May I suggest that length of comment should factor significantly into the choice to up/downvote?
I once suggested that upvote means "I would take the time to read this again if the insights from it were deleted from my brain" and downvote means "I would like the time it took to read this back."
Time figures into both of these. If you read a few words and don't profit from them, well, neither have you lost much. If you read several paragraphs, reread them to ensure you've understood them (because the writing was obtuse, say), and in the end conclude that you have learned nothing, the comment has, in some sense, made a real imposition on your time, and deserves a downvote.
This being said, one should not hesitate to downvote a short message if it does not add at all to the discussion, simply to keep the flow of useful comments without superfluous interruption that would hamper what could otherwise be a constructive argument.
(Note) This mostly has to do with karma with a minor rant/point at the end. If that doesn't sound interesting, it probably won't be.
Because I really do honestly think that if you want to downvote a comment that seems low-quality... and yet you hesitate, wondering if maybe you're downvoting just because you disagree with the conclusion or dislike the author... feeling nervous that someone watching you might accuse you of groupthink or echo-chamber-ism or (gasp!) censorship... then nine times of ten, I bet, nine times out of ten at least, it is a comment that really is low-quality.
Some of the most interesting things I have registered about LessWrong thus far have to do with the karma game. I am convinced that there are huge swaths of information that can be learned if the karma data was opened for analysis.
If I had to guess at the weaknesses of the karma system I would peg two big problems. The first is that (some? most? many?) people are trying to assign an integer value to a post that is something outside of the range [-1,1] and then adjust their vote to affect a post's score toward their chosen value. This seems to have the effect that everything is drawn toward 0 unless i...
The karma system is a integral part of the Reddit base code that this site is built on top of. It's designed to do one thing - increase the visibility of good content - and it does that one thing very well.
I agree, though, that there is untapped potential in the karma system. Personally I would love to see - if not by whom - at least when my comments are up/down voted.
I have the same apprehension. I'm somewhere between "complete poser" and "well-established member of the community," I just sort of found out about this movement about 50 days ago, started reading things and lurking, and then started posting. When I read the original post, I felt a little pang of guilt. Am I a fool running through your garden?
I'm doing pretty well for myself in the little Karma system, but I find that often I will post things that no one responds to, or that get up-voted or down-voted once and then left alone. I find that the only things that get down-voted more than once or twice are real attempts at trolling or otherwise hostile comments. Then again, many posts that I find insightful and beneficial to the discussion rarely rise about 2 or 3 karma points. So I'm left to wonder if my 1-point posts are controversial but good, above average but nothing special, or just mediocre and uninteresting.
Something that shows the volume of up- and down-votes as well as the net point score might provide more useful feedback.
I know there are more than twenty people visiting the site. Do they not read comments? Do they not vote on them?
I usually don't vote because I don't feel comfortable enough in my own understanding of these discussions to have an opinion about the relative value of a particular comment. Probably if I saw something that gave me an immediate and strong reaction, I'd be more likely to vote one way or another.
I know someone else who reads posts but seldom reads the comments.
no, but you can see from your inbox, which, for some odd reason, is not linked to anywhere.
ETA: Well, not linked to anywhere is a stretch. You can navigate there as follows:
I find it's easier to just bookmark the inbox page, or let your browser start autocompleting it for you
The user info in the sidebar now has an envelope which is a link to a users inbox. The envelope is red if there are new messages, otherwise it is gray.
The inbox and sent pages are now styled similar to the rest of lesswrong. In addition they now also have the sidebar.
I'd like to weigh in with a meta-comment on this meta-discussion: y'all are over-thinking this, seriously.
In the vein of Eliezer's Tsuyoku Naritai!, I'd like to propose a little quasi-anime (borrowed from the Japanese Shinsengumi by way of Rurouni Kenshin) mantra of my own:
Aku soku zan! ("Slay evil instantly!")
Don't obssess over what fractional vote a read-but-not-downvoted comment should earn, don't try to juggle length with quality with low-brow/high-brow distinctions (as Wittgenstein said, a good philosophy book could be written using nothing but jokes), don't ponder whether the poster is a female and a downvote would drive her away, or consider whether you have a duty to explain your downvote - just vote.
Is it a bad comment? (You know deep down that this is an easy question.) Aku soku zan! Downvote evil instantly! Is it a useless comment? Aku soku zan!
