I have argued a lot for my views! My sense is they are broadly (though not universally) accepted among what I consider the relevant set of core stakeholders for LessWrong.
But beyond that, the core set of stakeholders is also pretty united behind the meta-view that in order for a place like LessWrong to work, you need the culture to be driven by someone with taste, who trusts their own judgements on matters of culture, and you should not expect that you will get consensus on most things.
My sense is there is broad buy-in that under-moderation is a much bigger issue than over-moderation. And also ‘convincing people in the comments’ doesn’t actually like… do anything. You would have to be able to convince every single person who is causing harm to the site, which of course is untenable and unrealistic. At some point, after you explained your reasons, you have to actually enforce the things that you argued for.
In the beginning, while the community is still thriving, censorship seems like a terrible and unnecessary imposition. Things are still going fine. It’s just one fool, and if we can’t tolerate just one fool, well, we must not be very tolerant. Perhaps the fool will give up and go away, without any need of censorship. And if the whole community has become just that much less fun to be a part of… mere fun doesn’t seem like a good justification for (gasp!) censorship, any more than disliking someone’s looks seems like a good reason to punch them in the nose.
(But joining a community is a strictly voluntary process, and if prospective new members don’t like your looks, they won’t join in the first place.)
And after all—who will be the censor? Who can possibly be trusted with such power?
Quite a lot of people, probably, in any well-kept garden. But if the garden is even a little divided within itself —if there are factions—if there are people who hang out in the community despite not much trusting the moderator or whoever could potentially wield the banhammer—
(for such internal politics often seem like a matter of far greater import than mere invading barbarians)
—then trying to defend the community is typically depicted as a coup attempt. Who is this one who dares appoint themselves as judge and executioner? Do they think their ownership of the server means they own the people? Own our community? Do they think that control over the source code makes them a god?
I confess, for a while I didn’t even understand why communities had such trouble defending themselves—I thought it was pure naivete. It didn’t occur to me that it was an egalitarian instinct to prevent chieftains from getting too much power. “None of us are bigger than one another, all of us are men and can fight; I am going to get my arrows”, was the saying in one hunter-gatherer tribe whose name I forget. (Because among humans, unlike chimpanzees, weapons are an equalizer—the tribal chieftain seems to be an invention of agriculture, when people can’t just walk away any more.)
Maybe it’s because I grew up on the Internet in places where there was always a sysop, and so I take for granted that whoever runs the server has certain responsibilities. Maybe I understand on a gut level that the opposite of censorship is not academia but 4chan (which probably still has mechanisms to prevent spam). Maybe because I grew up in that wide open space where the freedom that mattered was the freedom to choose a well-kept garden that you liked and that liked you, as if you actually could find a country with good laws. Maybe because I take it for granted that if you don’t like the archwizard, the thing to do is walk away (this did happen to me once, and I did indeed just walk away).
And maybe because I, myself, have often been the one running the server. But I am consistent, usually being first in line to support moderators—even when they’re on the other side from me of the internal politics. I know what happens when an online community starts questioning its moderators. Any political enemy I have on a mailing list who’s popular enough to be dangerous is probably not someone who would abuse that particular power of censorship, and when they put on their moderator’s hat, I vocally support them—they need urging on, not restraining. People who’ve grown up in academia simply don’t realize how strong are the walls of exclusion that keep the trolls out of their lovely garden of “free speech”.
Any community that really needs to question its moderators, that really seriously has abusive moderators, is probably not worth saving. But this is more accused than realized, so far as I can see.
In any case the light didn’t go on in my head about egalitarian instincts (instincts to prevent leaders from exercising power) killing online communities until just recently. While reading a comment at Less Wrong, in fact, though I don’t recall which one.
But I have seen it happen—over and over, with myself urging the moderators on and supporting them whether they were people I liked or not, and the moderators still not doing enough to prevent the slow decay. Being too humble, doubting themselves an order of magnitude more than I would have doubted them. It was a rationalist hangout, and the third besetting sin of rationalists is underconfidence.
