Here’s my understanding of the situation. The interested parties are:
Prominent authors: Contribute the most value to the forum and influence over the forum’s long term trajectory. They will move to other platforms if they think it will be better for their messages.
Readers: Don’t want to see low quality comments that are hard to filter out (though I think when there are a lot of comments, comment karma helps a lot and I’m a lot more concerned about prominent authors leaving than about needing to skim over comments)
Prominent authors concerned with fairness: Authors like Wei who have equally or more valuable content and will prefer a forum that shows that the writer is allowing non-biased commenting from readers even if the reader (like me) needs to be willing to do a little more work to see this.
Suspected negative value commenters: Think their comments are valuable and being suppressed due to author bias
Intelligent automated systems: Should probably just get everything since they have unlimited patience for reading low quality, annotated comments
Forum developers: Their time is super valuable
Does this sound about right?
[Update: The guidelines above say “Before users can moderate, they have to set one of the three following moderation styles on their profile...”. But I don’t see this displayed on user profiles. Is the information recorded but not displayed? (I’m looking at Eliezer’s profile. If it’s displayed somewhere then this seems good enough to me.)]
I think the group that is missing the most are other active commenters. Maybe you meant to include them in “authors” but I think it makes sense to break them out.
The thing that IMO burns people the most is trying to engage in good faith with someone, or investing a lot of effort into explaining things, only to end up in a spot where they feel like that work ended up being mostly used against them in weird social ways, or their reward for sticking their head out and saying anything was being met with sneering. This applies to authors, but it also applies a lot to commenters.
One of the most central value propositions that makes people want to be on LW instead of the rest of the internet is the fact they don’t have to do moderation themselves. Commenters want to participate in curated environments. Commenters love having people engage with what they say with serious engagement (even if combined with intense disagreement) and hate having things rudely dismissed or sneered at.
Commenters hate having to do norm enforcement themselves, especially from an authority-less position. Indeed, maybe the most common problem I hear from people about other forums, as well as community engagement more general, is that they feel like they end up spending a lot of their time telling other people to be reasonable, and then this creates social drama and a feeling of needing to rile up troops via a badly codified mechanism of social enforcement, and this is super draining and exhausting, and so they leave. Moderator burnout is also extremely common, especially when the moderators do not feel like they get to act with authority.
By having both the LW moderation team do lots of active opinionated moderation, and allowing authors to do the same, we can create spaces that are moderated and can have any kind of culture, as opposed to just what happens by default on the internet. Realistically, you cannot settle norm disputes in individual comment threads, especially not with a rotating cast of characters on each post, so you need a mixture of authors and site-moderators work on codifying norms and think hard about cultural components.
Commenters want to participate in curated environments.
The argument this statement is a part of does not logically follow. Commenters also want to participate in echo chambers and circlejerk over woo sometimes. That doesn’t mean LW should be the spot for it. It does mean other places on the internet should probably supply that need, and indeed there is no shortage of such spaces.
All else equal, creating an environment a part of the commenters hate is indeed bad. Here, all else is not equal, as has been repeatedly explained.
especially when the moderators do not feel like they get to act with authority
Are you referring to yourself and the LW team here? You have certainly acted with a ton of authority in the past, are more than welcome to do so in the future, and the community largely has your backs and believes in you. I have a hard time thinking of another major forum where moderators are respected more than on LW.
any kind of culture
Except for the most important kind of culture, the culture which sits at the heart of what allows LW to be an epistemically productive environment (to the extent it is), namely one where applause lights, semantic stopsigns, nonsensical woo, vaguely religion-inspired obscurantism, etc. written by the authors get called out by commenters quickly, rapidly, and reliably.
You are empowering authors to set the culture of the commentary on their posts. This gets things precisely backwards, as has been repeatedly pointed out on this and related threads in the past few days. The culture this site has aspired to and hopefully continues to aspire to is the one that allows for fundamental epistemic norms (i.e., rules of reason as opposed to social rules, i.e., what the first book of the Sequences, Map and Territory, is all about) to be upheld. Sometimes this means empowering authors, sometimes this means empowering commenters. Sometimes this means enforcing certain social rules, sometimes it means making it clear in advance that policing of supposed social norms will not happen if certain conditions are met. Etc.
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. This is rather obvious, so it is deeply unfortunate I have to be retreading this ground yet again.
you cannot settle norm disputes in individual comment threads, especially not with a rotating cast of characters on each post, so you need a mixture of authors and site-moderators work on codifying norms and think hard about cultural components
At the risk of falling into the same kind of behavior you seem to dislike, this is locally invalid reasoning, and (yet again) obviously so. The first clause has nothing to do with the second.
