6 Answers sorted by
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Thanks for making this post!
One of the reasons why I like rate-limits instead of bans is that it allows people to complain about the rate-limiting and to participate in discussion on their own posts (so seeing a harsh rate-limit of something like "1 comment per 3 days" is not equivalent to a general ban from LessWrong, but should be more interpreted as "please comment primarily on your own posts", though of course it shares many important properties of a ban).
Things that seem most important to bring up in terms of moderation philosophy:
Moderation on LessWrong does not depend on effort
Another thing I've noticed is that almost all the users are trying. They are trying to use rationality, trying to understand what's been written here, trying to apply Baye's rule or understand AI. Even some of the users with negative karma are trying, just having more difficulty.
Just because someone is genuinely trying to contribute to LessWrong, does not mean LessWrong is a good place for them. LessWrong has a particular culture, with particular standards and particular interests, and I think many people, even if they are genuinely trying, don't fit well within that culture and those standards.
In making rate-limiting decisions like this I don't pay much attention to whether the user in question is "genuinely trying " to contribute to LW, I am mostly just evaluating the effects I see their actions having on the quality of the discussions happening on the site, and the quality of the ideas they are contributing.
Motivation and goals are of course a relevant component to model, but that mostly pushes in the opposite direction, in that if I have someone who seems to be making great contributions, and I learn they aren't even trying, then that makes me more excited, since there is upside if they do become more motivated in the future.
Signal to Noise ratio is important
Thomas and Elizabeth pointed this out already, but just because someone's comments don't seem actively bad, doesn't mean I don't want to limit their ability to contribute. We do a lot of things on LW to improve the signal to noise ratio of content on the site, and one of those things is to reduce the amount of noise, even if the mean of what we remove looks not actively harmful.
We of course also do other things than to remove some of the lower signal content to improve the signal to noise ratio. Voting does a lot, how we sort the frontpage does a lot, subscriptions and notification systems do a lot. But rate-limiting is also a tool I use for the same purpose.
Old users are owed explanations, new users are (mostly) not
I think if you've been around for a while on LessWrong, and I decide to rate-limit you, then I think it makes sense for me to make some time to argue with you about that, and give you the opportunity to convince me that I am wrong. But if you are new, and haven't invested a lot in the site, then I think I owe you relatively little.
I think in doing the above rate-limits, we did not do enough to give established users the affordance to push back and argue with us about them. I do think most of these users are relatively recent or are users we've been very straightforward with since shortly after they started commenting that we don't think they are breaking even on their contributions to the site (like the OP Gerald Monroe, with whom we had 3 separate conversations over the past few months), and for those I don't think we owe them much of an explanation. LessWrong is a walled garden.
You do not by default have the right to be here, and I don't want to, and cannot, accept the burden of explaining to everyone who wants to be here but who I don't want here, why I am making my decisions. As such a moderation principle that we've been aspiring to for quite a while is to let new users know as early as possible if we think them being on the site is unlikely to work out, so that if you have been around for a while you can feel stable, and also so that you don't invest in something that will end up being taken away from you.
Feedback helps a bit, especially if you are young, but usually doesn't
Maybe there are other people who are much better at giving feedback and helping people grow as commenters, but my personal experience is that giving users feedback, especially the second or third time, rarely tends to substantially improve things.
I think this sucks. I would much rather be in a world where the usual reasons why I think someone isn't positively contributing to LessWrong were of the type that a short conversation could clear up and fix, but it alas does not appear so, and after having spent many hundreds of hours over the years giving people individualized feedback, I don't really think "give people specific and detailed feedback" is a viable moderation strategy, at least more than once or twice per user. I recognize that this can feel unfair on the receiving end, and I also feel sad about it.
I do think the one exception here is that if people are young or are non-native english speakers. Do let me know if you are in your teens or you are a non-native english speaker who is still learning the language. People do really get a lot better at communication between the ages of 14-22 and people's english does get substantially better over time, and this helps with all kinds communication issues.
