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lukeprog comments on Dealing with trolling and the signal to noise ratio - Less Wrong
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Nesov, you are a particularly active and helpful moderator. I'm less familiar with how much effort is invested by other moderators. I believe you could do this well, but I'm not sure this solution can be scaled, or even run without you (right now).
I'm active (I read literally everything on Less Wrong, or at least skim) but I'm timid. I don't know what I am and am not supposed to be banning/editing, so I confine banning to spam and editing to obvious errors of formatting or spelling/grammar.
In June I asked Eliezer for moderation guidelines, since there has been an uptick in trolling or just timewasting poorly-informed ranters, but he just said that he thought it needed a software fix (the recent controversial one).
Thanks for your contributions. I scanned this whole thread and am talking to Eliezer about possible solutions. Right now the troll toll isn't enough, but maybe that's because nothing will deter a SuperTroll like Will Newsome.
ETA: I should clarify that I like Will Newsome in person, but on Less Wrong his comments very often seem to be deliberately obscurantist, unhelpful, and misleading.
You don't deter SuperTrolls. You ban them and move on. This is a very simple problem that you guys are vastly over-complicating.
Ban him and ostracize him socially.
You're right. It seems silly to say that nothing, with emphasis, will stop Will when banning him and any obvious sockpuppets hasn't even been tried. (This isn't particularly advocating that course of action, just agreeing that Luke's prediction is absurd.)
"Ostracize" does not work well online. You don't get direct feedback on how many people read what. (Even the downvotes are evidence that someone did read the comment, and expended some of their energy to downvote it -- which supposedly is part of what the trolls want.)
There is no online equivalent of a group turning their backs on someone in ice-cold silence. Just "not answering" is not the same thing... that happens to many normal comments too.
As far as I can tell Will Newsome hangs out in Berkely with SI folks.
The distinction between "toll threads" and "closed threads" was an attempt to make the action easier, bear less responsibility and provoke less agitation if applied in controversial cases (it could be un-applied by a moderator as well), so that the button could be more easily given to more people.
Right now the only tool anyone has is the banhammer that either destroys a post with all its comments completely (something I strongly disapprove of being at all possible, but my discussion in the tickets didn't evoke much support) or needs to be applied in a whac-a-mole manner to each new comment, and neither decision should be made lightly. Since there are no milder measures, nothing at all can be done in milder or more controversial cases. I don't believe there is much of a fixable-by-moderation signal-to-noise problem right now except for the occasional big bad threads, so most of the motivation for this tool is to make their inhibition more effective than it currently is. Since big bad threads are rare, you don't need a lot of moderators to address them.
(It's probably not worth the effort to implement it right now, so bringing it up is mostly motivated as being what I see as a better alternative to the punish-all-subcomments-automatically measure Eliezer was suggesting, although I still expect the current punish-direct-replies to suffice on its own.)