(And if anyone replies to this with a comment like 'I was going to upvote/downvote your comment, but then I decided deep down to downvote/upvote' - aku soku zan!)
No no! This sort of comment is exactly wrong - Once you start second-guessing your qualification of evil, it's a small step to going with the majoritarian flow and thence to ever more elaborate epicycles of karma. Aku soku zan!
For nearly 10 years I have referenced this thread in various forums I've moderated. While I never entirely agreed with every aspect, it has mostly held up well as a lodestar over the years.
Until recently.
And now, with the benefit of enough sequential observation over time, I am comfortable describing what I believe is a major hidden assumption, and thereby weakness, in this entire argument:
For the concept of "walled gardens" relating to online communities to succeed and thrive, there must exist an overlay of credibly alternative platforms. Or, more directly, there must exist fair and healthy competition among and within the media upon which the discussion are taking place.
This argument was created largely before the "sciences" of social media were refined. Today, we are living with the consequences of intersecting sciences of human psychology, sociology, computer science, statistics and mathematics. Dense, voluminous texts have been penned which describe precise models for determining how to create, manage and extract-value from "online communities". Some of those models even go so far as to involve manipulation of human physiological respons...
There is more than a single solution to this problem. Yes, one solution is to enforce First-Amendment style free-speech requirements on the oligopolistic giants that control the majority of the discourse that happens on the Internet. Another solution would be to address the fact that there are oligopolistic giants.
My solution to the above problem would be to force tech companies to abide by interoperability standards. The reason the dominant players are able to keep up their dominance is because they can successfully exploit Metcalfe's Law once they grow beyond a certain point. You need to be on Facebook/Twitter/etc because everyone you know is on that social network, and it requires too much energy to build the common knowledge to force a switch to a better competitor.
However, the reason it's so costly to switch is because there is no way for a competitor to be compatible with Facebook while offering additional features of their own. I can't build a successor social network which automatically posts content to Facebook while offering additional features that Facebook does not. If there were an open standard that all major social networks had to adopt, then it would be much easier
It may be true that well-kept gardens die from activism, but it's also the case that moderation can kill communities.
Any community that really needs to question its moderators, that really seriously has abusive moderators, is probably not worth saving. But this is more accused than realized, so far as I can see.
There speaks the voice of limited experience. Or perhaps LiveJournal, Reddit, Google+ and Facebook really are not worth saving?
I've seen enough discussion forums killed by abusive moderators that I look carefully before signing up for anything these days. When I write a lengthy response, like this, I post it on my own site rather than face the possibility that it will be silently deleted for disagreeing with a moderator.
However, I've also been a moderator, and I've seen situations where moderation was desperately needed. In my experience on both sides of the issue, there are some basic criteria for moderation that need to be met to avoid abuse:
Maybe I understand on a gut level that the opposite of censorship is not academia but 4chan (which probably still has mechanisms to prevent spam).
A quick factual note: 4chan unconditionally bans child pornography and blocks (in a Wikipedia sense) the IPs, as I found out myself back when I was browsing through Tor. They'll also moderate off-topic posts or posts in the wrong section. They actually have a surprisingly lengthy set of rules for a place with such an anarchistic reputation.
Also, it's important to note the difference between 4chan as a whole, which is indeed an erratically-tended garden of sorts, and the "random" sub-board, which is a seething cesspit of trolling and memes, with occasional flashes of socially-uninhibited lucidity, and indeed has anarchy levels that are (as they say) over 9000.
Update: new 'feature' - apparently, you can now only downvote if you've done less downvoting than your karma. Example from my screen:
Your total down votes (2538) must be less than your karma (528)
Current comment: 93t. This implies 11,792 comments, if I count correctly. You've downvoted 21% of all comments? I think it's more likely we're looking at some kind of bug, but if you've actually downvoted 21% of all comments then more power to you. Still, I'd like to verify first that it's not a bug.
That sounds about right - I try to read all comments and downvote over 1/3 of the time, but I've missed some in days of inactivity.
I think I just read the explanation for the strange phenomena some people have reported; that of karma disappearing rapidly over a few hours of downvotes on older threads. It's just thomblake catching up.
I've verified the numbers, thomblake has posted 2538 down votes. 93t is 11801 in base 36. Adding 436 articles drop the percentage slightly to 20.7%.
it'll also encourage me to upvote him more
It's nice to hear that my tendency to downvote heavily is so valued.
