Is that your true rejection? That is, if this poll were posted to Main, and all readers were encouraged to answer, and the results came back essentially the same, would you then allow the results to influence what kind of policy to adopt? Or are you just sufficiently confident about the need for such a moderation policy that, absent clear negative consequences not previously considered, you'll implement it anyway?
I don't mean at all to suggest that the latter answer is inappropriate. Overall I trust your moderating judgment, and you clearly have more experience with and have thought more about LW's public image than probably anyone. If you decide the strong version of this policy is needed, notwithstanding disagreement from most LW members, I'm happy to give substantial deference to that decision. But does it matter either way whether this post is selectively read?
Not if readers were "encouraged" to answer. If there were some way of knowing the population was representative (i.e. we selected at random and got back responses from everyone selected)... hm, possibly. I know that what people say at local LW gatherings has a stronger influence on me than what I hear online, but that could be for 'improper' reasons of face-to-face contact or greater personal familiarity.
New proposed censorship policy:
Any post or comment which advocates or 'asks about' violence against sufficiently identifiable real people or groups (as opposed to aliens or hypothetical people on trolley tracks) may be deleted, along with replies that also contain the info necessary to visualize violence against real people.
Reason: Talking about such violence makes that violence more probable, and makes LW look bad; and numerous message boards across the Earth censor discussion of various subtypes of proposed criminal activity without anything bad happening to them.
More generally: Posts or comments advocating or 'asking about' violation of laws that are actually enforced against middle-class people (e.g., kidnapping, not anti-marijuana laws) may at the admins' option be censored on the grounds that it makes LW look bad and that anyone talking about a proposed crime on the Internet fails forever as a criminal (i.e., even if a proposed conspiratorial crime were in fact good, there would still be net negative expected utility from talking about it on the Internet; if it's a bad idea, promoting it conceptually by discussing it is also a bad idea; therefore and in full generality this is a low-value form of discussion).
This is not a poll, but I am asking in advance if anyone has non-obvious consequences they want to point out or policy considerations they would like to raise. In other words, the form of this discussion is not 'Do you like this?' - you probably have a different cost function from people who are held responsible for how LW looks as a whole - but rather, 'Are there any predictable consequences we didn't think of that you would like to point out, and possibly bet on with us if there's a good way to settle the bet?'
Yes, a post of this type was just recently made. I will not link to it, since this censorship policy implies that it will shortly be deleted, and reproducing the info necessary to say who was hypothetically targeted and why would be against the policy.