This is something I currently want to accommodate but not encourage people to use moderation tools for, but maybe I’m wrong. How can I get a better sense of what’s going on with this kind of incompatibility? Why do you think “definitely not due to criticism but to conflict”?
I mean I’ve mostly gotten a better sense of it by running lots of institutions and events and had tons of complaints bubble up. I know it’s not just because of criticism because (a) I know from first-principles that conflicts exist for reasons other than criticism of someone’s blogposts, and (b) I’ve seen a bunch of these incompatibilities. Things like “bad romantic breakup” or “was dishonorable in a business setting” or “severe communication style mismatch”, amongst other things.
You say you’re not interested in using “moderation tools” for this. What do you have in mind for how to deal with this, other than tools for minimizing interaction between two people?
Like maybe allow people to vote on commenters instead of just comments, and then their comments get a default karma based on their commenter karma (or rather the direct commenter-level karma would contribute to the default karma, in addition to their total karma which currently determines the default karma).
It’s a good idea, and maybe we should do it, but I think doesn’t really address the thing of unique / idiosyncratic incompatibilities. Also it would be quite socially punishing for someone to know that they’re publicly labelled net negative as a commenter, rather than simply that their individual comments so-far have been considered poor contributions, and making a system this individually harsh is a cost to be weighed, and it might make it overall push away high-quality contributors more than it helps.
I’m worried about less “substantial” criticisms that are unlikely to get their own posts, like just pointing out a relatively obvious mistake in the OP, or lack of clarity, or failure to address some important counterargument.
This seems then that making it so that a short list of users are not welcome to comment on a single person’s post is much less likely to cause these things to be missed. The more basic mistakes can be noticed by a lot of people. If it’s a mistake that only one person can notice due to their rare expertise or unique perspective, I think they can get a lot of karma by making it a whole quick take or post.
Like, just to check, are we discussing a potential bad future world if this feature gets massively more use? Like, right now there are a ton of very disagreeable and harsh critics on LessWrong and there’s very few absolute bans. I’d guess absolute bans being on the order of 30-100 author-commenter pairs over the ~7 years we’ve had this, and weekly logged-in users being ~4,000 these days. The effect size so far has been really quite tiny. My guess is that it could probably increase like 10x and still not be a very noticeable friction for criticism on LessWrong for basically all good commenters.
I mean I’ve mostly gotten a better sense of it by running lots of institutions and events and had tons of complaints bubble up. I know it’s not just because of criticism because (a) I know from first-principles that conflicts exist for reasons other than criticism of someone’s blogposts, and (b) I’ve seen a bunch of these incompatibilities. Things like “bad romantic breakup” or “was dishonorable in a business setting” or “severe communication style mismatch”, amongst other things.
You say you’re not interested in using “moderation tools” for this. What do you have in mind for how to deal with this, other than tools for minimizing interaction between two people?
It’s a good idea, and maybe we should do it, but I think doesn’t really address the thing of unique / idiosyncratic incompatibilities. Also it would be quite socially punishing for someone to know that they’re publicly labelled net negative as a commenter, rather than simply that their individual comments so-far have been considered poor contributions, and making a system this individually harsh is a cost to be weighed, and it might make it overall push away high-quality contributors more than it helps.
This seems then that making it so that a short list of users are not welcome to comment on a single person’s post is much less likely to cause these things to be missed. The more basic mistakes can be noticed by a lot of people. If it’s a mistake that only one person can notice due to their rare expertise or unique perspective, I think they can get a lot of karma by making it a whole quick take or post.
Like, just to check, are we discussing a potential bad future world if this feature gets massively more use? Like, right now there are a ton of very disagreeable and harsh critics on LessWrong and there’s very few absolute bans. I’d guess absolute bans being on the order of 30-100 author-commenter pairs over the ~7 years we’ve had this, and weekly logged-in users being ~4,000 these days. The effect size so far has been really quite tiny. My guess is that it could probably increase like 10x and still not be a very noticeable friction for criticism on LessWrong for basically all good commenters.