Consider giving an explanation for your deletion this time around. "Harry Yudkowsky and the Methods of Postrationality: Chapter One: Em Dashes Colons and Ellipses, Littérateurs Go Wild"

Will_Newsome

My stupid fanfic chapter was banned without explanation so I reposted it; somehow it was at +7 when it was deleted and I think silently deleting upvoted posts is a disservice to LessWrong. I requested that a justification be given in the comments if it were to be deleted again, so LessWrong readers could consider whether or not that justification is aligned with what they want from LessWrong. Also I would like to make clear that this fanfic is primarily a medium for explaining some ideas that people on LessWrong often ask me about; that it is also a lighthearted critique of Yudkowskyanism is secondary, and if need be I will change the premise so that the medium doesn't drown out the message. But really, I wouldn't think a lighthearted parody of a lighthearted parody would cause such offense.

The original post has been unbanned and can be found here, so I've edited this post to just be about the banning.

I'm slightly torn here.

My first impulse was to point out that, just because there happened to be seven people on this site with the poor sense to upvote this unintentional self-parody, that doesn't justify an eighth person having the poor sense to unilaterally delete it.

Then I remembered kuro5hin's decline and death. A self-moderated forum can transition from "temporary lull in activity" to "permanent death spiral" if a critical mass of trolls pounce on the lull, and it's not a pretty thing to witness. The "critical mass" doesn't have to be very large, either, since self-moderated forums generally weight their users' opinions proportionately to amount-of-available-free-time, which most trolls have in surplus. I suspect it wouldn't have taken too many swings of the banhammer to save that site.

There's got to be a better solution, though. I'd hope there's even a simple better solution. Maybe a "trash" category alongside "main" and "discussion"? Then moderators can move posts between categories, while users can upvote/downvote within each. That would still allow moderators to keep the new users' queue cleaned up in a way that can't be "gamed", but makes moderator mistakes much less significant. "They're deleting me!" is a half-decent rallying cry; "They're calling me names!" not so much.

Then I remembered kuro5hin's decline and death.

kuro5hin is still a vibrant, thriving community.

2satt12y

Kuro5hin's $5 paywall for new accounts arguably deserves a lot of the blame for that. (My fading memory of K5 is that the boundary between trolls & non-trolls was pretty permeable there, and it wasn't a huge problem until the paywall came down.) [Edit, August 31: belatedly realized "the paywall came down" is ambiguous. I mean the paywall being imposed, like a curtain coming down.]