[I will move this into meta in a few days, but this seemed important enough to have around on the frontpage for a bit]
Here is a short post with some of the moderation changes we are implementing. Ray, Ben and me are working on some more posts explaining some of our deeper reasoning, so this is just a list with some quick updates.
Even before the start of the open beta, I intended to allow trusted users to moderate their personal pages. The reasoning I outlined in our initial announcement post was as follows:
“We want to give trusted authors moderation powers for the discussions on their own posts, allowing them to foster their own discussion norms, and giving them their own sphere of influence on the discussion platform. We hope this will both make the lives of our top authors better and will also create a form of competition between different cultures and moderation paradigms on Lesswrong.”
And I also gave some further perspectives on this in my “Models of Moderation” post that I posted a week ago.
We now finally got around to implement the technology for this. But the big question that has been on my mind while working on the implementation has been:
How should we handle moderation on frontpage posts?
Me, Ray, Ben and Vaniver talked for quite a while about the pros and cons, and considered a bunch of perspectives, but the two major considerations on our mind were:
The frontpage is a public forum that should reflect the perspectives of the whole community, as opposed to just the views of the active top-level authors.
We want our best authors to feel safe posting to LessWrong, and us promoting a post from your private blog to the frontpage shouldn’t feel like a punishment (which it might if it also entails losing control over it)
After a good amount of internal discussion, as well as feedback from some of the top content contributors on LW (including Eliezer), we settled on allowing users above 2000 karma to moderate their own frontpage posts, and allow users above 100 karma to moderate their personal blogs. This strikes me as the best compromise between the different considerations we had.
Here are the details about the implementation:
Users above...
100 karma can moderate everything in their personal blog posts section,
This functionality should go live in about a week
2000 karma can moderate all of their posts, including frontpage and curated. (We’ll likely increase the ‘2000’ threshold once we import the votes from old LessWrong)
This should be live right now
Before users can moderate, they have to set one of the three following moderation styles in their user settings:
Easy Going - I just delete obvious spam and trolling
Norm Enforcing - I try to enforce particular rules (See moderation guidelines)
Reign of Terror - I delete anything I judge to be annoying or counterproductive
Users can also specify more detailed moderation guidelines, which will be shown at the top of the comment section and at the bottom of the new comment form on the posts they can moderate
The specific moderation actions available are:
Delete comment
Optionally: with a public notice and reason
Delete thread without trace (deletes all comments and all its children)
Optionally: With a private reason sent to the author
Ban user from commenting on this post
Ban user from commenting on any of my posts
If a comment of yours is ever deleted, you will automatically receive a PM with the text of your comment, so you don’t lose the content of your comment.
I also want to allow users to create private comments on posts, that are only visible to themselves and the author of the post, and allow authors to make comments private (as an alternative to deleting them). But that will have to wait until we get around to implementing it.
We tested this reasonably thoroughly, but there is definitely a chance we missed something, so let us know if you notice any weird behavior around commenting on posts, or using the moderation tools, and we will fix it ASAP.
Can you give some examples of such people? (Are you one of them?)
My guess is something like more than half of the authors to this site who have posted more than 10 posts that you commented on, about you, in particular. Eliezer, Scott Alexander, Jacob Falkovich, Elizabeth Van Nostrand, me, dozens of others. This is not a rare position. I would have to dig to give you an exact list, but the list is not short, and it includes large fractions of almost everyone who one might consider strong contributors to the site.
We have had this conversation many times. I have listed examples of people like this in the past. If you find yourself still incapable of modeling more than 50% of top authors on the site whose very moderation guidelines you are opining on, after many many many dozens of hours of conversation on the topic, maybe you should just stay out of these conversations, as you are clearly incapable of modeling the preferences of the majority of people who would be affected by your suggested changes to the moderation guidelines.
A good start, if you actually wanted to understand any of this at all, would be to stop strawmaning these people repeatedly by inserting random ellipses and question marks and random snide remarks implying the absurdity of their position. Yes, people have preferences about how people interact with them that go beyond obvious unambigious norm violations, what a shocker! Yes, it is of course completely possible to be hostile in a plausible deniable way. Indeed, the most foundational essay for the moderation guidelines on this site, mentions this directly (emphasis mine):
Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)
So the garden is tainted now, and it is less fun to play in; the old inhabitants, already invested there, will stay, but they are that much less likely to attract new blood. Or if there are new members, their quality also has gone down.
Well-kept gardens do not tend to die by accepting obviously norm-violating content. They usually die by people being bad discourse participants in plausible deniable ways, just kind of worse, but not obviously and unambiguously worse, than what has come before. This is moderation 101. Yes, of course authors, and everyone else, will leave, if you fill a space with people just kind of being bad discourse participants, even if they don't do anything egregious. How could reality work any other way.
[I will move this into meta in a few days, but this seemed important enough to have around on the frontpage for a bit]
Here is a short post with some of the moderation changes we are implementing. Ray, Ben and me are working on some more posts explaining some of our deeper reasoning, so this is just a list with some quick updates.
Even before the start of the open beta, I intended to allow trusted users to moderate their personal pages. The reasoning I outlined in our initial announcement post was as follows:
“We want to give trusted authors moderation powers for the discussions on their own posts, allowing them to foster their own discussion norms, and giving them their own sphere of influence on the discussion platform. We hope this will both make the lives of our top authors better and will also create a form of competition between different cultures and moderation paradigms on Lesswrong.”
And I also gave some further perspectives on this in my “Models of Moderation” post that I posted a week ago.
We now finally got around to implement the technology for this. But the big question that has been on my mind while working on the implementation has been:
Me, Ray, Ben and Vaniver talked for quite a while about the pros and cons, and considered a bunch of perspectives, but the two major considerations on our mind were:
After a good amount of internal discussion, as well as feedback from some of the top content contributors on LW (including Eliezer), we settled on allowing users above 2000 karma to moderate their own frontpage posts, and allow users above 100 karma to moderate their personal blogs. This strikes me as the best compromise between the different considerations we had.
Here are the details about the implementation:
I also want to allow users to create private comments on posts, that are only visible to themselves and the author of the post, and allow authors to make comments private (as an alternative to deleting them). But that will have to wait until we get around to implementing it.
We tested this reasonably thoroughly, but there is definitely a chance we missed something, so let us know if you notice any weird behavior around commenting on posts, or using the moderation tools, and we will fix it ASAP.