LW Account Restricted: OK for me, but not sure about LessWrong
My LessWrong account has been restricted. [EDIT 20230413 11:49 - The restriction has been lifted. Thank you! ]
I’m alright with this. In fact, the restriction has turned out to be advantageous to me for the following reasons:
1-It inspired me to finally set up a Medium account and express my views on that platform.
[EDIT 20230413, 10:47 - I removed the link to the Medium account, because I have my writing sorted on my personal website (www.AmeliaJones.org https://www.AmeliaJones.org ) which then links to Medium. The previous LW stuff would mostly be under writing....AI, or writing...physics. There is also some right-brain type writing linked to from the website that was never on LW. ]
2-On the Medium platform, all my writing can be in one place. This even includes my short stories and poetry. And when it comes to writing on philosophical physics, I don’t have to worry that physics-oriented platforms will reject the writing for being too philosophical, while LW might reject it for not being philosophical enough. The writing can just exist for whatever it is worth in its own right.
3-The Medium platform will presumably have a larger and more diverse audience.
4-There is some comic potential in having my account restricted. I printed out the message about the restriction, and have it displayed on my desk. I don’t know exactly why it’s amusing. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I thought my writing was a healthy part of the dialog, when in actuality it must have really been annoying some people.
Yet, while the restriction does not necessarily harm me personally, I do have some concerns for the future of LW. I’ll include these concerns in responses to the message about the restriction. The message is in italic. My thoughts are in bold.
Hey amelia,
We’re generally tightening our moderation standards lately (see LW Team is adjusting moderation policy). This may feel like a significant shift in what the de-facto moderation standards. We’re leaning towards the default expectation being more like new users can periodically submit comments or posts for approval,
The “for approval” part concerns me a little. Does this mean any new user’s post will go through a moderator, and the moderator can decide to hide it from the rest of the LW audience, simply because they disagree with it? It seems this will stifle new ideas.
with gradually escalating privileges of how often they can comment that depends on being actively upvoted.
The upvoting part also concerns me. I think some readers use the karma vote based on whether they agree or disagree with the writer (and not whether the writer’s point was unusual, unique or well-argued). We know that groundbreaking ideas are often initially unpopular or deemed as “radical,” so I worry that the need for popularity might limit the voicing of such ideas.
You’ve been posting fairly frequently,
I made 7 posts, including drafts, in 59 days. If you add in comments on my posts, others’ posts, and replies to comments, that brings us to 24. I’m thinking that, for the good of LW, you might want to have a consistent standard, and publicize it, because some newbies might not realize what is meant by “frequent.”
[EDIT, 20230412 21:48, All but one of my comments were regarding my own posts. Somehow I feel obligated to reply w/my own comments to most comments on my posts, even if it’s just to say “Thanks for your feedback.”
So if you don’t count the comments on my own posts, then I’ve done 7 posts and 1 comment in 59 days. I can understand though if this is too much. You just might want to let future newbies know this.]
and my subjective impression
I won’t say anything to this, other than that it seems problematic.
as well as voting patterns suggest most people aren’t finding your comments sufficiently helpful.
Yeah, my comments received a net karma of +34, with 11 agree votes, and 1 disagree vote. However, my posts did receive a net −4 karma.
Generally, if I have an idea that I think everyone will agree with, or an idea that can be very easily argued, I don’t bother posting it—because such ideas don’t move the frontiers of philosophy forward. (I don’t really understand the point of posting something everyone already believes. How does that ever get us to a point of being “less wrong” tomorrow than we are today?)
Instead, I’ve tried to focus more on edge cases, unintuitive ideas, and unusual ideas, since those have not been covered as much or at all in some cases. I worry that if future newbies are subject to considering karma votes they will focus more on ideas everyone already believes, which doesn’t help anybody.
For now I’ve given you a 1-per-day rate limit, and may evaluate as we think more about the new standards.
As noted above, I’ve been way under the 1-per-day rate limit, so if future users are subjected to the same limit, it might not seem problematic at first. However, the problem I foresee is that comments tend to be conversational with other LW users. A person who is well under the 1-per-day rate limit might still need to post 5 or 6 comments on a particular day, when engaged in a discussion. The issue is that, in these cases, the conversation will need to be stretched out by 5 or 6 days. Furthermore, new posts tend to get the most immediate discussion the day they are posted, so a new user who makes a new post will have to respond to comments at a rate of one response per day, even though 10 comments might come in right away.
Because of this restriction, I’m moving all of my previous LW posts into draft mode, because the prospect of stretching any new conversations out over the course of weeks just sounds too painful. (I assume people can’t comment on posts in draft mode, but if they can, I’m sorry that I won’t be responding to them.)
