Which top authors did Said Achmiz drive away?
1Isha Yiras Hashem
2Sting
4habryka
9Sting
2habryka
11Sting
2habryka
2habryka
1Jasnah Kholin
1Sting
1Jasnah Kholin
6Zack_M_Davis
2habryka
10Zack_M_Davis
4habryka
2Zack_M_Davis
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What is the source for the Scott Alexander comment you quoted?
It is from the linked comment by Zack Davis. The original source is a Discord conversation between Zack and Scott.
I do really want to avoid this becoming a recurring topic with lots of disconnected top-level posts doing relitigation, so I'll by-default move this to a top-level comment on the Said banning post (I think this is the right choice for stuff like this, though feel free to argue with me about this, and a top-level shortform post complaining about that policy will not be moved and is something I am happy to debate on).
Also, I've spent much much more than my allotted 10 hours answering questions and digging into things here, so I won't respond much more on the Said topic, though this random thread I had with Said is probably worth reading and has a few examples of other public comments to this effect, though I'll again reiterate that most comments on this topic have been in private (including comments I remember from both Scott and Jacob Falkovich to this effect, which I mention in the relevant thread with Zack).
Edit: This is now done. I unlisted this post, e.g. it still exists but is only accessible via link, since that seemed like the simplest way to maintain any context I might have forgot to move over.
When I hover over the "Personal Blog" tag at the top of this post, a tooltip pops up which says, in part:
Members can write whatever they want on their personal blog. Personal blogposts are a good fit for:
- Meta-discussion of LessWrong (site features, interpersonal community dynamics)
And when I click that tag, it redirects to this guide which states:
Posts on practically any topic are welcomed on LessWrong[1].
The footnote in the quote states:
We will remove material of the following types:
- Calls for direct violence against others
- Doxing of people on the internet
- Material we are not legally able to host
- To a very limited degree, material that seriously threatens LessWrong’s long-term values, mission and culture.
Thus, I do not think that the decision to unlist this post is in accordance with standard LessWrong moderation guidelines for what is acceptable in a personal blogpost. Of course, you are the dictator, and can make whatever exceptions to the standard guidelines that you wish. But I would encourage you to adopt the policy of Frederick the Great:
"My people and I … have come to an agreement which satisfies us both. They are to say what they please, and I am to do what I please."
On the object level, it is natural enough to want to avoid sinking tons of time into eternal relitigiation of the decision to ban Said. But if you already answered a question, you can just link to the place where you already answered it.
E.g., for this post you could have said something like:
"Your question is partially answered here, and unfortunately I have already spent dozens of hours on this and lack the time to go digging for additional receipts. Author complains were not a load-bearing part of the decision in any case, which is why I did not include much in the way of examples in my original post."
This would have been a fine response! It also would not have taken long to write.
Also, I was not addressing the question to you. I would have welcomed (and would still welcome, although it is less likely to happen now) comments by top authors who found Said's presence intolerable, or links to statements by such authors.
After reading through your full post (except for the collapsed sections in the Appendix) as well as several thousand words of comments[1], I identified the key crux which to me would decisively justify a ban. To the degree that other users of LessWrong also find the "top authors no longer wanting to post or comment" claim to be a key crux on whether the decision to ban was a good one, it is useful to have a dedicated post where we can crowd-source an answer. Since you have stated elsewhere that author complaints were not load-bearing, this may not matter to you, but it does matter to us.
- ^
Despite all this, I believe I missed your partial answer linked above.
To be clear, we relatively routinely merge and move comment threads (as is common practice on most internet forums). The guidelines above are primarily about what kind of content we will delete, not about the exact ways we are going to list the content on the frontpage. I would never delete a post like this, and have indeed not done so!
In this case I merged it with an existing comment section and just left this post as unlisted for convenience to leave this meta-discussion intact as a reference. My best guess is that it will get somewhat more visibility in the long-run as a result of being on the Said post, while getting a bit less visibility in the short run, and most importantly having it there will make it so that answers will be available to people who want to build a model of the Said comment discussion and the context of the previous discussion will be available to people reading this comment.
Feel free to start a shortform somewhere with discussion about me moving this, or continue discussion about the meta-level issue on the comment thread on the Said post. The visibility of the comments on this post will be very weird and kind of jank, since unlisted posts aren't designed to have active discussion under them.
1The guidelines above are primarily about what kind of content we will delete, not about the exact ways we are going to list the content on the frontpage.
This is a Personal Blog post, which the guide states "Are not displayed by default on the homepage", unlike Frontpage posts which "Are displayed by default to all users". Therefore, unlisting my post does not affect the homepage, but it does prevent it from showing up on my user profile.
I would never delete a post like this, and have indeed not done so!
Yes, I appreciate that. The fact remains that I would like to post this on my Personal Blog, which you are not allowing.
My best guess is that it will get somewhat more visibility in the long-run as a result of being on the Said post
I very much doubt it will get more visibility in the long-run. Also, since I am not the author of the comment on the Said post, I will not be notified of replies to it.
Feel free to start a shortform somewhere with discussion about me moving this
I plan to do this within the next couple of days. We can continue the discussion there.
