Since we’ve already spent quite awhile discussing this, I’d kinda like to ask you to do the work of summarizing your understanding of our current position before re-explaining it to you.
I’m feeling a bit trapped in a “I would like to resolve this more with Wei Dai in particular, but, I don’t want to fall into the generic trap of restating our positions over and over in a way that will predictably not lead anyone to change their mind.” So I think I’m interested in discussing it more to the extent that we have some plan for building on the previous discussion rather than rehashing.
Whether LW should allow unilateral author moderation at all? I’ve already given up on trying to convince the LW team about this. Are you saying that you want to reopen this issue? Or,
Whether you endorse the specific kind of moderation that Tsvi did, namely to ban someone without warning, and then try to discuss it afterwards? I don’t think I’ve seen the mods talk about this before, hence I have no understanding of your position and am asking about it for the first time?
I guess what I meant was “I think my beliefs about #2 are fairly derivable from what I or Oli or Ben said in the past, and I can’t remember whether I, Oli or Ben already answered this specific question, and didn’t feel obligated to do all the work of checking myself.”
But, I don’t know if that was exactly fair either, I went ahead and answered the question for now.
I guess a tl;dr is I don’t think Tsvi’s approach here was perfect, and sometimes ban-first is bad. (it depends. all else equal it’s better for people to put more work into moderating well. But, things are usually not equal and moderating is extremely expensive).
But, the part where he unbanned you a day later, and wrote up a post that included Tsvi himself as an example of a bad pattern he’d like to address, makes me feel like this particular case is overall reasonable. If he hadn’t done that, I’d probably be talking privately with Tsvi about it and trying to find something better.
but in my case I simply have little to no motivation for talking with Tsvi at this point
Note that, in the original case, Tsvi had little-to-no-motivation for talking to you (presumably, since he banned you). I don’t think you exactly mean this, but this comes across to me as something like “when I do something that results in an author no longer wanting to talk to me, he should suck it up and keep talking to me. But, when they do something that leads me to no longer wanting to talk to them, that’s on them.”
Presumably you see the cases as being importantly different. That might be, but, I’m not automatically granting that assumption.
A difference is that Tsvi is still plenty motivated to talk on a meta level (about why he banned me), as evidenced by this post. So he could have easily said “I no longer want to talk about the object level. I think you’re doing a bad thing, [explanation …], please change your behavior if you agree, or let me know why you don’t (on the meta level).” Or “I’m writing up an explanation of what you’re doing wrong in this thread. Let’s pause this discussion until I finish it.”
Or if he actually doesn’t want to talk at all, he could have said “I’m getting really annoyed so I’m disengaging.” or “I think you’re doing a bad thing here, here’s a short explanation but I don’t want to discuss it further. Please stop it or I’ll ban you.”
Note that I’m not endorsing banning or threat of banning in an absolute sense, just suggesting that all of these are more “pro-social” than banning someone out of the blue with no warning. None of these involve asking him to “suck it up and keep talking to me” or otherwise impose a large cost on him.
Yeah I agree it’s much more pro-social to give more warning and opportunity for back-and-forth.
I also think there are ways of banning that are anti-social. But, I think people’s expectations about how costly moderation is and how valuable it is are out-of-whack enough that I generally am focused on advocating the zero-point set to “moderating at all is almost always pro-social, and moderating well is even more pro-social.”
I think it is true that authors should learn to suck up a bit of “okay, moderating well kinda sucks but it is worth taking-one-for-the-team to do it well.” But, also, commenters should suck it up a bit about cutting moderators and authors some slack about it. Partly because it’s hard in general, and partly because doing it well requires getting practice at it.
As I said earlier, I would see the situation differently if Tsvi hadn’t made this followup post and unbanned you, at least long enough to hash out the disagreement more. I agree that the initial bit was more abrupt than I’d want people to emulate as best practice. I think following it up the next day with a detailed post explaining the problem as he saw it, unbanning, and including himself as an example is one of the better-practices one could hope for.
I would hope, in the future, Tsvi is a bit more chill about it and doesn’t do it as knee-jerkily.
FYI an aspect of my experience is briefly thinking “Huh, I wonder what are norms around user-to-user-banning?”, and then not trying to find anything about that, and instead just assuming that it’s kinda like a twitter block (in particular, mostly it’s up to the banner’s discretion in order to make their experience work for them), and doing the ban. It sounds like user-bans are considered much more weighty than twitter blocks. This makes some sense, since the structures of the forums are pretty different; not saying I was justified in not processing the difference; I’m just noting descriptively that my (angry) awareness didn’t include much awareness of this difference. I’d suggest having a link to some description of the meaning / intended use of a user-ban near the interface element for that; possibly even with a confirmation warning dialogue thing like “are you sure? have you read the thing?”.
Definitely makes sense to put clearer guidance on how to use various mod powers as an author.
There’s an issue where people might treat them differently.
Part of my model here, which probably wouldn’t make sense as part of the mod-guidance, is that Wei Dai has been around awhile and has a good track record of generally thoughtful contribution. Also, he’s like one of ~20 people who probably will be able to meaningfully contribute to (some of) the topics I think you want to talk about. So, I think it would have made more sense to put more effort into back-and-forth in that case.
Bowing out for now because I strongly suspect Tsvi has been strongly downvoting all or most of my comments in this thread. Maybe will pick it up later, in a different venue.
Nod. Fwiw I notice myself also getting downvoted. I think conversations like this have a lot of random downvoting and voting-tug-of-war that’s mostly about a few people with strong opinions.
This thread has reminded me that there’s IMO something lacking about how our voting system handles arguments (where it’s easy for a couple people to make the whole experience feel bad and anxiety inducing which punishes any individual thought). I’m not sure what to do instead but it feels like the status quo isn’t great.