The fact that you need more than one individual comment thread to figure out what is going on (also a highly proposition by itself) implies moderator involvement is more important than ever, as a reasonable, non-hot-headed outside figure that can make a holistic assessment of what is going on and what rules of the site have been broken.
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.
I will be bowing out of this conversation now. What I’ve written thus far, in this and 2 other related threads, speaks for itself.
Your engagement in these discussions, @habryka, has been terribly disappointing and your assessment of what is going on certainly falls well below the standards I’d expect from somebody who has been moderating this site for so long.
Perhaps I should be taking a short vacation from LW for a bit.
The fact that you need more than one individual comment thread to figure out what is going on (also a highly proposition by itself) implies moderator involvement is more important than ever, as a reasonable, non-hot-headed outside figure that can make a holistic assessment of what is going on and what rules of the site have been broken.
Not sure if this is a big crux, just stoping by to note a disagreement here: I think often the reason that Alice doesn’t want to talk to Bob can be because Bob was very unpleasant toward Alice in off-site contexts. This is not something that the mods are able to see, but is a valid reason for Alice to find Bob’s (otherwise reasonable seeming) comments very unpleasant.
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.
Do you think anything is ever bad enough that it deserves to be rudely dismissed or sneered at? Or is that unacceptable to you in any possible context?
I don’t think “how bad something is” is the right dimension that determines whether sneering is appropriate, so I don’t think there is a strict level of “badness” that makes sneering OK. I do think there are situations where it’s appropriate, though very few on LW. Brainstorming some hypothetical situations:
An author showed up posting some LLM slop that didn’t get caught in our content review. A user explains why the LLM slop doesn’t make any sense. The author responds with more LLM slop comments. It seems pretty reasonable to rudely dismiss the author who posted the LLM slop (though my guess is culturally it would still be better to do it with less of a sneering motion, but I wouldn’t fault someone very much for it, and rudeness seems very appropriate).
If an organizational account was around that kept posting comments and posts that said things like “we (organization X) do not support this kind of work” and did other kind of markety things, and someone had already written about why intellectual discourse with organizational accounts doesn’t really make much sense, then I think I can imagine reacting with sneering to be appropriate (though mostly the right choice is of course to just ban that kind of stuff at the moderation level)
Maybe that helps? I don’t know, there are not that many circumstances where it feels like the right choice. Mostly where I’ve seen cultures of sneering things tend to go off the rails quite badly, and it’s one of the worst attractors in internet culture space.
Not Habryka, but I find that dismissal is regularly appropriate, and sometimes will be rude in-context (though the rudeness should not itself be the goal).
I think sneering is often passive-aggressive whereas I think it’s healthy for aggression to be overt / explicit rather than hidden behind plausible-deniability / pretense. Obfuscation is anti-communication, and I think it’s common that sneering is too (e.g. one bully communicating to other bullies that something is worth of scorn all-the-while seeming relatively innocuous to a passerby).
The guidelines above say “Before users can moderate, they have to set one of the three following moderation styles on their profile...”. But I don’t see this displayed on user profiles. Is “Norm Enforcing” or “Reign of Terror” displayed anywhere? Also I don’t think “Easy Going” really captures the “I Don’t Put Finger on Scales” position.
If the author’s policy is displayed somewhere and I just didn’t find it then this seems good enough to me as a Reader. I hope there is a solution that can make authors both like Eliezer and Wei happy. It will be nice to make Commenters happy also and I’ve thought less about that.
The place where it gets displayed is below the comment box when you start typing something:
It’s confusing for it to say “profile”. It should ideally say “user settings”, as the goal of that sentence was to explain to authors where they can set these and not to explain to readers where to find these. I’ll edit it.
Do the readers not want to see low quality comments, or is it more so the authors who don’t want to see them? And do the readers care primarily about the comments, or more so about the posts? The answer is probably “both” to both questions. Or at least, there are subsets of both groups that care about each.
There is also another important party, which I think people like Said, Zack M Davis, me, (maybe?) Viliam, etc. belong to, which is “commenters/authors concerned with the degradation of epistemic standards” caused by happy death spirals over applause lights, semantic stopsigns, postrationalist woo, etc.
Brainstorming: I wonder if it will be possible to have a subtle indicator at the bottom of the comment section for when comments have been silently modified by the author (such as a ban triggered). I think this may still be unfair to party 1, so perhaps there could instead be badges in prominent author profiles that indicate whether they fall into the “gardener” or “equal scales” position (plus perhaps a setting for users that is off by default but will allow them to see a note for when an article has silent moderations/restrictions by author) or a way for authors to display that they haven’t made any silent edits/restrictions?
