I have the following users on ignore”. (Perhaps you could allow authors to optionally display this info automatically under their posts.)
and eventually over time infer that it was because they find a person unpleasant rather than because they can’t find a good response/rebuttal
Well… that’s one conclusion that readers might reach, certainly. In any case, the point here, I think, is to make all the relevant information available; and then all readers/commenters/etc. could reach whatever conclusions they saw fit to reach.
As an aside, I get the sense you keep insisting the only reason the person doesn’t want to engage with the comments is because it’s criticism. But often I think ppl don’t want to engage with relatively un-critical content because the author is unpleasant in how they conduct themselves. That’s a more central case motivating this.
I… don’t understand what part of my comment you’re replying to with this. And I also don’t understand the scenario that you’re describing, or how it connects to what we’re talking about. I am, on the whole, baffled by how to relate your comment to this discussion.
In contrast with my fellow mod, I do feel worried about the suppression of criticism as a result of banning. I think that sort of thing is hard to admit to because we generally have pretty hard lines around that sort of thing around here, and it is plausible to me not worth putting any pressure on in this case.
Something on my mind is that sometimes there are people that are extremely unpleasant to deal with? For instance, I know one occasional commenter in this site who I believe stole a bunch of money from another occasional commenter, though they never took it to court. I think that’d be v unpleasant if the former ended up replying to a lot of the latter’s posts.
I would also say that sometimes people can be extremely unpleasant online. I know one person who (I believe) goes around the internet spreading falsehoods attempting to damage the reputation of another person, often directly, and in ways that seem to me a bit delusional, and I think that just based on that behavior it would be reasonable to ban someone.
Perhaps you will say that these are decisions for the mods to make. Perhaps that is so. My guess is that having to send a message to one of the mods making your case, is a much much bigger trivial inconvenience than banning the person, and this is more likely to suppress the person’s contributions. I think this is a strong reason to let users decide themselves, and I would like to give them agency in that. Indeed, on social media sites like Twitter the only way to survive is via massive amounts of blocking, one could not conceivably report all cases to mods and get adjudication.
The counterpoint is that banning can be abused, and conversation in spite of unpleasantness and conflict is critical to LessWrong. If a user banned a lot of good contributors to the site, I would probably desire to disable their ability to be able to do that. So I think it a good default to not allow it. But I think at the very least it should not be thought of as a policy with no downsides, that doesn’t cause a lot of people to feel uncomfortable here because people who have behaved in unpleasant ways that would be unacceptable elsewhere can comment freely here, even though overall it is fantastic.
Babble of alternative ideas.
You should be able to ban users and give a reason, and mods can override your reason.
Banned users can still comment on a post but it goes to a section below the comment section that is collapsed by-default.
Users have a budget for banning, and it is more costly to ban users who have higher karma.
We should build a natural ontology for “response posts” so that a post you write critiquing another post is natively shown on the original post above the comments.
The last idea there is exciting to me. I can imagine in such a world, being much more comfortable with blocking-from-comments, if critique-via-post was proportionally elevated to more than make up for the change in pressure.
Isn’t this just… comments, but worse? (Because surely not all useful comments are written in direct response to a post; many times, they are responses to other people’s comments, or to the OP’s comments which are written in response to other people’s comments, etc.)
Do you really think that an author who banned a commenter from commenting on their posts would be more happy if the commenter could instead write “response posts” which would be displayed under that author’s posts (and above the comments, no less!)??
This sounds like “the blogosphere, but more self-contained” (not unlike Substack).
Yes. I currently guess that I would prefer that people I find very unpleasant be able to critique my post but I not have to read it in order to read and engage with the comments of ppl I don’t find v unpleasant. I don’t mind that it happens, I mind that I have to read it when reading through all my other comments.
(In case this is the crux: I am imagining the response post to be shown with the same UI as a post on the frontpage, a horizontal box that is much shorter vertically than almost all comments.)
I see. Yeah, that’s not what I thought you were saying.
However, I remain skeptical, simply because a response post titled “Ben Pace’s Recent Post About Foo Bar Is Dumb And He Should Feel Bad About Writing It” (with the post itself being like a paragraph long, so it fits in the popup when someone hovers over it in post listings) does not seem like an improvement over a critical comment—and the feature you suggest would encourage such things.
What is really unclear to me is why this whole alleged problem wouldn’t be solved much more simply by an ignore system? GreaterWrong has one, in fact (you can go to a user’s page and click the “Ignore user” button at the top). When a user is ignored, their comments render like this:
This seems to me like it would completely solve the problem of preventing you from having to read comments from someone you don’t like, while not depriving any readers of the ability to read critical comments without restriction, not depriving commenters of the ability to discuss the post in a straightforward and simple way, etc. (You could even make it so that comments by ignored users don’t generate notifications.)
As far as I can tell, this is simply a vastly superior solution compared to banning, with basically none of the downside and all of the upside.
Nice idea, but that feels like being in a group conversation and one person ignoring all the contributions of a single other member of the conversation, but everyone else not behaving that way. I don’t think it really works. I’m proposing having two separate group conversations, one without the unpleasant-to-the-author user, and one with.
(To be clear I suspect that the author will sometimes choose to engage on the post by the other user, it’s just something they can prepare themselves for, rather than it being the default.)
I’m in a Discord guild where one guy’s posts are nothing more than spam to me.
I just don’t respond to any of those posts, while others do.
After a few weeks of this I decided to try a built-in muting function (I’m not sure I’m using the exact terminology; there are two “shut this user up” options available to non-moderators) and got Discord to collapse those messages. I still see a “1 ignored message” occasionally, but the signal:noise ratio is improved somewhat.
It’s a bit weird for me having a bunch of notifications of posts instead of actual posts, and I know who it is by process of elimination, but it’s not like me not interacting with this guy is super noticeable.
As far as I can tell, it really works.
This would be a reasonable concern with a flat commenting system, but LW has a threaded system, so this objection seems very odd to me. If Alice dislikes Bob, she can ignore all comment threads and subthreads started by Bob. (Or, if she wants, she can “prepare herself”, and then un-collapse a particular comment thread that Bob started, to see if there’s anything interesting being said there.)
In other words, in a threaded comment system, we already have multiple “separate group conversations”, and you can already just ignore any of those conversations—indeed, any individual branches of those conversations!—that involve someone you don’t like.
As far as I can tell, this solution satisfies all of your stated desiderata.
That doesn’t sound like my universal experience of threads. I feel like it often goes 1-2-1-3-1-2-1-2 where a third person interjects and the second person replies to them and then the author replies again. I suspect I wouldn’t want the convo to route through such a person at all.
Again, I’m not confident that this generalizes, I’m coming around to your proposal a bit, but it still feels like everyone else would be confused about an author not engaging on pertinent threads, and eventually over time infer that it was because they find a person unpleasant rather than because they can’t find a good response/rebuttal.
From the author perspective, I think I’d rather ask them to move to a different conversation thread. But I expect a second, lower down, “unpleasant” comment thread would be quite an unpleasant experience for the folks relegated there, to be blatantly a second-class citizen. Instead, having their own post for a response if they want it seems nicer for them, which doesn’t necessarily imply that they had to do so, and also in that post they would be treated as any other commenter.
Yes, of course, but the same thing happens on a “response post”, too; an author might want to respond to a third party’s comment on a “response post”, etc. (But then they’d have to expose themselves to the critical post!)
You could even have the ignore feature collapse only the ignored person’s comments, and not any subthreads originating therefrom (perhaps this could even be a toggleable option; I am not sure which setting should be the default, but that is surely something you could iterate on).
(Also, worrying about this seems rather inconsistent with the notion that banning a commenter is a good idea in the first place. Like, if you’re Alice, you’re ok with banning Bob from your posts and thereby unrecoverably losing all the conversations that Bob’s comments would’ve started, all comments by all commenters that would’ve been posted in those comment threads… but you’re not ok with not reading such comments/threads when they’re collapsed? Doesn’t really make much sense. If you don’t think that Bob’s ability to comment on your posts is contributing anything that you don’t care to lose, then ignoring all comments downthread of Bob’s is clearly unproblematic!)
Yes, of course people would be confused. This is good! People should wonder why an author isn’t responding to critical comments (if those comments aren’t obviously dumb or nonsensical, aren’t getting answered satisfactorily by other people, etc.). If an author wishes to avoid this, he can write some sort of note, like “FYI: I have the following users on ignore”. (Perhaps you could allow authors to optionally display this info automatically under their posts.)
Well… that’s one conclusion that readers might reach, certainly. In any case, the point here, I think, is to make all the relevant information available; and then all readers/commenters/etc. could reach whatever conclusions they saw fit to reach.
As an aside, I get the sense you keep insisting the only reason the person doesn’t want to engage with the comments is because it’s criticism. But often I think ppl don’t want to engage with relatively un-critical content because the author is unpleasant in how they conduct themselves. That’s a more central case motivating this.
I… don’t understand what part of my comment you’re replying to with this. And I also don’t understand the scenario that you’re describing, or how it connects to what we’re talking about. I am, on the whole, baffled by how to relate your comment to this discussion.
Would you perhaps care to elaborate…?
No!