[EDIT: 20230413, 10:53 Most of my LW posts are still available however, as I’ve been posting them to my new Medium blog, which I mentioned above.]
Also, obviously I won’t be able to reply to any comments on this post today, since I will have used up my one-per-day limit—so please don’t take my silence to imply rudeness, agreement, or disagreement. In fact, I probably won’t be using LW at all after this, but I wish you all the best.
(I see you asking for more feedback, which I think is super pretty reasonable thing to ask for but unfortunately I don’t have enough bandwidth for. Sorry about that.)
This was really nice. Yes, I can imagine it’s overwhelming with all the new posts coming in. I agree that moderation of very frequent posts is needed. I just wonder if it would be useful to have a consistent frequency standard, while overlooking karma.
FYI I appreciate this writeup (an awkward thing about the current situation with moderation is that I do strongly think some significant actions need to be taken, which are going to make some authors/commenters upset. I do care about those authors/commenters’ experience – it’s a major aspect of the overall site experience which is normally something I’d like to get user-interview feedback on, but there’s something awkward about asking “hey, we think you should somehow comment less, and we want to build tools that handle this semi-automatically because we’re busy… uh, which way of doing this feels least bad to you?”)
Some notes for now:
Our current (this week) set of moderation practices are a combination of “an experiment” and “a compromise with our current degree of tooling.” We’re building out new tools as we go. Right now we don’t have a distinction between rate-limiting posts and rate-limiting comments, but we’re working on it, and most likely in this case we’d have applied the post rate limit but not the commenting one.
We’re planning to modify the rate-limiting system so users can comment as much as they want on their own posts.”
The intent with rate-limiting is not “you’re permanently in a rate-limited box”, it’s a soft limit meant to encourage the user to change something about their posting behavior. The ideal outcome is that the user (re?)-reads the site guidelines, changes some thing about their commenting/posting behavior, and then the rate limit is retracted.
We’re working on various improvements to the /moderation page that make it easier to sanity-check the choices moderators are making, and I expect to fine-tune our response over time.
We’re thinking through how to write good top-level posts and onboarding-UI that help spell out our intended norms/vibe/site-culture in a way that feels actively positive rather than retroactively punishing.
That’s probably not that reassuring.
The situation is pretty difficult because there’s just a really huge amount of content that needs moderating (we’re spending a couple person-hours a day moderating it right now now while also building lots of new moderation features). That amount of content is increasing, so even if we decided to work fulltime on reading things thoroughly and providing good feedback right now, it wouldn’t be sustainable going forward.
People have suggested various ways of addressing this (such as outsourcing moderation to more established users, spreading the load around). I have various concerns and issues with that, which I’ll followup on when I have more time.
Rate limits are still very much an experiment. I’m hopeful that there’s an implementation that gets us a lot of value without much downside, but I think there are a lot ways to screw them up and do damage that I want to avoid. I’ve had the same thought 1/day (especially across for both posts and comments) is too little and stifles conversation.
I’m interested in alternative approaches to, e.g. the EA Forum has developed “your comments are automatically collapsed” as a moderation tool for users making less obviously good contributions, and I think that’s interesting.
Also, I’m sad whenever people look for an alternative place to post things. In my ideal (though likely unachievable) world, anyone could post anything to LessWrong and the site infrastructure would handle visibility perfectly so that things were only viewed by people wanted to see them (and in priority order of what they want to see). This would include poetry, personal, essays, etc. It’s just not a small project at all to achieve that, even though I wish it was just the case. Until then, we have to be more judicious with the users and content they create.
I’ll have a post up soon with more of my current thoughts and questions around moderation.
>Also, I’m sad whenever people look for an alternative place to post things. In my ideal (though likely unachievable) world, anyone could post anything to LessWrong and the site infrastructure would handle visibility perfectly so that things were only viewed by people wanted to see them (and in priority order of what they want to see).
This sounds nice but if taken far enough there’s a risk of fragmenting the site community into a bunch of partially overlapping sub-communities, a la the chaos of Twitter.
Similar to being able to reply freely to comments on our posts, it would be nice if we could reply freely to comments on our own comments.
I get why that feels reasonable, but I think that’s a fairly different situation. One of the main points of all this is so that post authors can have the kind of discussions they want on their posts, and one of the primary ways LessWrong often feels annoying is to have people asking confused 101 questions that then spawn a distracting conversation on what was supposed to be a 201 or 401 level post.
Is amelia currently able to respond to your comment, or is she unable to respond to comments on her post because she posted this? If so, that seems like a rather large flaw in the system. I realize you’re working on a solution tailored to this, but perhaps a less clunky system could be used, such as a 7/week limit?