Certainly not worth your time. Maybe we can go start our own rationalist community! With blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the rationalism!
Are upvotes also so restricted?
Nope. I'd suggested that originally for balance, but the concern here (I think) was that someone could wreak more damage with unrestricted downvotes. Someone could create a bunch of accounts and downvote a bunch of stuff to oblivion. To use the 'pruning the garden' metaphor, we don't want people to come off the street with machetes and chainsaws.
But yes, I find it very ironic that this feature was implemented at the same time as encouragement to downvote more. On the other hand, they do go together, as since I can't be the one doing most of the downvoting anymore (he said jokingly), other people need to step it up.
I can see myself linking to this more than anything else you've ever written. Sing it, brother!
Note that the voting system we have here is trivially open to abuse through mass account creation. We're not in a position to do anything about that, so I hope that you, the site admins, are defending against it.
Wikipedia is an instructive example. People think it's some kind of democracy. It is not a democracy: Jimbo is absolute ruler of Wikipedia. He temporarily delegates some of his authority to the bureaucrats, who delegate to the admins, who moderate the ordinary users. All those with power are interested to get ideas from lots of people before making decisions, but it's very explicit policy that the purpose is to make the best encyclopaedia possible, and democracy doesn't enter into it. It is heavily policed, and of course that's the only way it could possibly work.
There is no strong reason that reasonable, informative discourse should be an attractor for online communities. Measures like karma or censorship are designed to address particular problems that people have observed; they aren't even intended to be a real solution to the general issue. If you happen to end up with a community where most conversation is intelligent, then I think the best you can say is that you were lucky for a while.
The question is, do people think that this is the nature of community? There is a possible universe (possible with respect to my current logical uncertainty) in which communities are necessarily reliant on vigilance to survive. There is also a possible universe where there are fundamentally stable solutions to this problem. In such a universe, a community can survive the introduction of many malicious or misguided users because its dynamics are good rather than because its moderator is vigilant. I strongly, strongly suspect that we live in the second universe. If we do, I think trying to solve this problem is important (fostering intelligent discourse is more important than the sum of all existing online communities). I don't mean saying "lets try...
I think I fundamentally disagree with your premise. I concede, I have seen communities where this happened . . . but by and large, they have been the exception rather than the rule.
The fundamental standard I have seen in communities that survived such things, versus those that didn't fall under two broad patterns.
A) Communities that survived were those where politeness was expected - a minimal standard that dropping below simply meant people had no desire to be seen with you.
B) Communities where the cultural context was that of (And I've never quite worded this correctly in my own mind) acknowledging that you were, in effect, not at home but at a friendly party at a friends house, and had no desire to embarrass yourself or your host by getting drunk and passing out on the porch - {G}.
Either of these attitude seems to be very nearly sufficient to prevent the entire issue (and seem to hasten recovery even on the occasion when it fails), combined they (in my experience) act as a near invulnerable bulwark against party crashers.
Now exactly how these attitudes are nurtured and maintained, I have never quite explained to my own satisfaction - it's definitely an "I know it when I see...
I agree with you, and I also agree with Eliezer, and therefore I don't think you're contradicting him. The catch is here:
they act as a near invulnerable bulwark against party crashers
This implies that the party crashers, upon seeing that everyone else is acting polite and courteous, will begin acting polite and courteous too. In a closer model of an internet community, what happens is that they act rough and rowdy ... and then the host kicks them out. Hence, moderators.
Unless you really mean that the social norms themselves are sufficient to ward off people who made the community less fun, in which case your experience on the internet is very different from mine.
One problem I have with hesitation to downvote is that some mediocre comments are necessary. Healthy discussion should have the right ratio of good comments to mediocre comments, so that people may feel relaxed, and make simple observations, increasing rate of communication. And current downvote seems too harsh for this role. On the other hand, people who only make tedious comments shouldn't feel welcome. This is a tricky balance problem to solve with comment-to-comment voting.
I would downvote more, if we had a separate button, saying "mediocre", that would downvote the comment, say, by 0.3 points (or less, it needs calibration). The semantics of this button is basically that I acknowledge that I have read the comment, but wasn't impressed either way. From the interface standpoint, it should be a very commonly used button, so it should be very easy to use. Bringing this to a more standard setting, this is basically graded voting, --, - and ++ (not soft/hard voting as I suggested before though).