We consider legibility, but its only a relatively small input into our moderation decisions
It is valuable and a precious public good to make it easy to know which actions you take will cause you to end up being removed from a space. However, that legibility also comes at great cost, especially in social contexts. Every clear and bright-line rule you outline will have people budding right up against it, and de-facto, in my experience, moderation of social spaces like LessWrong is not the kind of thing you can do while being legible in the way that for example modern courts aim to be legible.
As such, we don't have laws. If anything we have something like case-law which gets established as individual moderation disputes arise, which we then use as guidelines for future decisions, but also a huge fraction of our moderation decisions are downstream of complicated models we formed about what kind of conversations and interactions work on LessWrong, and what role we want LessWrong to play in the broader world, and those shift and change as new evidence comes in and the world changes.
I do ultimately still try pretty hard to give people guidelines and to draw lines that help people feel secure in their relationship to LessWrong, and I care a lot about this, but at the end of the day I will still make many from-the-outside-arbitrary-seeming-decisions in order to keep LessWrong the precious walled garden that it is.
I try really hard to not build an ideological echo chamber
When making moderation decisions, it's always at the top of my mind whether I am tempted to make a decision one way or another because they disagree with me on some object-level issue. I try pretty hard to not have that affect my decisions, and as a result have what feels to me a subjectively substantially higher standard for rate-limiting or banning people who disagree with me, than for people who agree with me. I think this is reflected in the decisions above.
I do feel comfortable judging people on the methodologies and abstract principles that they seem to use to arrive at their conclusions. LessWrong has a specific epistemology, and I care about protecting that. If you are primarily trying to...
- argue from authority,
- don't like speaking in probabilistic terms,
- aren't comfortable holding multiple conflicting models in your head at the same time,
- or are averse to breaking things down into mechanistic and reductionist terms,
then LW is probably not for you, and I feel fine with that. I feel comfortable reducing the visibility or volume of content on the site that is in conflict with these epistemological principles (of course this list isn't exhaustive, in-general the LW sequences are the best pointer towards the epistemological foundations of the site).
If you see me or other LW moderators fail to judge people on epistemological principles but instead see us directly rate-limiting or banning users on the basis of object-level opinions that even if they seem wrong seem to have been arrived at via relatively sane principles, then I do really think you should complain and push back at us. I see my mandate as head of LW to only extend towards enforcing what seems to me the shared epistemological foundation of LW, and to not have the mandate to enforce my own object-level beliefs on the participants of this site.
Now some more comments on the object-level:
I overall feel good about rate-limiting everyone on the above list. I think it will probably make the conversations on the site go better and make more people contribute to the site.
Us doing more extensive rate-limiting is an experiment, and we will see how it goes. As kave said in the other response to this post, the rule that suggested these specific rate-limits does not seem like it has an amazing track record, though I currently endorse it as something that calls things to my attention (among many other heuristics).
Also, if anyone reading this is worried about being rate-limited or banned in the future, feel free to reach out to me or other moderators on Intercom. I am generally happy to give people direct and frank feedback about their contributions to the site, as well as how likely I am to take future moderator actions. Uncertainty is costly, and I think it's worth a lot of my time to help people understand to what degree investing in LessWrong makes sense for them.
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4I very much appreciate @habryka taking the time to lay out your thoughts; posting like this is also a great example of modeling out your principles. I've spent copious amounts of time shaping the Manifold community's discourse and norms, and this comment has a mix of patterns I find true out of my own experiences (eg the bits about case law and avoiding echo chambers), and good learnings for me (eg young/non-English speakers improve more easily).
1feature proposal: when someone is rate limited, they can still write comments. their comments are auto-delayed until the next time they'd be unratelimited. they can queue up to k comments before it behaves the same as it does now. I suggest k be 1. I expect this would reduce the emotional banneyness-feeling by around 10%.
feature proposal: when someone is ratelimited, the moderators can give a public reason and/or a private reason. if the reason is public, it invites public feedback as well as indicating to users passing by what things might get moderated. ...
