If someone finds interacting with you very unpleasant and you don’t understand quite why, it’s often bad form to loudly complain about it every time they don’t want to interact with you any more, even if you have an uncharitable hypothesis as to why.
If I was in this circumstance, I would be pretty worried about my own biases, and ask neutral or potentially less biased parties whether there might be more charitable and reasonable hypotheses why that person doesn’t want to interact with me. If there isn’t though, why shouldn’t I complain and e.g. make it common knowledge that my valuable criticism is being suppressed? (Obviously I would also take into consideration social/political realities, not make enemies I can’t afford to make, etc.)
I’ve seen many spaces degrade due to unwillingness to moderate
But most people aren’t using this feature, so to the extent that LW hasn’t degraded (and that’s due to moderation), isn’t it mainly because of the site moderators and karma voters? The benefits of having a few people occasionally moderate their own spaces hardly seems worth the cost (to potential critics and people like me who really value criticism) of not knowing when their critiques might be unilaterally deleted or banned by post authors. I mean aside from the “benefit” of attracting/retaining the authors who demand such unilateral powers.
And, man, this is a lot of moderation discussion.
Aside from the above “benefit”, It seems like you’re currently getting the worst of both worlds: lack of significant usage and therefore potential positive effects, and lots of controversy when it is occasionally used. If you really thought this was an important feature for the long term health of the community, wouldn’t you do something to make it more popular? (Or have done it in the past 7 years since the feature came out?) But instead you (the mod team) seem content that few people use it, only coming out to defend the feature when people explicitly object to it. This only seems to make sense if the main motivation is again to attract/retain certain authors.
I am somewhat wary you will keep asking me a lot of short questions that, due to your inexperience moderating spaces, you will assume have simple answers, and I will have to do lots of work generating all the contexts to show how things play out
It seems like if you actually wanted or expected many people to use this feature, you would have written some guidelines on what people can and can’t do, or under what circumstances their moderation actions might be reversed by the site moderators. I don’t think I was expecting the answers to my questions to necessarily be simple, but rather that the answers already exist somewhere, at least in the form of general guidelines that might need to be interpreted to answer my specific questions.
But most people aren’t using this feature, so to the extent that LW hasn’t degraded (and that’s due to moderation), isn’t it mainly because of the site moderators and karma voters? The benefits of having a few people occasionally moderate their own spaces hardly seems worth the cost
I mean, mostly we’ve decided to give the people who complain about moderation a shot, and compensate by spending much much more moderation effort from the moderators. My guess is this has cost a large amount of counterfactual quality of the site, many contributors, etc.
In-general, I find argument of the form “so to the extend that LW hasn’t been destroyed, X can’t be that valuable” pretty weak. It’s very hard to assess the counterfactual, and “if not X, LessWrong would have been completely destroyed” is rarely the case for almost any X that is in dispute.
My guess is LW would be a lot better if more people felt comfortable moderating things, and in the present world, there are a lot of costs born by the site admins that wouldn’t be necessary otherwise.
I mean, mostly we’ve decided to give the people who complain about moderation a shot
What do you mean by this? Until I read this sentence, I saw you as giving the people who demand unilateral moderation powers a shot, and denying the requests of people like me to reduce such powers.
My not very confident guess at this point is that if it weren’t for people like me, you would have pushed harder for people to moderate their own spaces more, perhaps by trying to publicly encourage this? And why did you decide to go against your own judgment on it, given that “people who complain about moderation” have no particular powers, except the power of persuasion (we’re not even threatening to leave the site!), and it seems like you were never persuaded?
My guess is LW would be a lot better if more people felt comfortable moderating things, and in the present world, there are a lot of costs born by the site admins that wouldn’t be necessary otherwise.
This seems implausible to me given my understanding of human nature (most people really hate to see/hear criticism) and history (few people can resist the temptation to shut down their critics when given the power and social license or cover to do so). If you want a taste of this, try asking DeepSeek some questions about the CCP.