An average mediocre comment should have (a bit of) negative Karma. This way, people may think of good comments they make as currency for buying the right to post some mediocre ones. In this situation, being afraid to post any mediocre comments corresponds to excessive frugality, an error of judgment.
Also, this kind of economy calls for separation of comment Karma and article Karma, since the nature of contributions and their valuation are too different between these venues.
Eliezer,
I used to be not so sure how I felt about this subject, but now I appreciate the wonderful community you and others have gardened, here.
This post makes me think of SL4:
The most active place on the internet for discussing Friendly AI is the SL4 email list. Ironically, it must be one of the most hostile email lists on the internet with frequent flame wars and people being banned from the list. The moderation system consists of so-called “list snipers” whose job it is to ban discussions that they don’t like. If these people are experts in friendliness… lord help us.
Different people will have different ideas of where on the 4chan - colloquium continuum a discussion should be, so here's a feature suggestion: post authors should be able to set a karma requirement to comment to the post. Beginner-level posts would draw questions about the basics, and other posts could have a karma requirement high enough to filter them out.
There could even be a karma requirement to see certain posts, for hiding Beisutsukai secrets from the general public.
I'd worry that:
a) It would be incredibly difficult to initially accumulate karma to begin with if it turned out that most posts that weren't "Introduce yourself!" had a decent karma requirement.
b) You'd end up excluding non-regulars who might have very substantial contributions to specific discussions from participating in those discussions. For example, I'm an economist, and most of my posts have been and probably will be in topics that touch on economic concepts. But I don't have much karma as a consequence, and I'd think it'd be to the community's detriment if I was excluded for that reason.
Karma is not a very good criterion, it's too much about participation, and less so about quality. It's additive. A cutoff of 20 points to post articles seems a reasonable minimum requirement, but doesn't tell much. The trolls who cause slow suffocation will often have 20 points, while new qualified people won't. Only extreme values of Karma seem to carry any info, when controlled for activity. Comment rating as feedback signal is much more meaningful.
4chan is actually pretty popular, I don't know if you are aware. Somehow their lack of censorship hasn't kept them from being "fun" for millions of people.
I can see how your moderation strategy might be different if you were optimizing for intelligent debate of issues in your community as opposed to optimizing for maximum fun had by the members of the community. In that case, though, you probably shouldn't conflate the two in your post.
For the record, I am not a denizen of 4chan, but I do have a lot of fun in moderation-light internet communities. I have been fortunate enough to see a natural experiment: the moderation team at my main online hangout was replaced en masse with a much easier going team a couple years back while leaving the community intact, and it was amazing how much easier it became to dick around to be funny when you no longer had to worry that you'd get a three-month ban for "being stupid".
I can see how your moderation strategy might be different if you were optimizing for intelligent debate of issues in your community as opposed to optimizing for maximum fun had by the members of the community. In that case, though, you probably shouldn't conflate the two in your post.
I won't be having much fun if the discussion ceases to be intelligent. Maybe the people who'll come after will have fun, but this is a community-wireheading scenario: you don't want to wirehead, but if you do wirehead, wireheaded you will have lots of fun...
The balance for a moderator is between too much craziness and too much groupthink.
Moderation easily becomes enforcement of a dogma. In English literary theory today, you're required to be a cultural relativist. You only get to choose one of three kinds of cultural relativist to be: Marxist, feminist, or post-modernist. Anyone else is dismissed as irrelevant to the discourse. This is the result of "moderation," which I place in quotes because it is anything but moderate.
It is especially problematic when the moderator is a key contributor. A m...
Given a finite amount of time in a day, I have to decide how to use it. While I can afford to take a quick look at each comment when there are only few of them, I have no choice but to ignore some when there are pages of them (and other top-level posts to read). One nice thing with the karma system is the "best to worst" comments order: I can read the first ones and stop reading when encountering too many "boring" ones in a row (but maybe not "boring" enough to merit a downvote).
However, if many people use a similar algorithm ...
My secret garden or why my garden is not well-kept
I talk of a real garden here - my garden, a place for me to rest, to see flowers, birds and butterflies, to read in.
Years ago, before my time, it was a well-kept garden.
There was a lot of grass and some bushes, and that was it, easy to maintain, well kept.
Because I like flowers, i tried this and that, some things thrived and others died and it was never the garden I planned in the beginning.
I never planted the clover and the moss that creeped into the grass. In the beginning, I tried to fight it, but sudden...