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1feature proposal: when someone is rate limited, they can still write comments. their comments are auto-delayed until the next time they'd be unratelimited. they can queue up to k comments before it behaves the same as it does now. I suggest k be 1. I expect this would reduce the emotional banneyness-feeling by around 10%.
If (as I suspect is the case) one of the in-practice purposes or benefits of a limit is to make it harder for an escalation spiral to continue via comments written in a heated emotional state, delaying the reading destroys that effect compared to delaying the writing. If the limited user is in a calm state and believes it's worth it to push back, they can save their own draft elsewhere and set their own timer.
1I strongly suspect that spending time building features for rate limited users is not valuable enough to be worthwhile. I suspect this mainly because:
- There aren't a lot of rate limited users who would benefit from it.
- The value that the rate limited users receive is marginal.
- It's unclear whether doing things that benefit users who have been rate limited is a good thing.
- I don't see any sorts of second order effects that would make it worthwhile, such as non-rate-limited people seeing these features and being more inclined to be involved in the community because of them.
- There are lots of other very valuable things the team could be working on.
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1Have you or anyone else on the LW team written anywhere about the effects of your new rate-limiting infrastructure, which was IIRC implemented last year? E.g. have some metrics improved which you care about?
14011
To answer, for now, just one piece of this post:
We're currently experimenting with a rule that flags users who've received several downvotes from "senior" users (I believe 5 downvotes from users with above 1,000 karma) on comments that are already net-negative (I believe that were posted in the last year).
We're currently in the manual review phase, so users are being flagged and then users are having the rate limit applied if it seems reasonable. For what it's worth, I don't think this rule has an amazing track record so far, but all the cases in the "rate limit wave" were reviewed by me and Habryka and he decided to apply a limit in those cases.
(We applied some rate limit in 60% of the cases of users who got flagged by the rule).
People who get manually rate-limited don't have an explanation visible when trying to comment (unlike users who are limited by an automatic rule, I think).
We have explained this to users that reached out (in fact this answer is adapted from one such conversation), but I do think we plausibly should have set up infrastructure to explain these new rate limits.
8I have been in the position of trying to moderate a large and growing community - it was at 500k users last I checked, although I threw in the towel around 300k - and I know what a thankless, sisyphean task it is.
I know what it is to have to explain the same - perfectly reasonable - rule/norm again and again and again.
I know what it is to try to cultivate and nurture a garden while hordes of barbarians trample all over the place.
But...
If it aint broke, don't fix it.
I would argue that the majority of the listed people penalized are net contributors to lesswrong, including some who are strongly net positive.
I've noticed y'all have been tinkering in this space for a while, I think you're trying super hard to protect lesswrong from the eternal september and you actually seem to be succeeding, which is no small feat, buuut...
I do wonder if the team needs a break.
I think there's a thing that happens to gardeners (and here I'm using that as a very broad archetype), where we become attached to and identify with the work of weeding - of maintaining, of day after day holding back entropy - and cease to take pleasure in the garden itself.
As that sets in, even new growth begins to seem like a weed.
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Hey, I'm just some guy but I've been around for a while. I want to give you a piece of feedback that I got way back in 2009 which I am worried no one has given you. In 2009 I found lesswrong, and I really liked it, but I got downvoted a lot and people were like "hey, your comments and posts kinda suck". They said, although not in so many words, that basically I should try reading the sequences closely with some fair amount of reverence or something.
I did that, and it basically worked, in that I think I really did internalize a lot of the values/tastes/habits that I cared about learning from lesswrong, and learned much more so how to live in accordance with them. Now I think there were some sad things about this, in that I sort of accidentally killed some parts of the animal that I am, and it made me a bit less kind in some ways to people who were very different from me, but I am overall glad I did it. So, maybe you want to try that? Totally fair if you don't, definitely not costless, but I am glad that I did it to myself overall.
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I am not a moderator, just sharing my hunches here.
