Mind blown.

Well, you are literally paid to put up with this ...

Gentlemen! Welcome to Rationality Club. The first rule of Rationality Club is: you do not talk about basilisks. The second rule of Rationality Club is: you DO NOT even allude to basilisks!

This confused me more than it should have.

Oh, absolutely :-) Multiple saved copies are a little more trustworthy.

Capturebot2 is reasonably trustworthy for its intended purpose (documenting the sort of site that actually gets into a habit of trying to burn the evidence). Of course, I'm saying that as one of the two people who in fact has the power to edit Capturebot's saved PNGs ...

This is an online forum that practices gardening. There are lots of other online forums where you can speak freely. Oh, but you'd rather speak here, to the people who gather here to listen? Well - maybe they're gathering here in this garden because they don't want to be in those other ungardened forums, and so no, you can't speak freely.

My personal guess would be that they are gathering here because many seeds are blown here (from HPMoR, for the usefulness of the sequences and other materials), and the gardening does not have a significant net positive impact. This is mostly based on the fact that I have spent time on ungardened forums and I have never felt that the lack of gardening was a real problem. Where they declined it was because the inflow of members died down, not because members were turned off by trolls.

I'm not sure there's any evidence out there to settle this one way or the other, and certainly in the end you can do whatever you want, but I think you should at least take note that what seems to be a significant part of the userbase thinks strict moderation does more harm than good.

Criticism =/= trolling

Gardening =/= censorship

This reads like a boilerplate reply you would email to a random idiot who complained about their post being deleted, not an actual answer to questions about deleting honest criticism and anything even mentioning the b-word. It's also not a response to the PR ramifications of these sorts of activities. Please stop acting like your moderation behavior is normal or like people who respond to it are crazy for not agreeing with it.

And as always: Telling people there are plenty of other places they can go is childish and petulant.

Reversed censorship is not a rational discussion.

I'm relatively certain (>95%) that Dymitry/Private_messaging gets special treatment (ie. deletion) because the admins consider him a troll.

They're right to do so.

I'm not aware of any other LessWrong users who are considered trolls by the site admins.

There are certainly some others, but I'm not sure naming names is really appropriate.

I'm not aware of any other LessWrong users who are considered trolls by the site admins.

Will_Newsome, eridu, and more generally anyone who's ever had negative last-30-days karma.

On a very casual glance, the scythe is all over the place.

If you don't like participating in threads where things randomly vanish, stop replying to trolls.

what is the rationale behind obfuscating basilisks?

To use a metaphor... The original basilisk was suppressed, not just because some people were frightened by the idea of making deals with demons, but because the site admins thought that the methods proposed might lead to people really getting entangled with real demons; and they will hang on to that belief until someone demonstrates, using the logic of a demonological theory that they accept, that the methods don't work.

Harry advocates for scientific secrecy in HP:MoR [...]

Not to mention the fact that his example (Szilard keeping the effectiveness of graphite as a neutron moderator secret) dates back to before the Internet, and hence before the Streisand effect was much of an issue.

I made a similar post a few days ago, thinking that at any point in Lesswrong there's at least a few people that think they have basilisks and are just too hesitant to tell others about them. No one came forward, so I guess they aren't as common as I thought. I didn't think of calling them basilisks until they were referred to as such in the comments.

Well, yeah. private_messaging has about 50% approval, many of the deleted comments scoring quite highly; for a "troll", there appear to be quite a lot of active readers who agree or approve. There's something systematic going on, with or without moderator approval.

I was tempted to, because I don't want to see big threads dedicated to community drama over censorship, but decided against it, and merely removed a few of my upvotes.

It is, but I think it's warranted.

One example after I posted that comment: Capture, burnt remains. There's been a pile of others (mostly not in fact Dmytry, before you make that claim), but the current site code no longer leaves a really embarrassingly obvious string of "Comment deleted".

Really, are you seriously claiming you thought I was just making it up?

If the accusation is false than it's very easy for someone like Eliezer to say: "This has no basis". If the accusation is true than it might violate the rules to reprint censored posts. A lack of public denail is a good way to see whether the accusation has a basis.

I think that's an overstatement. It's not 'marketing before intellectual honesty' to point out that we should be extra-wary about analyses or materials by ideologues for whom the results are part of their identity (Sailer repeatedly talks about white identity and how it's a shame there's no White-with-a-capital-w solidarity in the way there's Black-with-a-capital-b solidarity) which is just one of the many deductive fallacies with perfectly valid statistical justification for using, or that quoting approvingly such people will ceteris paribus put off other people with extra reason to distrust such people.