This about the Internet: Anyone can walk in. And anyone can walk out. And so an online community must stay fun to stay alive. Waiting until the last resort of absolute, blatent, undeniable egregiousness—waiting as long as a police officer would wait to open fire—indulging your conscience and the virtues you learned in walled fortresses, waiting until you can be certain you are in the right, and fear no questioning looks—is waiting far too late.
I have seen rationalist communities die because they trusted their moderators too little.[1]
I have very extensively argued for my moderation principles, and also LessWrong has very extensively argued about the basic premise of Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism. Of course, not everyone agrees, but both of these seem to me to I think create a pretty good asymmetric-weapons case for the things that I am de-facto doing as a head moderator.
The post also ends with a call for people to downvote more, which I also mostly agree with, but also it just seems quite clear that de-facto a voting system is not sufficient to avoid these dynamics.
the core set of stakeholders is pretty united behind the meta-view that in order for a place like LessWrong to work, you need the ability to have a culture be driven by someone with taste
Sorry, I don’t understand how this is consistent with the Public Archipelago doctrine, which I thought was motivated by different people wanting to have different kinds of discussions? I don’t think healthy cultures are driven by a dictator; I think cultures emerge from the interaction of their diverse members. We don’t all have to have exactly the same taste in order to share a website.
I maintain hope that your taste is compatible with me and my friends and collaborators continuing to be able to use the website under the same rules as everyone else, as we have been doing for fifteen years. I have dedicated much of my adult life to the project of human rationality. (I was at the first Overcoming Bias meetup in February 2008.) If Less Wrong is publicly understood as the single conversational locus for people interested in the project of rationality, but its culture weren’t compatible with me and my friends and collaborators doing the intellectual work we’ve spent our lives doing here, that would be huge problem for my life’s work. I’ve made a lot of life decisions and investments of effort on the assumption that this is my well-kept garden, too; that I am not a “weed.” I trust you understand the seriousness of my position.
And also ‘convincing people in the comments’ doesn’t actually like … do anything.
Well, it depends on what cultural problem you’re trying to solve, right? If the problem you’re worried about is “Authors have to deal with unwanted comments, and the existing site functionality of user-level bans isn’t quite solving that problem yet, either because people don’t know about the feature or are uncomfortable using it”, you could publicize the feature more and encourage people to use it.
That wouldn’t involve any changes to site policy; it would just be a matter of someone using speech to tell people about already-existing site functionality and thus to organically change the local culture.
It wouldn’t even need to be a moderator: I thought about unilaterally making my own “PSA: You Can Ban Users From Commenting on Your Posts” post, but decided against it, because the post I could honestly write in my own voice wouldn’t be optimal for addressing the problems that I think you perceive.
That is, speaking for myself in my own voice, I have been persuaded by Wei Dai’s arguments that user bans aren’t good because they censor criticism, which results in less accurate shared maps; I think people who use the feature (especially liberally) could be said to be making a rationality mistake. But crucially, that’s just my opinion, my own belief. I’m capable of sharing a website with other people who don’t believe the same things as me. I hope those people feel the same way about me.
My understanding is that you don’t think that popularizing existing site functionality solves the cultural problems you perceive, because you’re worried about users “heap[ing] [...] scorn and snark and social punishment” on e.g. their own shortform. I maintain hope that this class of concern can be addressed somehow, perhaps by appropriately chosen clear rules about what sorts of speech are allowed on the topics of particular user bans or the user ban feature itself.
I think clear rules are important in an Archipelago-type approach for defining how the different islands in the archipelago interact. Attitudes towards things like snark is one of the key dimensions along which I’d expect the islands in an archipelago to vary.
I fear you might find this frustrating, but I’m afraid I still don’t have a good grasp of your conceptualization of what constitutes social punishment. I get the impression that in many cases, what me and my friends and collaborators would consider “sharing one’s honest opinion when it happens to be contextually relevant (including negative opinions, including opinions about people)”, you would consider social punishment. To be clear, it’s not that I’m pretending to be so socially retarded that I literally don’t understand the concept that sharing negative opinions is often intended as a social attack. (I think for many extreme cases, the two of us would agree on characterizing some speech as unambiguously an attack.)