I was only ratelimited for a day because I got in this fight.
re: Akram Choudhary - the example you give of a post by them is an exemplar of what habryka was talking about, the "you have to be joking". this site has very tight rules on what argumentation structure and tone is acceptable: generally low-emotional-intensity words and generally arguments need to be made in a highly step-by-step way to be held as valid. I don't know if that's the full reason for the mute.
you got upvoted on april 1 because you were saying the things that, if you said the non-sarcastic version about ai, would be in line with general yudkowskian-transhumanist consensus. you continue to confuse me. it might be worth having the actual technical discussions you'd like to have about ai under the comments of those posts. what would you post on the april fools posts if you had thought they were not april fools at all? perhaps you can examine the step by step ways your reactions to those posts differ from ai in order to extract cruxes?
Victor Ashioya was posting a high ratio of things that sounded like advertisements, which I and likely others would then downvote on the homepage, and which would then disappear. Presumably Victor would delete them when they got downvotes. some still remain, which should give you a sense of why they were getting downvotes. Or not, if you're so used to such things on twitter that they just seem normal.
I am surprised trevor, shminux, and noosphere are muted. I expect it is temporary, but if it is not, I would wonder why. I would require more evidence about the reasoning before I got pitchforky about it. (Incidentally, my willingness to get pitchforky fast may be a reason I get muted easily. Oh well.)
I don't have an impression of the others in either direction on this topic.
But in general, my hunch is that since I was on this list and my muting was only for a day, the same may be true for others as well.
I appreciate you getting defensive about it rather than silently disappearing, even though I have had frustrating interactions with you before. I expect this post to be in the negatives. I have not voted yet, but if it goes below zero, I will strong upvote.
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1I spent several years moderating r/changemyview on Reddit which also has this rule. Having removed at least hundreds of comments that break it, I think the worst thing about it is that it rewards aloofness and punishes sincerity. That's acceptable to trade off to prevent the rise of very sincere flame wars, but it elevates people pretending to be wise at the expense of those with more experience who likely have more deeply held but also informed opinions about the subject matter. This was easily the most common moderation frustration expressed by users.
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2That fight (when I scanned over it briefly yesterday) seemed to be you and one other user (Shankar Sivarajan), having a sort of comment tennis game where you were pinging back an fourth, and (when I saw it) you both had downvotes that looked like you were both downvoting the other, and no one else was participating. I imagine that neither of was learning or having fun from that conversation. Ending that kind of chain might be the place the rate-limit has a use case. Whether it is the right solution I don't know.
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00I'm rate limited? I've heard about this problem before, but somehow I can still post despite being much less careful than other new users. I just posted two quick takes (which aren't that quick, I will admit that. But the rules seem more relaxed for quick takes than posts).
Edit: Rate limited now, lol. By the way, I enjoy your kind words of non-guilt. And I agree, I haven't done anything wrong. Can I still be a "danger" to the community in a way which needs to be gatekept? Only socially, not intellectually. I'm correct like Einstein was correct, stubbornly.
My comments are too long and ranty, and they're also hard to understand. But I don't think they're wrong or without value. Other than downvotes, there's not much engagement at all.
Self-censorship doesn't suit me. If it's required here then I don't want to stay. I could communicate easier and simpler ideas, but such ideas wouldn't be worth much. My current ideas might look like word salad to 90% of users, but I think the other 10% will find something of value. (exact ratio unknown)
Edit: Also, my theories are quite ambitious. Anything of sufficiently high level will look wrong, or like noise to those who do not understand it. Now, it may actually be noise, but the "attacker" only has to find one flaw whereas the defender has to make no mistakes. This effort ratio makes it a little pathetic when something gets, say -15 karma but zero comments, surely somebody can point out a mistake instead? Too kind? But banning isn't all that kind.
1First of all, thank you, this was exactly the type of answer I was hoping for. Also, if you still have the ability to comment freely on your short form, I’m happy to hop over there.
You've requested people stop sugarcoating so I'm going to be harsher than normal. I think the major disagreement lies here:
> But the entire point of punishment is teaching
I do not believe the mod team's goal is to punish individuals. It is to gatekeep in service of keeping lesswrong's quality high. Anyone who happens to emerge from that process making good contributions is a bonus, but not the goal.