But presumably you also know this (at least abstractly, but perhaps not as viscerally as I do, coming from a Chinese background, where even before the CCP, criticism in many situations was culturally/socially impossible), so I’m confused and curious why you believe what you do.
My guess is that you see a constant stream of bad comments, and wish you could outsource the burden of filtering them to post authors (or combine efforts to do more filtering). But as an occasional post author, my experience is that I’m not a reliable judge of what counts as a “bad comment”, e.g., I’m liable to view a critique as a low quality comment, only to change my mind later after seeing it upvoted and trying harder to understand/appreciate its point. Given this, I’m much more inclined to leave the moderation to the karma system, which seems to work well enough in leaving bad comments at low karma/visibility by not upvoting them, and even when it’s occasionally wrong, still provides a useful signal to me that many people share the same misunderstanding and it’s worth my time to try to correct (or maybe by engaging with it I find out that I still misjudged it).
But if you don’t think it works well enough… hmm I recall writing a post about moderation tech proposals in 2016 and maybe there has been newer ideas since then?
I mean, I have written like 50,000+ words about this at this point in various comment threads. About why I care about archipelagos, and why I think it’s hard and bad to try to have centralized control about culture, about how much people hate being in places with ambiguous norms, and many other things. I don’t fault you for not reading them all, but I have done a huge amount of exposition.
And why did you decide to go against your own judgment on it, given that “people who complain about moderation” have no particular powers, except the power of persuasion (we’re not even threatening to leave the site!), and it seems like you were never persuaded?
Because the only choice at this point would be to ban them, since they appear to be willing to take any remaining channel or any remaining opportunity to heap approximately as much scorn and snark and social punishment on anyone daring to do moderation they disagree with, and I value things like readthesequences.com and many other contributions from the relevant people enough that that seemed really costly and sad.
My guess is I will now do this, as it seems like the site doesn’t really have any other choice, and I am tired and have better things to do, but I think I was justified and right to be hesitant to do this for a while (though yes, in ex-post it would have obviously been better to just do that 5 years ago).
It seems to me there are plenty of options aside from centralized control and giving authors unilateral powers, and last I remember (i.e., at the end of this post) the mod team seems to be pivoting to other possibilities, some of which I would find much more reasonable/acceptable. I’m confused why you’re now so focused again on the model of authors-as-unilateral-moderators. Where have you explained this?
I have filled my interest in answering questions on this, so I’ll bow out and wish you good luck. Happy to chat some other time.
I don’t think we ever “pivoted to other possibilities” (Ray often makes posts with moderation things he is thinking about, and the post doesn’t say anything about pivoting). Digging up the exact comments on why ultimately there needs to be at least some authority vested in authors as moderators seems like it would take a while.
I meant pivot in the sense of “this doesn’t seem to be working well, we should seriously consider other possibilities” not “we’re definitely switching to a new moderation model”, but I now get that you disagree with Ray even about this.
Your comment under Ray’s post wrote:
We did end up implementing the AI Alignment Forum, which I do actually think is working pretty well and is a pretty good example of how I imagine Archipelago-like stuff to play out. We now also have both the EA Forum and LessWrong creating some more archipelago-like diversity in the online-forum space.
This made me think you were also no longer very focused on the authors-as-unilateral-moderators model and was thinking more about subreddit-like models that Ray mentioned in his post.
BTW I’ve been thinking for a while that LW needs a better search, as I’ve also often been in the position being unable to find some comment I’ve written in the past.
Instead of one-on-one chats (or in addition to them), I think you should collect/organize your thoughts in a post or sequence, for a number of reasons including that you seem visibly frustrated that after having written 50k+ words on the topic, people like me still don’t know your reasons for preferring your solution.
We did end up implementing the AI Alignment Forum, which I do actually think is working pretty well and is a pretty good example of how I imagine Archipelago-like stuff to play out. We now also have both the EA Forum and LessWrong creating some more archipelago-like diversity in the online-forum space.