Rather, the concern is that a policy of forbidding speech that could be construed as social punishment would have a chilling effect on speech that is legitimate and necessary towards the site’s mission (particularly if it’s not clear to users how moderators are drawing the category boundary of “social punishment”). I think you can see why this is a serious concern: for example, it would be bad if you were required to pretend that people’s praise of the Trump administration’s AI Action plan was in good faith if you don’t actually think that (because bad faith accusations can be construed as social punishment).
I just want to preserve the status quo where me and my friends and collaborators can keep using the same website we’ve been using for fifteen years under the same terms as everyone else. I think the status quo is fine. You want to get back to work. (Your real work, not whatever this is.) I want to get back to work. I think we can choose to get back to work.
We don’t all have to have exactly the same taste in order to share a website.
Please don’t strawman me. I said no such thing, or anything that implies such things. Of course not everyone needs to have exactly the same taste to share a website. What I said is that the site needs taste to be properly moderated, which of course does not imply everyone on it needs to share that exact taste. You occupy spaces moderated by people with different tastes from you and the other people within it all the time.
I maintain hope that your taste is compatible with me and my friends and collaborators continuing to be able to use the website under the same rules as everyone else, as we have been doing for fifteen years. I have dedicated much of my adult life to the project of human rationality. (I was at the first Overcoming Bias meetup in February 2008.) If Less Wrong is publicly understood as the single conversational locus for people interested in the project of rationality, but its culture weren’t compatible with me and my friends and collaborators doing the intellectual work we’ve spent our lives doing here, that would be huge problem for my life’s work. I’ve made a lot of life decisions and investments of effort on the assumption that this is my well-kept garden, too; that I am not a “weed.” I trust you understand the seriousness of my position.
Yep, moderation sucks, competing access needs are real, and not everyone can share the same space, even within a broader archipelago (especially if one is determined to tear down that very archipelago). I do think you probably won’t get what you desire. I am genuinely sorry for this. I wish you good luck.[1]
Rather, the concern is that a policy of forbidding speech that could be construed as social punishment would have a chilling effect on speech that is legitimate and necessary towards the site’s mission (particularly if it’s not clear to users how moderators are drawing the category boundary of “social punishment”).
Look, various commenters on LW including Said have caused much much stronger chilling effects than any moderation policy we have ever created, or will ever create. It is not hard to drive people out of a social space. You just have to be persistent and obnoxious and rules-lawyer every attempt at policing you. It really works with almost perfect reliability.
forbidding speech that could be construed as social punishment
And of course, nobody at any point was arguing (and indeed I was careful to repeatedly clarify) that all speech that could be construed as social punishment is to be forbidden. Many people will try to socially punish other people. The thing that one needs to reign in to create any kind of functional culture is social punishments of the virtues and values that are good and should be supported and are the lifeblood of the site by my lights.
The absence of moderation does not create some special magical place in which speech can flow freely and truth can be seen clearly. You are welcome to go and share your opinions on 4chan or Facebook or Twitter or any other unmoderated place on the internet if you think that is how this works. You could even start posting on DataSecretLox if you are looking for something with more similar demographics as this place, and a moderation philosophy more akin to your own. The internet is full of places with no censorship, with nothing that should stand in the way of the truth by your lights, and you are free to contribute there.
My models of online platforms say that if you want a place with good discussion the first priority is to optimize its signal-to-noise ratio, and make it be a place that sets the right social incentives. It is not anywhere close to the top priority to worry about every perspective you might be excluding when you are moderating. You are always excluding 99% of all positions. The question is whether you are making any kind of functional discussion space happen at all. The key to doing that is not absence of moderation, it’s presence of functional norms that produce a functional culture, which requires both leading by example and selection and pruning.
I also more broadly have little interest in continuing this thread, so don’t expect further comments from me. Good luck. I expect I’ll write more some other time.