"Don't believe in yourself! Believe that I believe in you!"
If you're trying to quote Gurren-Lagann here, I believe you botched the quote. "Believe in me who believes in you!" But maybe it was dubbed differently. In any case, I do find some amusement in your approvingly quoting a show which was more or less premised on a rejection of rationality. "Throw away your logic and kick reason to the curb!" I'll have to remember that for the next anti-rationalism quotes thread.
But anyways, I did like this post, although as you impli...
Unless LWers got together and staged an invasion... wouldn't that make for an interesting day at some forum...
If LW ever invades some other forum, that forum will either get out the banhammer or be overrun.
OK, that sounds like a lot of fun. Which would be exactly the wrong reason for us to do it.
That being said, what would be the result of a coup like that? If we could actually expect to change a few minds in the process, it might be worth trying.
On the other hand, reputation is a valuable commodity. What would such an act do to our visibility and reputation?
I can't think of a specific example that a broad audience might know about, but it's relatively easy to see how this could arise. Take a community of "idiots", by whatever criteria we'd use to apply the term to the lone troll. Many of them exist which espouse all sorts of nonsense. Throw in someone who actually understands the topics which these people purport to discuss. Unless that person is incredibly subtle and eloquent, they will be denounced as an idiot in any number of ways.
I can speak here from my own experience as an economist who's tried to make arguments about public choice and decentralized knowledge to a general (online) audience in order to defend free markets. A lot of crowds really will have none of it. I think this is a frustration which even the best libertarian-leaning individuals have run into. But given persistence, one can gain ground... and subsequently be accused of "ruining" a safe space which was reserved for the narrow worldview which you challenged. In face, any community with "safe space" disclaimers is probably extremely vulnerable to this - I just doubt you've engaged with many.
In my opinion, if handled improperly (E.g. Reddit) up/down vote system enable predatory herd dynamics since the accumulation of karma points trigger a competition between members and an excessive sense of self-worth.
When you don't have a specific karma count for every single community you are in, what can happen is people starting acting on purpose to get karma (that is also dopamine), adapting their behaviour to the general trend of every community they join, for the mere sake of acquiring what is perceived as "credibility" and "respect".
Gaining karma thr...
Lots of interesting and good things come out of 4chan. The signal/noise is low, but there is still lots of signal, and it had no high ideals to start with at all.
I wonder if an explicitly rationalist site without standards would devolve into something that was still interesting and powerful. I think I would trade LW/OB for a site where a thousand 13 year old bayesians insulted each others' moms and sometimes built up rationality. In the long run it's probably worth more.
Also, I have a higher quality comment which my posting time is too small to contain.
Just like it is easy to be naive about the universal virtue of unconditional nonviolent pacifism, when your country already has armed soldiers on the borders, and your city already has police.
Kudos! A lot of my friends don't understand why I practice martial arts, they just don't understand how priviledged they are in never having needed it.
More generally, the risk of getting injured or worse costs too much to attempt violence, even if you can win in 90% of encounters. Only where you can't avoid confrontation by paying whatever moderate amount of money you have on you, there is a point in being stronger, which further discounts the worth of training, down from the already low probability of being attacked at all.
Typo: at the bottom of the post, where the previous post is referred. Underconfidence has an extra 'e'
I see that Robert Scoble has recently posted on a good way of creating a responsible online community:
http://scobleizer.com/2009/04/20/decentralized-moderation-is-the-chat-room-savior/
My impression: anyone serious who wants to participate should feel free to do so in the welcome thread. You can ask feedback there on what background understandings or goals are expected; you can share your reasons for being a theist and ask if others have good responses; etc.
If this isn’t the case, perhaps we should create an explicit “Newcomers’ questions”, or “Background” thread, specifically for being a place where people without the expected LW background can ask for help, question conclusions the rest of the community wants to take as established and move on from (e.g., concerning theism), etc.?
I agree with cyphergoth that it would be nice to have certain background material that can be assumed in LW conversations, so that we can maintain a high level of conversation throughout most of LW.
I also think it would be a pity for byrnema to just leave, given the skills and willingness to learn that she’s demonstrated in her posts.
If we want to be a vibrant community, we’ll probably need to both maintain high-quality discussions most places, so that we can establish things and move on, and also to create “bridges” so that folks who have something to contribute but who don’t yet q...