Huh, ironically I now consider the AI Alignment Forum a pretty big mistake in how it’s structured (for reasons mostly orthogonal but not unrelated to this).
BTW I’ve been thinking for a while that LW needs a better search, as I’ve also often been in the position being unable to find some comment I’ve written in the past.
Agree.
Instead of one-on-one chats (or in addition to them), I think you should collect/organize your thoughts in a post or sequence, for a number of reasons including that you seem visibly frustrated that after having written 50k+ words on the topic, people like me still don’t know your reasons for preferring your solution.
I think I have elaborated non-trivially on my reasons in this thread, so I don’t really think it’s an issue of people not finding it.
I do still agree it would be good to do more sequences-like writing on it, though like, we are already speaking in the context of Ray having done that a bunch (referencing things like the Archipelago vision), and writing top-level content takes a lot of time and effort.
I think I have elaborated non-trivially on my reasons in this thread, so I don’t really think it’s an issue of people not finding it.
It’s largely an issue of lack of organization and conciseness (50k+ words is a minus, not a plus in my view), but also clearly an issue of “not finding it”, given that you couldn’t find an important comment of your own, one that (judging from your description of it) contains a core argument needed to understand your current insistence on authors-as-unilateral-moderators.
If someone finds interacting with you very unpleasant and you don’t understand quite why, it’s often bad form to loudly complain about it every time they don’t want to interact with you any more, even if you have an uncharitable hypothesis as to why.
If I was in this circumstance, I would be pretty worried about my own biases, and ask neutral or potentially less biased parties whether there might be more charitable and reasonable hypotheses why that person doesn’t want to interact with me. If there isn’t though, why shouldn’t I complain and e.g. make it common knowledge that my valuable criticism is being suppressed? (Obviously I would also take into consideration social/political realities, not make enemies I can’t afford to make, etc.)
I’m having a hard time seeing how this reply is hooking up to what I wrote. I didn’t say critics, I spoke much more generally. If someone wants to keep their distance from you because you have bad body odor, or because they think your job is unethical, and you either don’t know this or disagree, it’s pretty bad social form to go around loudly complaining every time they keep their distance from you. It makes it more socially costly for them to act in accordance with their preferences and makes a bunch of unnecessary social conflict. I’m pretty sure this is obvious and this doesn’t change if you’ve suddenly developed a ‘criticism’ of them.
But most people aren’t using this feature, so to the extent that LW hasn’t degraded (and that’s due to moderation), isn’t it mainly because of the site moderators and karma voters? The benefits of having a few people occasionally moderate their own spaces hardly seems worth the cost (to potential critics and people like me who really value criticism) of not knowing when their critiques might be unilaterally deleted or banned by post authors. I mean aside from the “benefit” of attracting/retaining the authors who demand such unilateral powers.
I mean, I think it pretty plausible that LW would be doing even better than it is with more people doing more gardening and making more moderated spaces within it, archipelago-style.
I read you questioning my honesty and motivations a bunch (e.g. you have a few times mentioning that I probably only care about this because of status reasons I cannot mention or to attract certain authors and that my behavior is not consistent with believing in users moderating their own posts being a good idea) which are of course fine hypotheses for you to consider. After spending probably over 40 hours writing this month explaining why I think authors moderating their posts is a good idea and making some defense of myself and my reasoning, I think I’ve done my duty in showing up to engage with this semi-prosecution for the time being, and will let ppl come to their own conclusions. (Perhaps I will write up a summary of the discussion at some point.)
If I was in this circumstance, I would be pretty worried about my own biases, and ask neutral or potentially less biased parties whether there might be more charitable and reasonable hypotheses why that person doesn’t want to interact with me. If there isn’t though, why shouldn’t I complain and e.g. make it common knowledge that my valuable criticism is being suppressed? (Obviously I would also take into consideration social/political realities, not make enemies I can’t afford to make, etc.)