Since we’ve already spent quite awhile discussing this, I’d kinda like to ask you to do the work of summarizing your understanding of our current position before re-explaining it to you.
I’m feeling a bit trapped in a “I would like to resolve this more with Wei Dai in particular, but, I don’t want to fall into the generic trap of restating our positions over and over in a way that will predictably not lead anyone to change their mind.” So I think I’m interested in discussing it more to the extent that we have some plan for building on the previous discussion rather than rehashing.
My understanding of your position on what? Is it:
Whether LW should allow unilateral author moderation at all? I’ve already given up on trying to convince the LW team about this. Are you saying that you want to reopen this issue? Or,
Whether you endorse the specific kind of moderation that Tsvi did, namely to ban someone without warning, and then try to discuss it afterwards? I don’t think I’ve seen the mods talk about this before, hence I have no understanding of your position and am asking about it for the first time?
I guess what I meant was “I think my beliefs about #2 are fairly derivable from what I or Oli or Ben said in the past, and I can’t remember whether I, Oli or Ben already answered this specific question, and didn’t feel obligated to do all the work of checking myself.”
But, I don’t know if that was exactly fair either, I went ahead and answered the question for now.
I guess a tl;dr is I don’t think Tsvi’s approach here was perfect, and sometimes ban-first is bad. (it depends. all else equal it’s better for people to put more work into moderating well. But, things are usually not equal and moderating is extremely expensive).
But, the part where he unbanned you a day later, and wrote up a post that included Tsvi himself as an example of a bad pattern he’d like to address, makes me feel like this particular case is overall reasonable. If he hadn’t done that, I’d probably be talking privately with Tsvi about it and trying to find something better.
Note that, in the original case, Tsvi had little-to-no-motivation for talking to you (presumably, since he banned you). I don’t think you exactly mean this, but this comes across to me as something like “when I do something that results in an author no longer wanting to talk to me, he should suck it up and keep talking to me. But, when they do something that leads me to no longer wanting to talk to them, that’s on them.”
Presumably you see the cases as being importantly different. That might be, but, I’m not automatically granting that assumption.
A difference is that Tsvi is still plenty motivated to talk on a meta level (about why he banned me), as evidenced by this post. So he could have easily said “I no longer want to talk about the object level. I think you’re doing a bad thing, [explanation …], please change your behavior if you agree, or let me know why you don’t (on the meta level).” Or “I’m writing up an explanation of what you’re doing wrong in this thread. Let’s pause this discussion until I finish it.”
Or if he actually doesn’t want to talk at all, he could have said “I’m getting really annoyed so I’m disengaging.” or “I think you’re doing a bad thing here, here’s a short explanation but I don’t want to discuss it further. Please stop it or I’ll ban you.”
Note that I’m not endorsing banning or threat of banning in an absolute sense, just suggesting that all of these are more “pro-social” than banning someone out of the blue with no warning. None of these involve asking him to “suck it up and keep talking to me” or otherwise impose a large cost on him.
Yeah I agree it’s much more pro-social to give more warning and opportunity for back-and-forth.
I also think there are ways of banning that are anti-social. But, I think people’s expectations about how costly moderation is and how valuable it is are out-of-whack enough that I generally am focused on advocating the zero-point set to “moderating at all is almost always pro-social, and moderating well is even more pro-social.”
I think it is true that authors should learn to suck up a bit of “okay, moderating well kinda sucks but it is worth taking-one-for-the-team to do it well.” But, also, commenters should suck it up a bit about cutting moderators and authors some slack about it. Partly because it’s hard in general, and partly because doing it well requires getting practice at it.
As I said earlier, I would see the situation differently if Tsvi hadn’t made this followup post and unbanned you, at least long enough to hash out the disagreement more. I agree that the initial bit was more abrupt than I’d want people to emulate as best practice. I think following it up the next day with a detailed post explaining the problem as he saw it, unbanning, and including himself as an example is one of the better-practices one could hope for.
I would hope, in the future, Tsvi is a bit more chill about it and doesn’t do it as knee-jerkily.
FYI an aspect of my experience is briefly thinking “Huh, I wonder what are norms around user-to-user-banning?”, and then not trying to find anything about that, and instead just assuming that it’s kinda like a twitter block (in particular, mostly it’s up to the banner’s discretion in order to make their experience work for them), and doing the ban. It sounds like user-bans are considered much more weighty than twitter blocks. This makes some sense, since the structures of the forums are pretty different; not saying I was justified in not processing the difference; I’m just noting descriptively that my (angry) awareness didn’t include much awareness of this difference. I’d suggest having a link to some description of the meaning / intended use of a user-ban near the interface element for that; possibly even with a confirmation warning dialogue thing like “are you sure? have you read the thing?”.
Definitely makes sense to put clearer guidance on how to use various mod powers as an author.
There’s an issue where people might treat them differently.
Part of my model here, which probably wouldn’t make sense as part of the mod-guidance, is that Wei Dai has been around awhile and has a good track record of generally thoughtful contribution. Also, he’s like one of ~20 people who probably will be able to meaningfully contribute to (some of) the topics I think you want to talk about. So, I think it would have made more sense to put more effort into back-and-forth in that case.
Bowing out for now because I strongly suspect Tsvi has been strongly downvoting all or most of my comments in this thread. Maybe will pick it up later, in a different venue.
Nod. Fwiw I notice myself also getting downvoted. I think conversations like this have a lot of random downvoting and voting-tug-of-war that’s mostly about a few people with strong opinions.
This thread has reminded me that there’s IMO something lacking about how our voting system handles arguments (where it’s easy for a couple people to make the whole experience feel bad and anxiety inducing which punishes any individual thought). I’m not sure what to do instead but it feels like the status quo isn’t great.