The thing that one needs to reign in to create any kind of functional culture is social punishments of the virtues and values that are good and should be supported and are the lifeblood of the site by my lights.
Well, I agree with all of that except the last three words. Except that it seems to me that the things that you’d need to reign in is the social (and administrative) punishment that you are doing, not anything else.
I’ve been reviewing older discussions lately. I’ve come to the conclusion that the most disruptive effects by far, among all discussions that I’ve been involved with, were created directly and exclusively by the LW moderators, and that if the mods had simply done absolutely nothing at all, most of those disruptions just wouldn’t have happened.
The only reason—the only reason!—why a simple question ended up leading to a three-digit-comment-count “meta” discussion about “moderation norms” and so on, was because you started that discussion. You, personally. If you had just done literally nothing at all, it would have been completely fine. A simple question would’ve been asked and then answered. Some productive follow-up discussion would’ve taken place. And that’s all.
Many such cases.
The absence of moderation does not create some special magical place in which speech can flow freely and truth can be seen clearly.
It’s a good thing, then, that nobody in this discussion has called for the “absence of moderation”…
My models of online platforms say that if you want a place with good discussion the first priority is to optimize its signal-to-noise ratio, and make it be a place that sets the right social incentives.
Thanks Said. As you know, I have little interest in this discussion with you, as we have litigated it many times.
Please don’t respond further to my comments. I am still thinking about this, but I will likely issue you a proper ban in the next few days. You will probably have an opportunity to say some final words if you desire.
The only reason—the only reason!—why a simple question ended up leading to a three-digit-comment-count “meta” discussion about “moderation norms” and so on, was because you started that discussion. You, personally. If you had just done literally nothing at all, it would have been completely fine. A simple question would’ve been asked and then answered. Some productive follow-up discussion would’ve taken place. And that’s all.
Look, this just feels like a kind of crazy catch-22. I weak-downvoted a comment, and answered a question you asked about why someone would downvote your comment. I was not responsible for anything but a small fraction of the relevant votes, nor do I consider any blame to have fallen upon me when honestly explaining my case for a weak-downvote. I did not start anything. You asked a question, I answered it, trying to be helpful in understanding where the votes came from.
It really is extremely predictable that if you ask a question about why a thing was downvoted, that you will get a meta conversation about what is appropriate on the site and what is not.
But again, please, let this rest. Find some other place to be. I am very likely the only moderator for this site that you are going to get, and as you seem to think my moderation is cause for much of your bad experiences, there is little hope in that changing for you. You are not going to change my mind in the 701st hour of comment thread engagement, if you didn’t succeed in the first 700.
I have argued a lot for my views! My sense is they are broadly (though not universally) accepted among what I consider the relevant set of core stakeholders for LessWrong.
But beyond that, the core set of stakeholders is also pretty united behind the meta-view that in order for a place like LessWrong to work, you need the culture to be driven by someone with taste, who trusts their own judgements on matters of culture, and you should not expect that you will get consensus on most things.
My sense is there is broad buy-in that under-moderation is a much bigger issue than over-moderation. And also ‘convincing people in the comments’ doesn’t actually like… do anything. You would have to be able to convince every single person who is causing harm to the site, which of course is untenable and unrealistic. At some point, after you explained your reasons, you have to actually enforce the things that you argued for.
See of course the standard Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism:
I have very extensively argued for my moderation principles, and also LessWrong has very extensively argued about the basic premise of Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism. Of course, not everyone agrees, but both of these seem to me to I think create a pretty good asymmetric-weapons case for the things that I am de-facto doing as a head moderator.
The post also ends with a call for people to downvote more, which I also mostly agree with, but also it just seems quite clear that de-facto a voting system is not sufficient to avoid these dynamics.
Sorry, I don’t understand how this is consistent with the Public Archipelago doctrine, which I thought was motivated by different people wanting to have different kinds of discussions? I don’t think healthy cultures are driven by a dictator; I think cultures emerge from the interaction of their diverse members. We don’t all have to have exactly the same taste in order to share a website.