But most people aren’t using this feature, so to the extent that LW hasn’t degraded (and that’s due to moderation), isn’t it mainly because of the site moderators and karma voters? The benefits of having a few people occasionally moderate their own spaces hardly seems worth the cost (to potential critics and people like me who really value criticism) of not knowing when their critiques might be unilaterally deleted or banned by post authors. I mean aside from the “benefit” of attracting/retaining the authors who demand such unilateral powers.
Aside from the above “benefit”, It seems like you’re currently getting the worst of both worlds: lack of significant usage and therefore potential positive effects, and lots of controversy when it is occasionally used. If you really thought this was an important feature for the long term health of the community, wouldn’t you do something to make it more popular? (Or have done it in the past 7 years since the feature came out?) But instead you (the mod team) seem content that few people use it, only coming out to defend the feature when people explicitly object to it. This only seems to make sense if the main motivation is again to attract/retain certain authors.
It seems like if you actually wanted or expected many people to use this feature, you would have written some guidelines on what people can and can’t do, or under what circumstances their moderation actions might be reversed by the site moderators. I don’t think I was expecting the answers to my questions to necessarily be simple, but rather that the answers already exist somewhere, at least in the form of general guidelines that might need to be interpreted to answer my specific questions.
I mean, mostly we’ve decided to give the people who complain about moderation a shot, and compensate by spending much much more moderation effort from the moderators. My guess is this has cost a large amount of counterfactual quality of the site, many contributors, etc.
In-general, I find argument of the form “so to the extend that LW hasn’t been destroyed, X can’t be that valuable” pretty weak. It’s very hard to assess the counterfactual, and “if not X, LessWrong would have been completely destroyed” is rarely the case for almost any X that is in dispute.
My guess is LW would be a lot better if more people felt comfortable moderating things, and in the present world, there are a lot of costs born by the site admins that wouldn’t be necessary otherwise.
What do you mean by this? Until I read this sentence, I saw you as giving the people who demand unilateral moderation powers a shot, and denying the requests of people like me to reduce such powers.
My not very confident guess at this point is that if it weren’t for people like me, you would have pushed harder for people to moderate their own spaces more, perhaps by trying to publicly encourage this? And why did you decide to go against your own judgment on it, given that “people who complain about moderation” have no particular powers, except the power of persuasion (we’re not even threatening to leave the site!), and it seems like you were never persuaded?
This seems implausible to me given my understanding of human nature (most people really hate to see/hear criticism) and history (few people can resist the temptation to shut down their critics when given the power and social license or cover to do so). If you want a taste of this, try asking DeepSeek some questions about the CCP.
But presumably you also know this (at least abstractly, but perhaps not as viscerally as I do, coming from a Chinese background, where even before the CCP, criticism in many situations was culturally/socially impossible), so I’m confused and curious why you believe what you do.
My guess is that you see a constant stream of bad comments, and wish you could outsource the burden of filtering them to post authors (or combine efforts to do more filtering). But as an occasional post author, my experience is that I’m not a reliable judge of what counts as a “bad comment”, e.g., I’m liable to view a critique as a low quality comment, only to change my mind later after seeing it upvoted and trying harder to understand/appreciate its point. Given this, I’m much more inclined to leave the moderation to the karma system, which seems to work well enough in leaving bad comments at low karma/visibility by not upvoting them, and even when it’s occasionally wrong, still provides a useful signal to me that many people share the same misunderstanding and it’s worth my time to try to correct (or maybe by engaging with it I find out that I still misjudged it).
But if you don’t think it works well enough… hmm I recall writing a post about moderation tech proposals in 2016 and maybe there has been newer ideas since then?
I mean, I have written like 50,000+ words about this at this point in various comment threads. About why I care about archipelagos, and why I think it’s hard and bad to try to have centralized control about culture, about how much people hate being in places with ambiguous norms, and many other things. I don’t fault you for not reading them all, but I have done a huge amount of exposition.