Look, if E wants to stomp you, expect to feel it. The whole point of the above is that he sees no virtue in holding back.
I'd be very surprised if Eliezer was obliquely referring to you. You've said things that go against the consensus here, but they've been of generally good quality.
I would presume that Eliezer has specifically told any banning candidates exactly why their contributions are problematic, and that he's withholding named examples here out of politeness. So if you haven't had a serious rebuke about your conduct on LW, I don't think you're implicated.
Superhappies would ask you, in the name of fairness, to invent a symmetric rite of admission for atheists. Some Bayesian-obvious truth that would sound similarly unacceptable to their social circle.
For example, we atheists could get a taste of theists' feelings by declaring aloud that "women/blacks and men/whites don't have equal intelligence on average" and watching the reactions. A "bigoted" version of Dawkins or Eliezer could arise and argue eloquently how this factual statement is irrelevant to morality, just like the issue of god's existence. That was inflammatory on purpose; you could go for something milder, like the goodness of monarchy relative to democracy.
it's not appropriate to post arguments for religious faith here at all.
Agreed, with reservations. (Some might be useful examples. Some might be sufficiently persuasive prima facie to be worth a look even though we'd be astonished if they turned out actually to work.)
if you don't understand why theism is ruled out, you're not ready to post here at all.
If theism were just one more thing that people can easily be wrong about, perhaps you'd be right. As it is, there's huge internal and external pressure influencing many people in the direction of theism, and some people are really good at compartmentalizing; and as a result there are lots of people who are basically good thinkers, who are basically committed to deciding things rationally, but who are still theists. I don't see any reason to believe that no one in that position could have anything to offer LW.
Once again: Would you want to keep out Robert Aumann?
You seem to be implying that communities such as 4chan are "bad". You did not say that explicitly, but you heavily implied it. Why do you think free-speech communities are bad? Your choice of the word "fool" to characterize someone with whom you disagree is questionable at best.
Maybe I understand on a gut level that the opposite of censorship is not academia but 4chan (which probably still has mechanisms to prevent spam).
A quick factual note: 4chan unconditionally bans child pornography and blocks (in a Wikipedia sense) the IPs, as I found out myself back when I was browsing through Tor. They'll also moderate off-topic posts or posts in the wrong section. They actually have a surprisingly lengthy set of rules for a place with such an anarchistic reputation.
One: I support the above post. I've seen quite a few communities die for that very reason.
Two: Gurren Lagann? (pause) Gurren Lagann? Who the h*ll do you think I am?
Barry Kort posted notice of this article on a thread at The Wikipedia Review.
We have there, over the years, often considered this problem, with Wikipedia being the sublimely ridiculous example.
Here are a couple of threads that come to mind:
Open to discussion here or there …
Jon Awbrey
What communities actually die in that way? If they don't actually end but continue differently then it's like saying science fiction died because new authors with their newfangled take on the genre changed things (disclaimer: I don't really know anything about science fiction).
In the case of spam there is a problem of high volume (raivo pommer estee is a good counter-example, as there's generally no more than 1 per thread and it's short) but otherwise I don't really see the harm in idiots posting. Anybody is free to skip past stuff they don't care about (I...
For the record, I am also having a hard time deciding how to vote on comments to this post. Is it too early to turn up the standards and vote everyone down?
Previously in series: My Way
Followup to: The Sin of Underconfidence
Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.
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.
Then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members, those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere, leave...
I am old enough to remember the USENET that is forgotten, though I was very young. Unlike the first Internet that died so long ago in the Eternal September, in these days there is always some way to delete unwanted content. We can thank spam for that—so egregious that no one defends it, so prolific that no one can just ignore it, there must be a banhammer somewhere.
But when the fools begin their invasion, some communities think themselves too good to use their banhammer for—gasp!—censorship.
After all—anyone acculturated by academia knows that censorship is a very grave sin... in their walled gardens where it costs thousands and thousands of dollars to enter, and students fear their professors' grading, and heaven forbid the janitors should speak up in the middle of a colloquium.
It is easy to be naive about the evils of censorship when you already live in a carefully kept garden. Just like it is easy to be naive about the universal virtue of unconditional nonviolent pacifism, when your country already has armed soldiers on the borders, and your city already has police. It costs you nothing to be righteous, so long as the police stay on their jobs.
The thing about online communities, though, is that you can't rely on the police ignoring you and staying on the job; the community actually pays the price of its virtuousness.
