Are you referring to yourself and the LW team here?
Nope, I think we have plenty of authority. I was here referring to authors trying to maintain any kind of discussion quality in the absence of our help, and unfortunately, we are very limited in the amount of moderation we can do, as it already takes up a huge fraction of our staff time.
The culture that matters is one that does not unilaterally cede control to authors over who is allowed to point out their errors or how they can do that.
Yes, we all agree on that. Posts are a great tool for pointing out errors with other posts, as I have pointed out many times. Yes, comments are also great, but frequently discussions just go better if you move them to the top level, and the attention allocation mechanisms work so much better.
Also de-facto people just almost never ban anyone else from their posts. I agree we maybe should just ban more people ourselves, though it’s hard and I prefer the world where instead of banning someone like Said site-wide, we have a middle ground where individual authors who are into his style of commenting can still have him around. But if there is only one choice on this side, then clearly I would ban Said and other people in his reference class, as this site would quickly fall into something close to full abandonment if we did not actively moderate that.
Like, I don’t believe you that you want the site moderators to just ban many more people from the whole site. It just seems like a dumb loss for everyone.
When there is repeated as opposed to one-off conflict between users is precisely the time for a neutral outsider to step in, instead of empowering one of the sides to unilaterally cut off the other.
Ok, then tell me, what do you propose we do when people repeatedly get into unproductive conversations, usually generated by a small number of users on the site? Do you want us to just ban them from the site in general? Many times they have totally fine interactions with many sub-parts of the site, they just don’t get along with some specific person. Empowering the users who have a history of contributing positively to the site (or at least a crude proxy of that in the form of karma) to have some control their own seems like the most economical solution.
We could also maintain a ban list where authors can appeal to us to ban a user from their posts, though honestly, I think there are almost no bans I would not have approved this way. I agree that if we had lots of authors who make crazy to me seeming bans then we should change something about this system, but when I look at the register of bans, I don’t think I see approximately any ban where it to me as a moderator does indeed not just seem better for these people to keep distance from each other.
Nope, I think we have plenty of authority. I was here referring to authors trying to maintain any kind of discussion quality in the absence of our help, and unfortunately, we are very limited in the amount of moderation we can do, as it already takes up a huge fraction of our staff time.
Yes, we all agree on that. Posts are a great tool for pointing out errors with other posts, as I have pointed out many times. Yes, comments are also great, but frequently discussions just go better if you move them to the top level, and the attention allocation mechanisms work so much better.
Also de-facto people just almost never ban anyone else from their posts. I agree we maybe should just ban more people ourselves, though it’s hard and I prefer the world where instead of banning someone like Said site-wide, we have a middle ground where individual authors who are into his style of commenting can still have him around. But if there is only one choice on this side, then clearly I would ban Said and other people in his reference class, as this site would quickly fall into something close to full abandonment if we did not actively moderate that.
Like, I don’t believe you that you want the site moderators to just ban many more people from the whole site. It just seems like a dumb loss for everyone.
Ok, then tell me, what do you propose we do when people repeatedly get into unproductive conversations, usually generated by a small number of users on the site? Do you want us to just ban them from the site in general? Many times they have totally fine interactions with many sub-parts of the site, they just don’t get along with some specific person. Empowering the users who have a history of contributing positively to the site (or at least a crude proxy of that in the form of karma) to have some control their own seems like the most economical solution.
We could also maintain a ban list where authors can appeal to us to ban a user from their posts, though honestly, I think there are almost no bans I would not have approved this way. I agree that if we had lots of authors who make crazy to me seeming bans then we should change something about this system, but when I look at the register of bans, I don’t think I see approximately any ban where it to me as a moderator does indeed not just seem better for these people to keep distance from each other.