tl:dr;

• The LessWrong reviews all first time submissions from new users
• In the last month, we've built a new process where we reject some of those submissions (with explanation) – you can now see what was rejected from the main site on the new Rejected Content section
• New users shouldn't be very afraid to submit, the bar could well be lower than you think (and now you can check based on what we actually reject). The worst that happens now is you get some feedback from us, rather than getting downvoted by many people.
  • Though maybe write something shorter as your first thing. Don't write thousands of words only for us to say "this has serious problem X".

What is the Rejected Content section?

When new users submit their first post or comment, it is reviewed by a LessWrong team member before it goes live on the site. Many times, especially with an increased influx of users to LessWrong, we will sometimes reject these first posts/comments and not let them go live.

To increase transparency and accountability, we've made a new section of the site where you can view everything we've rejected, and usually with some explanation of why. This means that anyone who is motivated can both go fishing for things they think were actually good but were mistakenly classified as reject-worthy, or in general just verify that the LessWrong team is (or isn't) exercising good and fair judgment in what we're rejecting.

The Rejected Content section is part of the Moderation Log, viewable at

lesswrong.com/moderation#rejected-posts

and

lesswrong.com/moderation#rejected-comments

What to do if you disagree with a rejection decision?

• Message us directly about it – maybe we didn't pay close enough attention and it'll be no big deal to change it. See the contact us page.
• Mention in the monthly Open Thread.
• Write a top-level post if you want to start a larger conversation about our moderation philosophy or approach.

The point of the feature is precisely so people can weigh in, so don't feel afraid to question our choices here. (This isn't a promise to change in response to feedback, but is a good amount of willingness to listen to feedback.)

Why build it?

As I wrote in a recent post of of mine about moderation, the moderation team has historically faced a tricky choice. Either we:

1. Approve and let userbase evaluate: When we view low quality content^[1] being submitted by new users^[2], we nonetheless approve it (perhaps with downvote) and allow the userbase to evaluate and vote accordingly.
2. Block using our own judgment: We block that content from going live (and send some message to the author explaining why)

Each choice has costs and benefits. Letting userbase evaluate decreases reliance on the mod team's judgment. We will make mistakes, so seems safer to have more people look at things. Also I feel bad if behind the scenes the LessWrong team is filtering what goes live and people don't know even know what choices we're making or why.

At the same time, letting the userbase decide means often:

• a whole bunch of users will view a bad post that they won't benefit from. This seems true even if a moderator gives it an initial downvote.
• you get negative karma posts showing up in different places that feels pretty ughy, e.g. in the All Posts page
• they can end up in search results
• negative karma comments (even if they're collapsed) still make comments sections feel more ughy

Theoretically, visibility of negative karma content could be fixed in other ways, but it's kind of a weird situation to have this content if you're going to to a lot of trouble to prevent it being seen by people anyway.

On the other hand, when us moderators decide to block content going live, we're relying on our judgment, which is fallible. And heck, we often disagree even among ourselves. Plus I generally dislike moderation actions aren't visible to people generally.

Solution

The Rejected Content section tries to get us the best of both options. We prevent not-good content going live and degrading the signal-to-noise ratio of the site, and also we're not acting behind the scenes where no one can catch our mistakes or call us out if we're systematically going astray.

Should I be more afraid to post on LessWrong now?

As a new user, counter-intuitively perhaps, the rejection system (perhaps named in an unfriendly way), actually means you should have a lower bar for posting things. Instead of risking getting downvoted by many people (ouch), you can get some quick feedback from the mod team, no harm done!

Also, take a look at the actual stuff we reject to see if you think you're in that bucket. If you're worried, likely you're not.

Also Open Threads (regular and AI specific) are particular good place for first time intro questions, including about whether your idea for a post would be well received.

Standard Reasons for Rejection

We're continuing to iterate on our criteria for inclusion/reject on LessWrong, and in particular, we want to make these salient and available to new users when they're writing their first submission so they don't get a surprise rejection.

If you want to see what we show people, one option is just to make a new account and attempt to make a post/comment and see what we show. (Feedback welcome, current stuff is mid-improvement.) See some of our messaging here.

Also this is the state of some of our rejection reasons messages (these get sent to users if we've rejected their content). Our moderator UI for rejection looks like this:

Checking each of these sends a user a longer explanation.

Here are some of them (my ideal is to make all of these templates public viewable too):

[ ] Low Quality or 101-Level AI Content. There’ve been a lot of new users coming to LessWrong recently interested in AI. To keep the site’s quality high and ensure stuff posted is interesting to the site’s users, we’re currently only accepting posts that meets a pretty high bar. We look for good reasoning, making a new and interesting point, bringing new evidence, and/or building upon prior discussion. If you were rejected for this reason, possibly a good thing to do is read more existing material. The AI Intro Material wiki-tag is a good place, for example.

[ ] Not addressing relevant prior discussion. Your post doesn't address or build upon relevant previous discussion of its topic that much of the LessWrong audience is already familiar with. If you're not sure where to find this discussion, feel free to ask in monthly open threads (general one, one for AI). Another form of this is writing a post arguing against a position, but not being clear about who exactly is being argued against, e.g., not linking to anything prior. Linking to existing posts on LessWrong is a great way to show that you are familiar/responding to prior discussion. If you're curious about a topic, try Search or look at our Concepts page.

[ ] Missing some rationality basics. Sometimes it’s hard to judge, but my feeling from your submission it fails to apply some of the basic rationality mental motions that are expected on LessWrong. There’s a fairly long list of these, but they include things like focusing on predictions, defining things clearly or tabooing definitions, expressing uncertainty [quantitatively]. See this general intro to LessWrong.

[ ] Clearer Introduction. It was hard for me to assess whether your submission was a good fit for the site due to its length and that the opening didn’t seem to explain the overall goal of your submission.  Your first couple paragraphs should make it obvious what the main point of your post is, and ideally gesture at the strongest argument for that point. It's helpful to explain why your post is relevant to the LessWrong audience. 

[ ] Confusion / muddled reasoning. I felt your submission has a bit too much confusion or muddled thinking to approve. Reasons I check the box for this feedback item include things like “really strange premises that aren’t justified”, “inferences that don’t seem to follow from the premises,” “use of weird categories,” “failure to understand basics topics of what it discusses (e.g. completely misunderstand how LLMs work)”, and/or “failure to respond to basic arguments about the topic”. Often the right thing to do in this case is read more about the topic you’re discussing.

[ ] Somewhat offtopic crosspost. Looks like you’re crossposting this from your blog elsewhere. That can be fine, but sometimes we we’ll reject these crossposts (or allow them but with a warning) if they seem like they’re not quite aimed at the LessWrong audience or adopting LessWrong norms. LessWrong has particular norms aimed at getting towards truth (e.g. avoiding rhetoric, being precise, being quantitative, etc), and your post isn't obviously displaying those. Good solutions to this are to (a) write an extra intro to your post to explain why people on LessWrong might find it interesting, (b) rewrite to be a style more aimed at truth than persuasiveness or engagingness.  

[ ] Gratuitously Offensive. Yo, c'mon. 

Also we often write custom messages with more specific feedback in addition to or instead of the above reasons.

To see these reasons in use, see the Rejected Contents section on the Moderation Log page.

1. ^{^}

   By which I mean real content from a real user, not spam, just stuff that's not very good.

2. ^{^}

   Historically, we have reviewed every first post by new users before it's allowed to go live on the site. As of recently, we now review first posts and first comments from new users before they go live.