In the beginning, while the community is still thriving, censorship seems like a terrible and unnecessary imposition. Things are still going fine. It's just one fool, and if we can't tolerate just one fool, well, we must not be very tolerant. Perhaps the fool will give up and go away, without any need of censorship. And if the whole community has become just that much less fun to be a part of... mere fun doesn't seem like a good justification for (gasp!) censorship, any more than disliking someone's looks seems like a good reason to punch them in the nose.
(But joining a community is a strictly voluntary process, and if prospective new members don't like your looks, they won't join in the first place.)
And after all—who will be the censor? Who can possibly be trusted with such power?
Quite a lot of people, probably, in any well-kept garden. But if the garden is even a little divided within itself —if there are factions—if there are people who hang out in the community despite not much trusting the moderator or whoever could potentially wield the banhammer—
(for such internal politics often seem like a matter of far greater import than mere invading barbarians)
—then trying to defend the community is typically depicted as a coup attempt. Who is this one who dares appoint themselves as judge and executioner? Do they think their ownership of the server means they own the people? Own our community? Do they think that control over the source code makes them a god?
I confess, for a while I didn't even understand why communities had such trouble defending themselves—I thought it was pure naivete. It didn't occur to me that it was an egalitarian instinct to prevent chieftains from getting too much power. "None of us are bigger than one another, all of us are men and can fight; I am going to get my arrows", was the saying in one hunter-gatherer tribe whose name I forget. (Because among humans, unlike chimpanzees, weapons are an equalizer—the tribal chieftain seems to be an invention of agriculture, when people can't just walk away any more.)
Maybe it's because I grew up on the Internet in places where there was always a sysop, and so I take for granted that whoever runs the server has certain responsibilities. Maybe I understand on a gut level that the opposite of censorship is not academia but 4chan (which probably still has mechanisms to prevent spam). Maybe because I grew up in that wide open space where the freedom that mattered was the freedom to choose a well-kept garden that you liked and that liked you, as if you actually could find a country with good laws. Maybe because I take it for granted that if you don't like the archwizard, the thing to do is walk away (this did happen to me once, and I did indeed just walk away).
And maybe because I, myself, have often been the one running the server. But I am consistent, usually being first in line to support moderators—even when they're on the other side from me of the internal politics. I know what happens when an online community starts questioning its moderators. Any political enemy I have on a mailing list who's popular enough to be dangerous is probably not someone who would abuse that particular power of censorship, and when they put on their moderator's hat, I vocally support them—they need urging on, not restraining. People who've grown up in academia simply don't realize how strong are the walls of exclusion that keep the trolls out of their lovely garden of "free speech".
Any community that really needs to question its moderators, that really seriously has abusive moderators, is probably not worth saving. But this is more accused than realized, so far as I can see.
In any case the light didn't go on in my head about egalitarian instincts (instincts to prevent leaders from exercising power) killing online communities until just recently. While reading a comment at Less Wrong, in fact, though I don't recall which one.
But I have seen it happen—over and over, with myself urging the moderators on and supporting them whether they were people I liked or not, and the moderators still not doing enough to prevent the slow decay. Being too humble, doubting themselves an order of magnitude more than I would have doubted them. It was a rationalist hangout, and the third besetting sin of rationalists is underconfidence.
This about the Internet: Anyone can walk in. And anyone can walk out. And so an online community must stay fun to stay alive. Waiting until the last resort of absolute, blatent, undeniable egregiousness—waiting as long as a police officer would wait to open fire—indulging your conscience and the virtues you learned in walled fortresses, waiting until you can be certain you are in the right, and fear no questioning looks—is waiting far too late.
I have seen rationalist communities die because they trusted their moderators too little.
But that was not a karma system, actually.
Here—you must trust yourselves.
A certain quote seems appropriate here: "Don't believe in yourself! Believe that I believe in you!"
Because I really do honestly think that if you want to downvote a comment that seems low-quality... and yet you hesitate, wondering if maybe you're downvoting just because you disagree with the conclusion or dislike the author... feeling nervous that someone watching you might accuse you of groupthink or echo-chamber-ism or (gasp!) censorship... then nine times of ten, I bet, nine times out of ten at least, it is a comment that really is low-quality.
You have the downvote. Use it or USENET.
Part of the sequence The Craft and the Community
Next post: "Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories"
Previous post: "The Sin of Underconfidencee"
