You can write lots of judgmental comments criticizing an author’s posts, and then they can ban you from their comments because they find engaging with you to be exhausting, and then you can make a shortform where you and your friends call them a coward, and then they stop using the mod tools (and other authors do too) out of a fear that using the mod tools will result in a group of people getting together to bully and call them names in front of the author’s peers. That’s a situation where authors become uncomfortable using their mod tools.
Here’s what confuses me about this stance: do an author’s posts on Less Wrong (especially non-frontpage posts) constitute “the author’s private space”, or do they constitute “public space”?
If the former, then the idea that things that Alice writes about Bob on her shortform (or in non-frontpage posts) can constitute “bullying”, or are taking place “in front of” third parties (who aren’t making the deliberate choice to go to Alice’s private space), is nonsense.
If the latter, then the idea that authors should have the right to moderate discussions that are happening in a public space is clearly inappropriate.
I understood the LW mods’ position to be the former—that an author’s posts are their own private space, within the LW ecosystem (which is why it makes sense to let them set their own separate moderation policy there). But then I can’t make any sense of this notion of “bullying”, as applied to comments written on an author’s shortform (or non-frontpage posts).
It seems to me that these two ideas are incompatible.
Here’s what confuses me about this stance: do an author’s posts on Less Wrong (especially non-frontpage posts) constitute “the author’s private space”, or do they constitute “public space”?
If the former, then the idea that things that Alice writes about Bob on her shortform (or in non-frontpage posts) can constitute “bullying”, or are taking place “in front of” third parties (who aren’t making the deliberate choice to go to Alice’s private space), is nonsense.
If the latter, then the idea that authors should have the right to moderate discussions that are happening in a public space is clearly inappropriate.
I understood the LW mods’ position to be the former—that an author’s posts are their own private space, within the LW ecosystem (which is why it makes sense to let them set their own separate moderation policy there). But then I can’t make any sense of this notion of “bullying”, as applied to comments written on an author’s shortform (or non-frontpage posts).
It seems to me that these two ideas are incompatible.