Here’s my understanding of the situation. The interested parties are:
Prominent authors: Contribute the most value to the forum and influence over the forum’s long term trajectory. They will move to other platforms if they think it will be better for their messages.
Readers: Don’t want to see low quality comments that are hard to filter out (though I think when there are a lot of comments, comment karma helps a lot and I’m a lot more concerned about prominent authors leaving than about needing to skim over comments)
Prominent authors concerned with fairness: Authors like Wei who have equally or more valuable content and will prefer a forum that shows that the writer is allowing non-biased commenting from readers even if the reader (like me) needs to be willing to do a little more work to see this.
Suspected negative value commenters: Think their comments are valuable and being suppressed due to author bias
Intelligent automated systems: Should probably just get everything since they have unlimited patience for reading low quality, annotated comments
Forum developers: Their time is super valuable
Does this sound about right?
[Update: The guidelines above say “Before users can moderate, they have to set one of the three following moderation styles on their profile...”. But I don’t see this displayed on user profiles. Is the information recorded but not displayed? (I’m looking at Eliezer’s profile. If it’s displayed somewhere then this seems good enough to me.)]
You forgot readers who also want to see debunkings of bad posts (without having to maintain a separate list of people who usually debunk bad posts).
I think the group that is missing the most are other active commenters. Maybe you meant to include them in “authors” but I think it makes sense to break them out.
The thing that IMO burns people the most is trying to engage in good faith with someone, or investing a lot of effort into explaining things, only to end up in a spot where they feel like that work ended up being mostly used against them in weird social ways, or their reward for sticking their head out and saying anything was being met with sneering. This applies to authors, but it also applies a lot to commenters.
One of the most central value propositions that makes people want to be on LW instead of the rest of the internet is the fact they don’t have to do moderation themselves. Commenters want to participate in curated environments. Commenters love having people engage with what they say with serious engagement (even if combined with intense disagreement) and hate having things rudely dismissed or sneered at.
Commenters hate having to do norm enforcement themselves, especially from an authority-less position. Indeed, maybe the most common problem I hear from people about other forums, as well as community engagement more general, is that they feel like they end up spending a lot of their time telling other people to be reasonable, and then this creates social drama and a feeling of needing to rile up troops via a badly codified mechanism of social enforcement, and this is super draining and exhausting, and so they leave. Moderator burnout is also extremely common, especially when the moderators do not feel like they get to act with authority.
By having both the LW moderation team do lots of active opinionated moderation, and allowing authors to do the same, we can create spaces that are moderated and can have any kind of culture, as opposed to just what happens by default on the internet. Realistically, you cannot settle norm disputes in individual comment threads, especially not with a rotating cast of characters on each post, so you need a mixture of authors and site-moderators work on codifying norms and think hard about cultural components.
The argument this statement is a part of does not logically follow. Commenters also want to participate in echo chambers and circlejerk over woo sometimes. That doesn’t mean LW should be the spot for it. It does mean other places on the internet should probably supply that need, and indeed there is no shortage of such spaces.
All else equal, creating an environment a part of the commenters hate is indeed bad. Here, all else is not equal, as has been repeatedly explained.
Are you referring to yourself and the LW team here? You have certainly acted with a ton of authority in the past, are more than welcome to do so in the future, and the community largely has your backs and believes in you. I have a hard time thinking of another major forum where moderators are respected more than on LW.
Except for the most important kind of culture, the culture which sits at the heart of what allows LW to be an epistemically productive environment (to the extent it is), namely one where applause lights, semantic stopsigns, nonsensical woo, vaguely religion-inspired obscurantism, etc. written by the authors get called out by commenters quickly, rapidly, and reliably.
You are empowering authors to set the culture of the commentary on their posts. This gets things precisely backwards, as has been repeatedly pointed out on this and related threads in the past few days. The culture this site has aspired to and hopefully continues to aspire to is the one that allows for fundamental epistemic norms (i.e., rules of reason as opposed to social rules, i.e., what the first book of the Sequences, Map and Territory, is all about) to be upheld. Sometimes this means empowering authors, sometimes this means empowering commenters. Sometimes this means enforcing certain social rules, sometimes it means making it clear in advance that policing of supposed social norms will not happen if certain conditions are met. Etc.
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. This is rather obvious, so it is deeply unfortunate I have to be retreading this ground yet again.
