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Alicorn comments on Meta: LW Policy: When to prohibit Alice from replying to Bob's arguments? - Less Wrong
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Comments (81)
The parent is bad, but someone banned it (I unbanned it for now), and I'm not aware of a policy that permits banning in such cases. Please clarify.
Incorrect is a suspected Will Newsome sockpuppet and I've been told to - er - fire at will.
It was supposed to be a sarcastic response about being too strict with definitions but obviously didn't end up being funny.
I am not a Will Newsome sockpuppet. I'll refrain from making the lower quality subset of my comments henceforth.
I agree about Will Newsome, who recently fell under the "Put on probation if reaches minus hundreds of 30-day Karma" (his current 30-day Karma is minus 334), but "suspected Will Newsome sockpuppet" doesn't seem reliable enough to me. (I wasn't suspecting that, for example, did I miss something obvious?)
Began suspecting in this thread. Agree/disagree?
Plausible, not conclusive. It's an old enough user account to be more conservative on the odd chance that there is an alternative explanation. (Unbanned Incorrect in that thread so that others can judge, it's not that toxic on its own. As a result, there are currently no (recent) comments by Incorrect that are banned.)
I admire your restrain. I'm also really glad to see Alicorn taking the hands on approach to Will's disruptions. As a curious observer, and for whatever it is worth I'm approximately neutral with respect to the "Ban Incorrect" decision. I naturally agree that banning on suspicion is a potentially abhorrent heuristic. Justice systems are so much better when "beyond reasonable doubt" is applied. However in this case the mistake isn't banning someone who is innocent. It is banning someone who is acting like a willfully obnoxious fool who delights in baiting people for responses by saying stupid things in a way that looks like it could be Will Newsome. If the last part happens to be false then hey, at least Alicorn still got rid of comments by someone who was deliberately being an asshat.
Even when it results in false positives (people behaving like Will at his worst are banned as Will sockpuppets) or false negatives (Will acts like someone who isn't being a dick on one of his sockpuppets so isn't banned) the policy still results in Mission. Fucking. Acomplished.
Purely out of interest Alicorn, do you just ban individual comments by the supsected sockpuppets when they also happen to be silly comments? Or do you just ban all of them? The former option seems like more work but more power to you if you are willing to put in the effort. The latter option would be ok, but then it seems like you just need a 'ban account' feature instead!
The former. We don't have a "ban account" feature, and I read-or-at-least-skim all comments on the entire site anyway.
Well, looking at the banned comments from Will's user page it certainly seems that you're not limiting yourself to silly comments.
Yes, I actually noticed that my favourite comment on this entire thread seems to have been banned (for being made by Will). This is disappointing but something I can accept if it is part of the price of also getting rid of the actually disruptive anti-social contributions.
I didn't personally ban them all.
I had to go back and reread this to really understand the implications. Suddenly it's much clearer to me why you and other moderators care so much about keeping Recent Comments clean and want features like the troll feeding fee. Low quality comments, no matter in what thread, impact your experience much more than mine.
(Not to imply that reading many threads, or Recent Comments, is something only done by moderators.)
How? Through the RSS feed?
Through the Recent Comments pages.
The 'Recent Comments' text is a link. Wow. Never noticed that. Thanks.
Account age isn't a guarantee - I know Will has older accounts than his current main, although I haven't seen them in circulation recently - but I'll abide by your conservatism here.
I'm not saying that the age of an account (strongly) argues against the account being Newsome's, I'm saying it (significantly) increases the disutility of wrongful banning. Which in turn argues for requiring a higher level of certainty for banning an older account. Hence, the distinction between "plausible" and "conclusive" becomes relevant, where it wouldn't be so for a new account that only had a few very-bad-and-highly-suspicious comments.
Love it.