How well is this signposted? The new user message says
Followed by a crippling long New User Guide.
I think that message was put in last summer but am not sure when. You might have joined before it went up (although then you would have been on the site when the equivalent post went up).
Going against the consensus is *probably* enough to get one rate-limited, even if they're correct
For issues interesting enough to have this problem, there is no ground source of truth that humans can access. There is human judgement, and a long process that will hopefully lead to better under...
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The CCP once ran a campaign asking for criticism and then purged everyone who engaged.
I'd be super wary of participating in threads such as this one. A year ago I participated in a similar thread and got the rate limit ban hit.
If you talk about the very valid criticisms of LessWrong (which you can only find off LessWrong) then expect to be rate limited.
If you talk about some of the nutty things the creator of this site has said that may as well be "AI will use Avada Kadava" then expect to be rate limited.
I find it really sad honestly. The group think here is restrictive and bound up by verbose arguments that start with claims that someone hasn't read the site. Or that there are subjects that are settled and must not be discussed.
Rate limiting works to push away anyone even slightly outside the narrow view.
I think the creator of this site is like a bad L. Ron Hubbard quite frankly except they never succeeded with their sci-fi and so turned to being a doomed prophet.
But hey, don't talk about the weird stuff he has said. Don't talk about the magic assumption that AI will suddenly be able to crack all encryption instantly.
I stopped participating because of the rate limit. I don't think a read of my comments show that I was participating in bad faith or ignorance.
I just don't fully agree...
Forums that do this just die eventually. This place will because no new advances can be made so long as there exists a body of so-called knowledge that you're required to agree with to even start participating.
Better conversations are happening elsewhere and have been for a while now.
621Do you have an example for where better conversations are happening?
8https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign is the source. Re-education camps to execution were the punishment.
Thank you for telling me about the rate limit a year ago. I thought I was the only one. Were you given any kind of feedback from the moderators for the reason you were punished such or an advance warning to give you the opportunity to change anything?
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Summary: the moderators appear to be soft banning users with 'rate-limits' without feedback. A careful review of each banned user reveals it's common to be banned despite earnestly attempting to contribute to the site. Some of the most intelligent banned users have mainstream instead of EA views on AI.
Note how the punishment lengths are all the same, I think it was a mass ban-wave of 3 week bans:
Gears to ascension was here but is no longer, guess she convinced them it was a mistake.
Have I made any like really dumb or bad comments recently:
https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/gerald-monroe?show=comments
Well I skimmed through it. I don't see anything. Got a healthy margin now on upvotes, thanks April 1.
Over a month ago, I did comment this stinker. Here is what seems to the same take by a very high reputation user here, @Matthew Barnett , on X: https://twitter.com/MatthewJBar/status/1775026007508230199
Must be a pretty common conclusion, and I wanted this site to pick an image that reflects their vision. Like flagpoles with all the world's flags (from coordination to ban AI) and EMS uses cryonics (to give people an alternative to medical ASI).
I asked the moderators:
@habryka says:
I skimmed all comments I made this year, can't find anything that matches to this accusation. What comment did this happen on? Did this happen once or twice or 50 times or...? Any users want to help here, it surely must be obvious.
You can look here: https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/gerald-monroe?show=comments if you want to help me find what habryka could possibly be referring to.
I recall this happening once, Gears called me out on it, and I deleted the comment.
Conditional that this didn't happen this year, why wasn't I informed or punished or something then?
Skimming the currently banned user list:
Let's see why everyone else got banned. Maybe I can infer a pattern from it:
Akram Choudhary :
-2 per comment and 1 post at -25. Taking the doomer view here: 
frankybegs 
+2.23 karma per comment. This is not bad. Does seem to make comments personal. Decided to enjoy the site and make 16 comments 6-8 days ago. Has some healthy karma on the comments, +6 to +11. That's pretty good by lesswrong standards. No AI views. Ban reason is???
Victor Ashioya
His negative karma doesn't add up to -38, not sure why. AI view is in favor of red teaming, which is always good.