At the risk of falling into the same kind of behavior you seem to dislike, this is locally invalid reasoning, and (yet again) obviously so. The first clause has nothing to do with the second.
The fact that you need more than one individual comment thread to figure out what is going on (also a highly proposition by itself) implies moderator involvement is more important than ever, as a reasonable, non-hot-headed outside figure that can make a holistic assessment of what is going on and what rules of the site have been broken.
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.
I will be bowing out of this conversation now. What I’ve written thus far, in this and 2 other related threads, speaks for itself.
Your engagement in these discussions, @habryka, has been terribly disappointing and your assessment of what is going on certainly falls well below the standards I’d expect from somebody who has been moderating this site for so long.
Perhaps I should be taking a short vacation from LW for a bit.
Not sure if this is a big crux, just stoping by to note a disagreement here: I think often the reason that Alice doesn’t want to talk to Bob can be because Bob was very unpleasant toward Alice in off-site contexts. This is not something that the mods are able to see, but is a valid reason for Alice to find Bob’s (otherwise reasonable seeming) comments very unpleasant.
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.
Do you think anything is ever bad enough that it deserves to be rudely dismissed or sneered at? Or is that unacceptable to you in any possible context?
I don’t think “how bad something is” is the right dimension that determines whether sneering is appropriate, so I don’t think there is a strict level of “badness” that makes sneering OK. I do think there are situations where it’s appropriate, though very few on LW. Brainstorming some hypothetical situations:
An author showed up posting some LLM slop that didn’t get caught in our content review. A user explains why the LLM slop doesn’t make any sense. The author responds with more LLM slop comments. It seems pretty reasonable to rudely dismiss the author who posted the LLM slop (though my guess is culturally it would still be better to do it with less of a sneering motion, but I wouldn’t fault someone very much for it, and rudeness seems very appropriate).
If an organizational account was around that kept posting comments and posts that said things like “we (organization X) do not support this kind of work” and did other kind of markety things, and someone had already written about why intellectual discourse with organizational accounts doesn’t really make much sense, then I think I can imagine reacting with sneering to be appropriate (though mostly the right choice is of course to just ban that kind of stuff at the moderation level)
Maybe that helps? I don’t know, there are not that many circumstances where it feels like the right choice. Mostly where I’ve seen cultures of sneering things tend to go off the rails quite badly, and it’s one of the worst attractors in internet culture space.
Not Habryka, but I find that dismissal is regularly appropriate, and sometimes will be rude in-context (though the rudeness should not itself be the goal).
I think sneering is often passive-aggressive whereas I think it’s healthy for aggression to be overt / explicit rather than hidden behind plausible-deniability / pretense. Obfuscation is anti-communication, and I think it’s common that sneering is too (e.g. one bully communicating to other bullies that something is worth of scorn all-the-while seeming relatively innocuous to a passerby).
The guidelines above say “Before users can moderate, they have to set one of the three following moderation styles on their profile...”. But I don’t see this displayed on user profiles. Is “Norm Enforcing” or “Reign of Terror” displayed anywhere? Also I don’t think “Easy Going” really captures the “I Don’t Put Finger on Scales” position.
If the author’s policy is displayed somewhere and I just didn’t find it then this seems good enough to me as a Reader. I hope there is a solution that can make authors both like Eliezer and Wei happy. It will be nice to make Commenters happy also and I’ve thought less about that.
The place where it gets displayed is below the comment box when you start typing something:
It’s confusing for it to say “profile”. It should ideally say “user settings”, as the goal of that sentence was to explain to authors where they can set these and not to explain to readers where to find these. I’ll edit it.
Do the readers not want to see low quality comments, or is it more so the authors who don’t want to see them? And do the readers care primarily about the comments, or more so about the posts? The answer is probably “both” to both questions. Or at least, there are subsets of both groups that care about each.
There is also another important party, which I think people like Said, Zack M Davis, me, (maybe?) Viliam, etc. belong to, which is “commenters/authors concerned with the degradation of epistemic standards” caused by happy death spirals over applause lights, semantic stopsigns, postrationalist woo, etc.
Brainstorming: I wonder if it will be possible to have a subtle indicator at the bottom of the comment section for when comments have been silently modified by the author (such as a ban triggered). I think this may still be unfair to party 1, so perhaps there could instead be badges in prominent author profiles that indicate whether they fall into the “gardener” or “equal scales” position (plus perhaps a setting for users that is off by default but will allow them to see a note for when an article has silent moderations/restrictions by author) or a way for authors to display that they haven’t made any silent edits/restrictions?