I think giving people the right and responsibility to unilaterally ban commenters on their posts is demanding too much of people's rationality, forcing them to make evaluations when they're among most likely to be biased, and tempting them with the power to silence their harshest or most effective critics. I personally don't trust myself to do this and have basically committed to not ban anyone or even delete any comments that aren't obvious spam, and kind of don't trust others who would trust themselves to do this.
Given that the current comment tree is very large and unwieldy to read through, I would suggest that specific preferences on a system are agreed-or-disagreed-upon at my dedicated post - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z3zCGmqPC7geBHf5N/actionable-moderation-proposals-from-comments-tree.
[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.