1Therefore, unlisting my post does not affect the homepage, but it does prevent it from showing up on my user profile.
Personal blogposts show up both in recent discussion, and of course get included in the homepage feed of everyone who has enabled seeing personal blogposts. The naming here is kind of terrible, so I am pretty sympathetic to the confusion, but personal blogposts get a pretty substantial amount of frontpage/homepage traffic.
I very much doubt it will get more visibility in the long-run.
If we can find an operationalization, I would take a bet. I expect that Said post to get traffic for many years.
Since I am not the author of the comment on the Said post, I will not be notified of replies to it.
(Just subscribe to comments via the triple-dot menu)
1"I very much doubt it will get more visibility in the long-run."
I came here from the discussion, and expect that i wouldn't if it wasn't a comment there. i don't know if I'm typical, but it's evidence toward habryka's claim.
Well, sort of. Your comment provides evidence for habryka's claim compared to a counterfactual of 0 commenters finding their way here from that thread, but it provides evidence against hybryka's claim compared to a counterfactual of 2 or more commenters finding their way here from that thread.
Overall rate of engagement remains low. It was stuck at 11 comments for 21 days before your comment, and has been stuck at 47 karma for at least the last 19 days. Karma and comments are imperfect proxies of readership, but they are what we have. In the counterfactual world where this post wasn't unlisted, I expect engagement would have been far higher.
yeah, I don't try to overstate the evidence. but it was the rare case where me being here provided evidence, so it was worth to give it. . I assume you already have access to information about the people who read posts in LW in real time. and people who read old good posts (and then mostly don't comment, because everyone moved on) and encounter site news randomly and with half a year of delay, are less visible by nature. so i expect people who don't do that to underestimate out number :-)
(also, in the comments to Said-was-banned post there was a person who didn't read all the post and assume everyone else didn't, too. so maybe I'm over-correcting for typical mind fallacy here. at least, it definitely encouraged my to write this comment.)
Sting, the author of the post, thought a top-level question post was the right choice. If you think the algorithm should deprioritize showing other people Sting's post because you think it's bad, you have a strength-10 strong downvote. Why isn't that enough? On any other topic, if someone makes a post about something other people have also made posts about, you don't demote later posts to comments. Why is this topic different?
I mean, the algorithm is like one line of math, why would we assume it covers all possible edge-cases? It's extremely common for forum-moderation to do lots of moving of comments and posts and to concentrate discussion of a topic in a single place in any forum on the internet (see the many times a week dang at hackernews does the same thing with overlapping discussions, or similar meta-topics), or the many times we've done the same on LW.
Separately, I don't think it would be appropriate for this post to get downvoted! The post is asking a reasonable question, just one I think is best asked in the context of all the other discussion on the topic. I don't think downvoting is the appropriate operation for this.
The default equilibrium of internet discussion like this is that stuff gets eternally relitigated because people show up who don't want to read the previous context and are looking for some kind of drama, or get drawn in by someone else presenting some isolated facet of the context. The whole reason why I spent 60+ hours writing the previous post is to avoid that exact dynamic. Allowing lots of top-level posts will inevitably then cause me to have to spend another 100+ hours on this, which I do not want to do. Indeed, in this case there are a lot of comments on the banning post that directly address questions in this post, and I strongly expect any discussion situated in that context to go a lot better.
Allowing lots of top-level posts
As it happens, I was planning (in due time) to write my own top-level reaction post to your post of 22 August. I had assumed this would be allowed, as I have written well-received top-level reaction posts to other Less Wrong posts many times before: for example, "Relevance Norms" (which you evidently found valuable enough to cite in your post of 22 August) or "Firming Up Not-Lying Around Its Edge-Cases Is Less Broadly Useful Than One Might Initially Think" (which was Curated).
Will I be permitted to post?
will inevitably then cause me to have to spend another 100+ hours on this
I don't think "have to" is warranted. You don't have to reply if you don't want to. But other people have a legitimate interest in publicly discussing your public statements among themselves, independently of whether you think it's worth your time to reply.
Will I be permitted to post?
A post that aims to make some novel points makes more sense as a top-level post than the kind of question that was this OP.
I do think it's kind of worse form than responding in comments if you aim for it to be a commentary on the specific moderation decision, though I can't really judge that without knowing the content. I certainly can imagine lots of good top-level posts and the two posts you link certainly are better for being top-level posts than comments, and my general prior on such a post of yours makes me think it's a good fit for a top-level post.
But other people have a legitimate interest in publicly discussing your public statements among themselves, independently of whether you think it's worth your time to reply.
Totally agree.
I do think it's quite important to provide context as to the efforts already exerted on the topic and associated lack of response, as the norms by which many, if not most, readers will interpret the lack of a response is as some kind of admission of wrongness (as discussed at some length in my Said moderation post).
I can try to provide the context myself by writing comments, though it is costly, and won't reliably get read, so it seems to me like bad form to not provide it in the top-level post (the same way I cared a bunch about offering Said the option to have his response linked from high up in the moderation post, and present itself in the body of the text, though I don't think Said has yet taken me up on that). Moving things into the context of the original discussion helps take care of this more naturally and in ways less reliant on goodwill.