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Epiphany comments on Call For Agreement: Should LessWrong have better protection against cultural collapse? - Less Wrong
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Actually, this eternal September business was preceded by the concerns of other people in my LessWrong could grow a lot but we're doing it wrong thread:
Vladimir_M
CronoDAS
gjm (Specifically concerned about intentional growth that I proposed causing eternal September.)
beoShaffer
Risto_Saarelma
More people expressed concern when I talked about preventing it:
cousin_it
Xachariah
People are still expressing concern in this very thread:
Konkvistador
Armok_GoB
If there's a volunteer interested in working on growth, and it looks like lots of growth is possible, but a bunch of people are concerned about a decline in culture and it's a known risk of growing internet forums, and Eliezer is talking about the proliferation of undiscriminating skeptics, and I saw a forum collapse from it myself, doesn't it make sense to talk about whether growth would destroy LessWrong before speeding up growth?
People were quick to up vote my growth post like there's no tomorrow. It was the most popular post in almost a month. Then I write a post about the downsides of growth, and it's down voted to the point of being hidden. Might this be optimism bias, normalcy bias, or denial at work? I don't think that the rejections stated are the true rejection.
I see my name being taken kinda-in-vain here. I wasn't saying "LW is about to be consumed by an Eternal September" but something nearer to "If we take the course Epiphany is proposing, we may inflict an Eternal September upon ourselves". I think the same may be true for some of the other people you mention, but I haven't gone back to check exactly what they said.
Did my edit solve this, Gjm?
Yes, with two minor caveats -- probably too minor to merit half the number of words I'm about to spend on one of them :-).
1 As I already mentioned, the same concerns may apply to some of the other people you listed; I haven't checked.
2 I'm still there bulking up your list of people worried about "this eternal September business", even though what I was expressing concern about was something more specific. Your edit means that you aren't misrepresenting me any more, but it's still a little odd. Imagine, to take an melodramatically exaggerated example, that a creationist website puts up a list of "people who think Darwin was wrong", and one of the people on the list is, say, Richard Dawkins. Even with a note explaining "Specifically, thinks that science has moved on since the 1850s and we now know lots of details Darwin didn't" his name would be out of place on that list.
The reason why #2 is not a big deal is that, actually, I do think there is a real possibility that (even without deliberate attempts to grow) LW -- or any other community -- will suffer from "dilution" over time. But that isn't what I said in the discussion you linked to :-). (And I certainly wouldn't say that it's likely to destroy LW, or anything like that.)
Okay, well it's up to you, Gjm. I will remove you completely if you request.
Given the presence of this discussion, I don't think that's necessary.
Sometimes popularity does not correlate with good ideas; especially when unpopular things need to be done. Forum moderation triggers our hierarchy instincts. We don't want trolling here, but any specific action against trolling feels dangerous; our instincts scream at us that the moderator is taking too much power and will certainly abuse it. We imagine a hypothetical scenario where the rules could be used against us, and we get a paranoid feeling that this is exactly what will happen.
For instance, now we have the new rule that replying to low-karma votes costs you some karma. Suddenly everyone imagines a situation where it would be reasonable to reply to a negative-karma post, and ignores that the prior probability of that is much lower than the prior probability of a negative-karma post not worth replying (but receiving many replies anyway).
It's the "better be safe than sorry" bias talking, which means ignoring the costs of being "safe". We want to be certain that no negative-karma comment worth replying goes unnoticed, ever. The costs in our time and attention be damned.
Perhaps your article was not about this, but... it just came at the wrong time, when it's popular to oppose website moderation.
I think it's especially telling that their main objections to this post are "It's long." and "It's a meta thread." while this popular post on growth definitely qualifies as a meta thread and the most popular post I've ever seen here is over three times longer than this thread. If they didn't like meta topics, they'd have voted my growth post into oblivion. If they didn't like long posts, they'd never have been interested in the sequences. If they didn't like newbies posting meta threads, they would not have up voted my popular growth post to the point where it was the most popular post in almost a month.
None of these are the true rejection. On an individual level, maybe. On a group level, no.
"It's long." and "It's a meta thread." are both simplified versions of the actual objections. The full versions are "It took too long to come to a point so I gave up reading" and "It's the umpteenth meta thread in the last week and I'm tired of them", respectively.
You'll note that the three-times-longer post you link to goes to great lengths to summarize its key points in the first few paragraphs. The structure of the post is also clear, and there are even three separate objections that people can read and address individually. Also, part of the "length" argument might be that you have page-long paragraphs with no breaks in them, which is harder to read.
Likewise, the growth post is a different kind of meta thread. It starts a new discussion and has data to back it up; although I disagree with pretty much everything in it, I saw no reason to downvote it. On the other hand, the current post is just rehashing the endless discussions we've had over the past few weeks that doesn't seem to bring many new points to the table. When people say "we don't want a new meta thread" they mean "we don't want a new thread to discuss the same things that the last three meta threads were filled with."
Thank you for this theory, Viliam. (: