I could see it being confusing because sometimes an author like Gordon is moderating you, and sometimes a site-mod like Habryka is moderating you, but they are using different standards, and the LW-mods are not typically endorsing the author standards as our own.
It’s not just confusing sometimes, it’s confusing basically all the time. It’s confusing even for me, even though I’ve spent all these years on Less Wrong, and have been involved in all of these discussions, and have worked on GreaterWrong, and have spent time thinking about moderation policies, etc., etc. For someone who is even a bit less “very on LW”[1]—it’s basically incomprehensible.
I mean, consider: whenever I comment on anything anywhere, on this website, I have to not only keep in mind the rules of LW (which I don’t actually know, because I can’t remember in what obscure, linked-from-nowhere-easily-findable, long, hard-to-parse post those rules are contained), and the norms of LW (which I understand only very vaguely, because they remain somewhere between “poorly explained” and “totally unexplained”), but also, in addition to those things, I have to keep in mind whose post I am commenting under, and somehow figure out from that not only what their stated “moderation policy” is (scare quotes because usually it’s not really a specification of a policy, it’s just sort of a vague allusion at a broad class of approaches to moderation policy), but also what their actual preferences are, and how they enforce those things.
(I mean, take this recent post. The “moderation policy” a.k.a. “commenting guidelines” are: “Reign of Terror—I delete anything I judge to be counterproductive”. What is that? That’s not anything. What is Nate going to judge to be “counterproductive”? I have no idea. How will this “policy” be applied? I have no idea. Does anyone besides Nate himself know how he’s going to moderate the comments on his posts? Probably not. Does Nate himself even know? Well, maybe he does, I don’t know the guy; but a priori, there’s a good chance that he doesn’t know. The only way to proceed here is to just assume that he’s going to be reasonable… but it is incredibly demoralizing to invest effort into writing some comments, only for them to be summarily deleted, on the basis of arbitrary rules you weren’t told of beforehand, or “norms” that are totally up to arbitrary interpretation, etc. The result of an environment like that is that people will treat commenting here as strictly a low-effort activity. Why bother to put time and thought into your comments, if “whoops, someone’s opaque whim dictates that your comments are now gone” is a strong possibility?)
The whole thing sort of works most of the time because most people on LW don’t take this “set your own moderation policy” stuff too seriously, and basically (both when posting and when commenting) treat the site as if the rules were something like what you’d find on a lightly moderated “nerdy” mailing list or classic-style discussion forum.
But that just results in the same sorts of “selective enforcement” situations as you get in any real-world legal regime that criminalizes almost everything and enforces almost nothing.
It’s not just confusing sometimes, it’s confusing basically all the time. It’s confusing even for me, even though I’ve spent all these years on Less Wrong, and have been involved in all of these discussions, and have worked on GreaterWrong, and have spent time thinking about moderation policies, etc., etc. For someone who is even a bit less “very on LW”[1]—it’s basically incomprehensible.
I mean, consider: whenever I comment on anything anywhere, on this website, I have to not only keep in mind the rules of LW (which I don’t actually know, because I can’t remember in what obscure, linked-from-nowhere-easily-findable, long, hard-to-parse post those rules are contained), and the norms of LW (which I understand only very vaguely, because they remain somewhere between “poorly explained” and “totally unexplained”), but also, in addition to those things, I have to keep in mind whose post I am commenting under, and somehow figure out from that not only what their stated “moderation policy” is (scare quotes because usually it’s not really a specification of a policy, it’s just sort of a vague allusion at a broad class of approaches to moderation policy), but also what their actual preferences are, and how they enforce those things.
(I mean, take this recent post. The “moderation policy” a.k.a. “commenting guidelines” are: “Reign of Terror—I delete anything I judge to be counterproductive”. What is that? That’s not anything. What is Nate going to judge to be “counterproductive”? I have no idea. How will this “policy” be applied? I have no idea. Does anyone besides Nate himself know how he’s going to moderate the comments on his posts? Probably not. Does Nate himself even know? Well, maybe he does, I don’t know the guy; but a priori, there’s a good chance that he doesn’t know. The only way to proceed here is to just assume that he’s going to be reasonable… but it is incredibly demoralizing to invest effort into writing some comments, only for them to be summarily deleted, on the basis of arbitrary rules you weren’t told of beforehand, or “norms” that are totally up to arbitrary interpretation, etc. The result of an environment like that is that people will treat commenting here as strictly a low-effort activity. Why bother to put time and thought into your comments, if “whoops, someone’s opaque whim dictates that your comments are now gone” is a strong possibility?)
The whole thing sort of works most of the time because most people on LW don’t take this “set your own moderation policy” stuff too seriously, and basically (both when posting and when commenting) treat the site as if the rules were something like what you’d find on a lightly moderated “nerdy” mailing list or classic-style discussion forum.
But that just results in the same sorts of “selective enforcement” situations as you get in any real-world legal regime that criminalizes almost everything and enforces almost nothing.
By analogy with “very online”