[SEQ RERUN] Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism

MinibearRex

Today's post, Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism was originally published on 21 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves, and so it has been since the days of Eternal September. Anyone acculturated by academia knows that censorship is a very grave sin... in their walled gardens where it costs thousands and thousands of dollars to enter. A community with internal politics will treat any attempt to impose moderation as a coup attempt (since internal politics seem of far greater import than invading barbarians). In rationalist communities this is probably an instance of underconfidence - mildly competent moderators are probably quite trustworthy to wield the banhammer. On Less Wrong, the community is the moderator (via karma) and you will need to trust yourselves enough to wield the power and keep the garden clear.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The Sin of Underconfidence, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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Today's post, Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism was originally published on 21 April 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves, and so it has been since the days of Eternal September. Anyone acculturated by academia knows that censorship is a very grave sin... in their walled gardens where it costs thousands and thousands of dollars to enter. A community with internal politics will treat any attempt to impose moderation as a coup attempt (since internal politics seem of far greater import than invading barbarians). In rationalist communities this is probably an instance of underconfidence - mildly competent moderators are probably quite trustworthy to wield the banhammer. On Less Wrong, the community is the moderator (via karma) and you will need to trust yourselves enough to wield the power and keep the garden clear.

Sample solution: We could expand the scale of the existing system. Add multiple discussion tiers; increase the karma requirement to post to Main, add a lower karma requirement to comment in Main, add a yet lower karma requirement to vote in Main. Do the same thing to Discussion, with lower limits. Add multiple tiers of discussion, where users have to graduate at each level to move up.

[Edited for tone]

Most of your suggestions have been made before, and are probably on some wish list. How do you get any of it done on zero budget is the issue. So the real question is how to get the necessary budget for the site development, not which features should be implemented.

0[anonymous]13y

You could generalize this to "Become reddit (i.e. anyone can make a new subreddit/discussion-section), and allow mods to set karma levels for joining/voting/commenting/submitting on a per-subreddit basis".

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