Oliver Habryka joins Wolf Tivy to tell how he revived LessWrong after it nearly died, built the Lighthaven campus, and launched his $35m/quarter project to reform grantmaking.
A great video, just a note about 10:33 -- the difficult part of moderating the LessWrong 1.0 wasn't "had to click delete on 500 new accounts every day", that would be the easy part! The difficult part was that there were no tools to identify the new accounts, and monitor their activity.
Actually, to this day I am not sure what Eugine Nier's hack was precisely. To downvote others, you needed karma. To get karma, you had to get your comments upvoted. To get comments upvoted, you obviously had to post the comments first. He had thousands of accounts that seemingly didn't post comments... and yet that somehow allowed him to do the mass downvoting. It was not obvious what purpose those 500 accounts serve.
I speculated that he was probably exploiting some bug; for example, if you delete your own comment, do you lose the associated karma? If not, then it would be easy to make each account post one comment at the same time, upvote each other's comments, and immediately delete them. If you were not looking there at that exact moment (and this could happen under a several years old post) you probably wouldn't notice anything; and the accounts would be fully powered to downvote others. Alas, there was no way to figure out whether this was true.
Also, LessWrong 1.0 was hosted on someone else's servers, and for some reason the moderators couldn't get a permission to run SQL queries on those servers, so they were limited to the Reddit web interface.
Oliver Habryka joins Wolf Tivy to tell how he revived LessWrong after it nearly died, built the Lighthaven campus, and launched his $35m/quarter project to reform grantmaking.