@Remmelt
doomer view, good karma (+2.52 karma per comment), hasn't made any comments in 17 days...why rate limit him? Skimming his comments they look nice and meaty and well written...what? All I can see is over the last couple of month he's not getting many upvotes per comment.
green_leaf
Ok at least I can explain this one. One comment at -41, in the last 20, green_leaf rarely comments. doomer view.
PeteJ
Tries to use humanities knowledge to align AI, apparently the readerbase doesn't like it. Probably won't work, banned for trying.
@StartAtTheEnd
1.02 karma per comment, a little low, may still be above the bar. Not sure what he did wrong, comments are a bit long?
doomer view, lots of downvotes
omnizoid
Seems to just be running a low vote total. People didn't like a post justifying religion.
@MiguelDev
Why rate limited? This user seems to be doing actual experiments. Karma seems a little low but I can't find any big downvote comments or posts recently.
@RomanS
Overall Karma isn't bad, 19 upvotes the most recent post. Seems to have a heavily downvoted comment that's the reason for the limit.
@shminux this user has contributed a lot to the site. One comment heavily downvoted, algorithm is last 20.
It certainly feels that way from the receiving end.
2.49 karma per comment, not bad. Cube tries to applies Baye's rule in several comments, I see a couple barely hit -1, I don't have an explanation here.
M. Y. Zuo
possibly just karma
@Noosphere89
One heavily downvoted comment for AI views. I also noticed the same and I also got a lot of downvotes. It's a pretty reasonable view, we know humans can be very misaligned, upgrading humans and trying to control them seems like a superset of the AI alignment problem. Don't think he deserves this rate limit but at least this one is explainable.
Has anyone else experienced anything similar? Has anyone actually received feedback on a specific post or comment by the moderators?
Finally, I skipped several negative overall karma users not mentioned, because the reason is obvious.
Remarks :
I went into this expecting the reason had to do with AI views, because the site owners are very much 'doomer' faction. But no, plenty of rate limited people on that faction. I apologize for the 'tribalism' but it matters:
https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/nora-belrose Nora Belrose is one of the best posters this site has in terms of actual real world capabilities knowledge. Remember the OAI contributors we see here aren't necessarily specialists in 'make a real system work'. Look at the wall of downvotes.
vs
https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/max-h Max is very worried about AI, but I have seen him write things I think disagree with current mainstream science and engineering. He writes better than everyone banned though.
But no, that doesn't explain it. Another thing I've noticed is that almost all the users are trying. They are trying to use rationality, trying to understand what's been written here, trying to apply Baye's rule or understand AI. Even some of the users with negative karma are trying, just having more difficulty. And yeah it's a soft ban from the site, I'm seeing that a lot of rate limited users simply never contribute 20 more comments to get out of the sump from one heavily downvoted comment or post.
Finally, what rationality principles justify "let's apply bans to users of our site without any reason or feedback or warning. Let's make up new rules after the fact."
Specifically, every time I have personally been punished, it would be no warning, then @Raemon first rate limited me, by making up a new rule (he could have just messaged me me first), then issued a 3 month ban, and gave some reasons I could not substantiate, after carefully reviewing my comments for the past year. I've been enthusiastic about this site for years now, I absolutely would have listened to any kind of warnings or feedback. The latest moderator limit is the 3rd time I have been punished, with no reason I can validate given or content cited.
I asked for, in a private email to the moderators, any kind of feedback or specific content I wrote to justify the ban, and was not given it. All I wanted was a few examples of the claimed behavior, something I could learn from.
Is there some reason the usual norms of having rules, not punishing users until after making a new rule, and informing users when they broke a rule and what user submission was rule violating isn't rational? Just asking here, every mainstream site does this, laws do this, what is the evidence justifying doing it differently?
There's this:
well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism
Is not giving a reason for a decision, or informing a user/issuing a lesser punishment instead of immediately going to the maximum punishment a community with abusive moderators? I can say in other online communities, absolutely. Sites have split over one wrongful ban of a popular user.