LessWrongers dream of an unhurried future without having to fear death.

https://carado.moe/everything-is-okay.html is a dead link. Seems that all of the website is gone and purged from the Wayback Machine.

Nowhere on the whole wide internet works like that! Clearly the vast majority of people do not think that authors shouldn’t moderate their own threads. Practically nowhere on the internet do you even have the option for anything else.

Where's this coming from all of a sudden? Forums work like this, Less Wrong used to work like this. Data Secrets Lox still works like this. Most subreddits work like this. This whole thread is about how maybe the places that work like this have the right idea, so it's a bit late in the game to open up with "they don't exist and aren't a thing anyone wants".

It feels like there's a confusion of different informal social systems with how LW 2.0 has been set up. Forums have traditionally had moderators distinct from posters, and even when moderators also participate in discussions on small forums, there are often informal conventions that a moderator should not put on a modhat if they are already participating in a dispute as a poster, and a second moderator should look at the post instead (you need more than one moderator for this of course).

The LW 2.0 author moderation system is what blog hosting platforms like Blogger and Substack use, and the bid seems to have been to entice people who got big enough to run their standalone successful blog back to Lesswrong. On these platforms the site administrators are very hands-off and usually only drop in to squash something actually illegal (and good luck getting anyone to talk to if they actually decide your blog needs to be wiped from the system), and the separate blogs are kept very distinct from each other with little shared site identity, so random very weird Blogger blogs don't really create that much of an overall "there's something off with Blogger" vibe. They just exist on their own domain and mostly don't interact with the rest of the platform.

Meanwhile, LW is still very much in the forum mold, the posts exist in the same big pool and site moderators are very hands-on, give warnings and can be talked to. Standalone blog author tier people mostly don't seem to have come back to post a large volume of LW threads, and the dynamics are still very forum-like, so basically now there's just the chaotic extra element that any random person who started a forum thread can act as moderator and moderate other users as well as their individual comments on their threads, and this adds weird drama and dysfunction to the forum social dynamic. Most of the time it happens it'll also violate the informal rule that a moderator should not start moderating the dispute they themselves got initially involved in as a non-modhat poster.

EDIT: The third system mixed in is Facebook/Twitter style social media that's a "steppe" instead of a "valley", meaning that you have a steady stream of complete strangers coming in and out instead of a pool of a few dozen to a few hundred people who might have been around for over a decade. You want a very low friction ban mechanism on a steppe site since a lot of first interactions will be bad and usually indicate the drive-by stranger they're from is not worth interacting with. On a valley site the person interacting with you is much more likely to be tightly invested in the very local area, so blocking them is bigger drama generator.

Reddit and HN also get it wrong, but less wrong than LW: they show the comment and its subthread, but not the surrounding context.

You can click on the "context" link in a HN subthread view to switch to the one you want.

I zoned out pretty hard around the time they got deep into the korrigibility debate, and started entertaining myself by assuming that the ship's approach was actually The Outer Dark from Warren Ellis' Authority, told from a different viewpoint.

I'm having a hard time finding examples in that list that feel like they really match the idea. Most of them seem to be about people figuring out they're in a Matrix and then punching the Matrix Lord in the face. One example I remember which does go directly from realization to nonexistence is Orqwith in Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol. The idea that you can directly affect the physical universe, though not necessarily to the point of nonexistence, by messing with sufficiently complex calculations shows up pretty much as is in Greg Egan's Luminous.

I'm pretty sure people drifted away because of a more complex set of dynamics and incentives than "Said might comment on their posts" and I don't expect to see much of a reversal.

People dropping in on an unfamiliar website can have very hair-trigger reactions on any sort of AI art. I heard someone say they felt like immediately writing off a (good) Substack post as fake content they should ignore because of the AI art illustration at the top of the post. And I think the illustration generator is a built-in option on Substack because I see constant AI illustrations on Substacks of people who are purely writers who as far as I can tell who aren't very interested in art or web design. But this person wasn't familiar with Substack, so their brain just went "random AI slop site, ignore".

Bad call. You don't exactly have an unlimited supply of people who have a solid handle on the formative LW mindset and principles from 15 years ago and who are still actively participating on the forums, and latter-day LessWrong doesn't have as much of a coherent and valuable identity to stand firmly on its own.

A key idea in the mindset that started LessWrong is that people can be wrong. Being wrong can exist as an abstract thing to begin with, it's not just an euphemism for poor political positioning. And people in positions of authority can be wrong. Kind, well-meaning, likable people can be wrong. People who have considerate friendly conversations that are a joy to moderate can be wrong. It's not always easy to figure out right and wrong, but it is possible, and it's not always socially harmonious to point it out loud, but it used to be considered virtuous still.

A forum that has principles in its culture is going to have cases where moderation is annoying around something or someone who doggedly sticks to those principles. It's then a decision for the moderators whether they want to work to keep the forum's principles alive or to have a slightly easier time moderating in the future.