My request that you not reply to my comments was not, and never became, an invitation for replies to my comments.
Alicorn's request for SilasBarta to not reply to her comments was not, and never became, an obligation for him to not speak up when Alicorn says things that he opposes.
Replying to a comment on a forum is not the same as approaching someone in person to engage in conversation. It is, fittingly, like responding to a public speech at the forum. Accordingly, the right to reply to Alicorn's comments isn't something that requires her 'invitation'. She does not have the right to speak whatever she wishes and demand that someone in particular who disagrees with her may not reply. (Except, I suppose, in the technical sense whereby she could in principle abuse her moderation powers to prevent someone replying for any reason she chose.)
This particular play for status and control over SilasBarta should be rejected and crushed mercilessly. SilasBarta's comment isn't personal in nature and so does not represent the kind of social approach that fits with the subject of this thread and doesn't get the same treatment.
The solution to not wanting to see replies by a specific individual is an ignore feature and that is one we really need here. There are plenty of people I whose comments I don't want to see and as a bonus that which is not seen can not be fed.
Also, the grandparent is disingenuous. Presumably, Silas assumed that the request had simply expired, not that it had morphed into a different kind of request.
...as did I, frankly. I'm now commenting here after seeing this and thinking, "Oh, no, please don't let this be about....that!", and then finding, to my utter horror, that it was indeed about that.
One of the lessons highlighted in the thread "Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter" is Gender ratio matters.
There have recently been a number of articles addressing one social skills issue that might be affecting this, from the perspective of a geeky/sciencefiction community with similar attributes to LessWrong, and I want to link to these, not just so the people potentially causing problems get to read them, but also so everyone else knows the resource is there and has a name for the problem, which may facilitate wider discussion and make it easier for others to know when to point towards the resources those who would benefit by them.
However before I do, in the light of RedRobot's comment in the "Of Gender and Rationality" thread, I'd like to echo a sentiment from one of the articles, that people exhibiting this behaviour may be of any gender and may victimise upon any gender. And so, while it may be correlated with a particular gender, it is the behaviour that should be focused upon, and turning this thread into bashing of one gender (or defensiveness against perceived bashing) would be unhelpful.
Ok, disclaimers out of the way, here are the links:
Some of those raise deeper issues about rape culture and audience as enabler, but the TLDR summary is:
EDITED TO ADD:
Despite the way some of the links are framed as being addressed to creepers, this post is aimed at least as much at the community as a whole, intended to trigger a discussion on how the community should best go about handling such a problem once identified, with the TLDR being "set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons", rather that a complete description that guarantees that anyone who doesn't meet it isn't creepy. (Thank you to jsteinhardt for clearly verbalising the misinterpretation - for discussion see his reply to this post)