I think they can actually make one more comment (there’s a separate rate limit for comments and posts in the current system). The effort involved in making it 7/week is roughly the same as the effort to just allow unlimited commenting on your own posts and I’ll just try and fix that soon.
Update: I’ve mostly completed a PR that enables rate limited authors to comment on their own posts without (nonstandard) limits. It’s not quite ready to ship tonight.
Meanwhile, reviewing Amelia’s posts in more depth, I’m not actually sure I endorse the rate limit (the message they got was mostly a template-message, not making a strong claim about her content). Meanwhile looking over her comments they seemed mostly fine. I’m revoking the rate limit for now.
I generally want to express/reiterate sadness at the situation where “clearly, most commenters deserve a fair shake, and a reasonably thorough evaluation rather than relying on rough heuristics”. I’m still pretty unsettled on the best way to handle it but most of the options seem Differently Bad.
Raemon, thank you very much for lifting the restriction on my account! I’m sure it’s extremely challenging to maintain high LW standards, while at the same time trying to promote open dialog with differing perspectives. I don’t envy your job, but I really appreciate the work you do.
In the short term, I might not take full advantage of my restored liberty. I’ve started using my personal website (www.AmeliaJones.org) for both AI art projects and all my writing (not just LW writing). The writing will have links to Medium blog posts, so people can comment as much as they choose. It’s actually turning out to be easier for me to do things this way. However, depending on whether I get any visibility or feedback via this method, I might return to LW for niche writing projects in the longer term.
Thanks again for lifting the restriction, and for the important work you do.
Best wishes,
Amelia
Btw, the OP user page says “No Comments Found” when I open it (and doesn’t display any comments in the Comments section), even though it also indicates that there are “24 comments” (in the stats line at the top). But the replies page works.
This is a known bug that occurs when all of the first page of comments are on posts that you can’t see (because the posts were deleted or moved to drafts).
I’m curious what posts have disappeared from @amelia.
Thanks for being curious! I’ve begun using my personal website (AmeliaJones.org) as a place for all my work. From there, I will have links to Medium blog posts. (Posts that were previously on LW would mostly be under the writing....philosophy, or writing....physics categories on the website.) I appreciate your interest!
Moderation is a delicate thing. It seems like the team is looking for a certain type of discourse, mainly higher level and well thought out interactions. If that is the goal of the platform then that should be stated and whatever measures they take to get there is their prerogative. A willingness to iterate on policy, experimenting and changing it depending on the audience and such is probably a good idea.
I do like the idea of a more general place where you can write about a wider variety of topics. I really like LessWrong, the aesthetic the quality of posts. A think a set of features for dividing up posts besides the tags would be great. Types of posts that are specifically for discussion like “All AGI Safety Questions” where you beginners can learn and eventually work their way up into higher level conversations. Something like this would be a good way to encourage the Err part without diluting the discourse on the posts that should have that standard.
Like short post, post and question, but more and filterable. A type of post for quickly putting down an idea. Then a curious observer might provide feedback that could improve it. A ranking system where a post starts out like a quick messy idea but through a collaborative iterative process could end up being a front-page post.
There are a lot of interesting possibilities and I would love to see some features that improved the conversation rather than moderation that controlled the conversation.
I kind of hope they aren’t actively filtering in favor of AI discussion as that’s what the AI Alignment forum is for. We’ll see how this all goes down, but the team has been very responsive to the community in the past. I expect when they suss out specifically what they want, they’ll post a summary and take comments. In the meantime, I’m taking an optimistic wait-and-see position on this one.
I wonder what the cost would be of having another ‘parallel’ site, running on the same software but with less restrictive norms, just as the AI Alignment forum has more restrictive norms than LessWrong.
I don’t think they are filtering for AI. That was ill said, and not my intention, thanks for catching it. I am going to edit that piece out.
To the people who upvoted this post,
Thank you very much for the support. As you maybe saw below, the restriction on my account has been lifted!
As I also mentioned below, I might not take advantage of the restored liberty in the short term. I’ve already begun consolidating all my writing on my personal website (AmeliaJones.org), with links to Medium blog posts for the writing. (The writing that was on LW would mostly be under writing...AI, or writing....physics. There are also short stories and other right-brain type stuff, but I don’t think LW folks would be too interested in that i.e. just ignore it.)
However, I might return to LW in the longer term. For now, please don’t be offended if I don’t respond to comments on this post. I don’t think I will be checking in too often. This will allow me to focus more on my new platform.
Warmest wishes to all of you, and thanks again for the support when I really needed it,
Amelia
Best of luck to you, whatever you decide!