Because the only choice at this point would be to ban them, since they appear to be willing to take any remaining channel or any remaining opportunity to heap approximately as much scorn and snark and social punishment on anyone daring to do moderation they disagree with, and I value things like readthesequences.com and many other contributions from the relevant people enough that that seemed really costly and sad.
My guess is I will now do this, as it seems like the site doesn’t really have any other choice, and I am tired and have better things to do, but I think I was justified and right to be hesitant to do this for a while (though yes, in ex-post it would have obviously been better to just do that 5 years ago).
It seems to me there are plenty of options aside from centralized control and giving authors unilateral powers, and last I remember (i.e., at the end of this post) the mod team seems to be pivoting to other possibilities, some of which I would find much more reasonable/acceptable. I’m confused why you’re now so focused again on the model of authors-as-unilateral-moderators. Where have you explained this?
I have filled my interest in answering questions on this, so I’ll bow out and wish you good luck. Happy to chat some other time.
I don’t think we ever “pivoted to other possibilities” (Ray often makes posts with moderation things he is thinking about, and the post doesn’t say anything about pivoting). Digging up the exact comments on why ultimately there needs to be at least some authority vested in authors as moderators seems like it would take a while.
I meant pivot in the sense of “this doesn’t seem to be working well, we should seriously consider other possibilities” not “we’re definitely switching to a new moderation model”, but I now get that you disagree with Ray even about this.
Your comment under Ray’s post wrote:
This made me think you were also no longer very focused on the authors-as-unilateral-moderators model and was thinking more about subreddit-like models that Ray mentioned in his post.
BTW I’ve been thinking for a while that LW needs a better search, as I’ve also often been in the position being unable to find some comment I’ve written in the past.
Instead of one-on-one chats (or in addition to them), I think you should collect/organize your thoughts in a post or sequence, for a number of reasons including that you seem visibly frustrated that after having written 50k+ words on the topic, people like me still don’t know your reasons for preferring your solution.
Huh, ironically I now consider the AI Alignment Forum a pretty big mistake in how it’s structured (for reasons mostly orthogonal but not unrelated to this).
Agree.
I think I have elaborated non-trivially on my reasons in this thread, so I don’t really think it’s an issue of people not finding it.
I do still agree it would be good to do more sequences-like writing on it, though like, we are already speaking in the context of Ray having done that a bunch (referencing things like the Archipelago vision), and writing top-level content takes a lot of time and effort.
It’s largely an issue of lack of organization and conciseness (50k+ words is a minus, not a plus in my view), but also clearly an issue of “not finding it”, given that you couldn’t find an important comment of your own, one that (judging from your description of it) contains a core argument needed to understand your current insistence on authors-as-unilateral-moderators.
I’m having a hard time seeing how this reply is hooking up to what I wrote. I didn’t say critics, I spoke much more generally. If someone wants to keep their distance from you because you have bad body odor, or because they think your job is unethical, and you either don’t know this or disagree, it’s pretty bad social form to go around loudly complaining every time they keep their distance from you. It makes it more socially costly for them to act in accordance with their preferences and makes a bunch of unnecessary social conflict. I’m pretty sure this is obvious and this doesn’t change if you’ve suddenly developed a ‘criticism’ of them.
I mean, I think it pretty plausible that LW would be doing even better than it is with more people doing more gardening and making more moderated spaces within it, archipelago-style.
I read you questioning my honesty and motivations a bunch (e.g. you have a few times mentioning that I probably only care about this because of status reasons I cannot mention or to attract certain authors and that my behavior is not consistent with believing in users moderating their own posts being a good idea) which are of course fine hypotheses for you to consider. After spending probably over 40 hours writing this month explaining why I think authors moderating their posts is a good idea and making some defense of myself and my reasoning, I think I’ve done my duty in showing up to engage with this semi-prosecution for the time being, and will let ppl come to their own conclusions. (Perhaps I will write up a summary of the discussion at some point.)