I think there is a decent chance I would have asked people to move the discussion somewhere else as well (as a post author not as a LW moderator), not with any particular interest of hiding information, but because I have models about what kind of conversation tends to go well or badly online.
It’s obvious to me that the relevant discussion would have probably derailed and consumed the whole rest of the conversation, not in particularly productive ways, even if it had important true things in it. The post is not centrally about Nate, but about generalized strategies, and interpersonal drama tends to consume all.
I really really want authors on LW to feel more comfortable not less comfortable moving comments off of their post to somewhere else on the site.
This actually made me think the right UI for authors might be that instead of having a “delete from post” button, we have a “move to open thread” button, which leaves a small note behind indicating that a comment thread has been moved to the open thread, and then discussion can continue there. I’ll think about it for a while.
(Relatedly, I have vastly overspent my “how much I have time to discuss LW moderation things” in the past 2 weeks, so I probably won’t participate much in the discussion in as much as anyone wants to respond, and also, I have learned that generalized moderation discussions are best had not in the middle of a fight between people who have very strong feelings)
This actually made me think the right UI for authors might be that instead of having a “delete from post” button, we have a “move to open thread” button, which leaves a small note behind indicating that a comment thread has been moved to the open thread, and then discussion can continue there. I’ll think about it for a while.
I strongly endorse this.
Data Secrets Lox makes very heavy use of the “move post”/“split topic”/“merge topics” functionality of the forum software we use, and it works spectacularly well. It almost completely defuses or prevents a huge swath of arguments, disagreements, annoyances, etc. about what’s appropriate to post when and where, etc.
Thanks to this capability, DSL is able to maintain a policy of “never delete content” (except for obvious spam, or content that is outright illegal), while still ensuring that discussions don’t get clogged up with totally off-topic digressions.
Moving/splitting/merging instead of deletion makes a forum much more pleasant to use.
I think there is a decent chance I would have asked people to move the discussion somewhere else as well (as a post author not as a LW moderator), not with any particular interest of hiding information, but because I have models about what kind of conversation tends to go well or badly online.
It’s obvious to me that the relevant discussion would have probably derailed and consumed the whole rest of the conversation, not in particularly productive ways, even if it had important true things in it. The post is not centrally about Nate, but about generalized strategies, and interpersonal drama tends to consume all.
I really really want authors on LW to feel more comfortable not less comfortable moving comments off of their post to somewhere else on the site.
This actually made me think the right UI for authors might be that instead of having a “delete from post” button, we have a “move to open thread” button, which leaves a small note behind indicating that a comment thread has been moved to the open thread, and then discussion can continue there. I’ll think about it for a while.
(Relatedly, I have vastly overspent my “how much I have time to discuss LW moderation things” in the past 2 weeks, so I probably won’t participate much in the discussion in as much as anyone wants to respond, and also, I have learned that generalized moderation discussions are best had not in the middle of a fight between people who have very strong feelings)
I strongly endorse this.
Data Secrets Lox makes very heavy use of the “move post”/“split topic”/“merge topics” functionality of the forum software we use, and it works spectacularly well. It almost completely defuses or prevents a huge swath of arguments, disagreements, annoyances, etc. about what’s appropriate to post when and where, etc.
Thanks to this capability, DSL is able to maintain a policy of “never delete content” (except for obvious spam, or content that is outright illegal), while still ensuring that discussions don’t get clogged up with totally off-topic digressions.
Moving/splitting/merging instead of deletion makes a forum much more pleasant to use.