I maintain hope that your taste is compatible with me and my friends and collaborators continuing to be able to use the website under the same rules as everyone else, as we have been doing for fifteen years. I have dedicated much of my adult life to the project of human rationality. (I was at the first Overcoming Bias meetup in February 2008.) If Less Wrong is publicly understood as the single conversational locus for people interested in the project of rationality, but its culture weren’t compatible with me and my friends and collaborators doing the intellectual work we’ve spent our lives doing here, that would be huge problem for my life’s work. I’ve made a lot of life decisions and investments of effort on the assumption that this is my well-kept garden, too; that I am not a “weed.” I trust you understand the seriousness of my position.
Well, it depends on what cultural problem you’re trying to solve, right? If the problem you’re worried about is “Authors have to deal with unwanted comments, and the existing site functionality of user-level bans isn’t quite solving that problem yet, either because people don’t know about the feature or are uncomfortable using it”, you could publicize the feature more and encourage people to use it.
That wouldn’t involve any changes to site policy; it would just be a matter of someone using speech to tell people about already-existing site functionality and thus to organically change the local culture.
It wouldn’t even need to be a moderator: I thought about unilaterally making my own “PSA: You Can Ban Users From Commenting on Your Posts” post, but decided against it, because the post I could honestly write in my own voice wouldn’t be optimal for addressing the problems that I think you perceive.
That is, speaking for myself in my own voice, I have been persuaded by Wei Dai’s arguments that user bans aren’t good because they censor criticism, which results in less accurate shared maps; I think people who use the feature (especially liberally) could be said to be making a rationality mistake. But crucially, that’s just my opinion, my own belief. I’m capable of sharing a website with other people who don’t believe the same things as me. I hope those people feel the same way about me.
My understanding is that you don’t think that popularizing existing site functionality solves the cultural problems you perceive, because you’re worried about users “heap[ing] [...] scorn and snark and social punishment” on e.g. their own shortform. I maintain hope that this class of concern can be addressed somehow, perhaps by appropriately chosen clear rules about what sorts of speech are allowed on the topics of particular user bans or the user ban feature itself.
I think clear rules are important in an Archipelago-type approach for defining how the different islands in the archipelago interact. Attitudes towards things like snark is one of the key dimensions along which I’d expect the islands in an archipelago to vary.
I fear you might find this frustrating, but I’m afraid I still don’t have a good grasp of your conceptualization of what constitutes social punishment. I get the impression that in many cases, what me and my friends and collaborators would consider “sharing one’s honest opinion when it happens to be contextually relevant (including negative opinions, including opinions about people)”, you would consider social punishment. To be clear, it’s not that I’m pretending to be so socially retarded that I literally don’t understand the concept that sharing negative opinions is often intended as a social attack. (I think for many extreme cases, the two of us would agree on characterizing some speech as unambiguously an attack.)
Rather, the concern is that a policy of forbidding speech that could be construed as social punishment would have a chilling effect on speech that is legitimate and necessary towards the site’s mission (particularly if it’s not clear to users how moderators are drawing the category boundary of “social punishment”). I think you can see why this is a serious concern: for example, it would be bad if you were required to pretend that people’s praise of the Trump administration’s AI Action plan was in good faith if you don’t actually think that (because bad faith accusations can be construed as social punishment).
I just want to preserve the status quo where me and my friends and collaborators can keep using the same website we’ve been using for fifteen years under the same terms as everyone else. I think the status quo is fine. You want to get back to work. (Your real work, not whatever this is.) I want to get back to work. I think we can choose to get back to work.
Please don’t strawman me. I said no such thing, or anything that implies such things. Of course not everyone needs to have exactly the same taste to share a website. What I said is that the site needs taste to be properly moderated, which of course does not imply everyone on it needs to share that exact taste. You occupy spaces moderated by people with different tastes from you and the other people within it all the time.
Yep, moderation sucks, competing access needs are real, and not everyone can share the same space, even within a broader archipelago (especially if one is determined to tear down that very archipelago). I do think you probably won’t get what you desire. I am genuinely sorry for this. I wish you good luck.[1]
Look, various commenters on LW including Said have caused much much stronger chilling effects than any moderation policy we have ever created, or will ever create. It is not hard to drive people out of a social space. You just have to be persistent and obnoxious and rules-lawyer every attempt at policing you. It really works with almost perfect reliability.
And of course, nobody at any point was arguing (and indeed I was careful to repeatedly clarify) that all speech that could be construed as social punishment is to be forbidden. Many people will try to socially punish other people. The thing that one needs to reign in to create any kind of functional culture is social punishments of the virtues and values that are good and should be supported and are the lifeblood of the site by my lights.
The absence of moderation does not create some special magical place in which speech can flow freely and truth can be seen clearly. You are welcome to go and share your opinions on 4chan or Facebook or Twitter or any other unmoderated place on the internet if you think that is how this works. You could even start posting on DataSecretLox if you are looking for something with more similar demographics as this place, and a moderation philosophy more akin to your own. The internet is full of places with no censorship, with nothing that should stand in the way of the truth by your lights, and you are free to contribute there.
My models of online platforms say that if you want a place with good discussion the first priority is to optimize its signal-to-noise ratio, and make it be a place that sets the right social incentives. It is not anywhere close to the top priority to worry about every perspective you might be excluding when you are moderating. You are always excluding 99% of all positions. The question is whether you are making any kind of functional discussion space happen at all. The key to doing that is not absence of moderation, it’s presence of functional norms that produce a functional culture, which requires both leading by example and selection and pruning.
I also more broadly have little interest in continuing this thread, so don’t expect further comments from me. Good luck. I expect I’ll write more some other time.
Like, as in, I will probably ban Said.
Well, I agree with all of that except the last three words. Except that it seems to me that the things that you’d need to reign in is the social (and administrative) punishment that you are doing, not anything else.
I’ve been reviewing older discussions lately. I’ve come to the conclusion that the most disruptive effects by far, among all discussions that I’ve been involved with, were created directly and exclusively by the LW moderators, and that if the mods had simply done absolutely nothing at all, most of those disruptions just wouldn’t have happened.
I mean, take this discussion. I asked a simple question about the post. The author of the post (himself an LW mod!), when he got around to answering the question, had absolutely no trouble giving a perfectly coherent and reasonable answer. Neither did he show any signs of perceiving the question to be problematic in any way. And the testimony of multiple other commenters (including from longtime members who had contributed many useful comments over the years) affirmed that my question made sense and was highly relevant to the core point of the post.
The only reason—the only reason!—why a simple question ended up leading to a three-digit-comment-count “meta” discussion about “moderation norms” and so on, was because you started that discussion. You, personally. If you had just done literally nothing at all, it would have been completely fine. A simple question would’ve been asked and then answered. Some productive follow-up discussion would’ve taken place. And that’s all.
Many such cases.
It’s a good thing, then, that nobody in this discussion has called for the “absence of moderation”…
I certainly agree with this.
Thanks Said. As you know, I have little interest in this discussion with you, as we have litigated it many times.
Please don’t respond further to my comments. I am still thinking about this, but I will likely issue you a proper ban in the next few days. You will probably have an opportunity to say some final words if you desire.
Look, this just feels like a kind of crazy catch-22. I weak-downvoted a comment, and answered a question you asked about why someone would downvote your comment. I was not responsible for anything but a small fraction of the relevant votes, nor do I consider any blame to have fallen upon me when honestly explaining my case for a weak-downvote. I did not start anything. You asked a question, I answered it, trying to be helpful in understanding where the votes came from.
It really is extremely predictable that if you ask a question about why a thing was downvoted, that you will get a meta conversation about what is appropriate on the site and what is not.
But again, please, let this rest. Find some other place to be. I am very likely the only moderator for this site that you are going to get, and as you seem to think my moderation is cause for much of your bad experiences, there is little hope in that changing for you. You are not going to change my mind in the 701st hour of comment thread engagement, if you didn’t succeed in the first 700.