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.

If I were to ban posts on the grounds that I consider them bad for LW, I would ban maybe a quarter of Discussion posts.

I'm not sure it would be a bad idea if you started banning posts on this level of super-obvious crap. I'm also not sure it would hurt to have you ban a quarter of Discussion, but I'm a lot more optimistic that nothing bad goes wrong if you consistently ban everything this horrible.

I agree that it's better for that post to not be on LW, but banning such things is not standard procedure, and people don't like it when moderators do surprizing things.

It is not clear to me that this should be an important consideration in restraining moderation. If some people, including some good posters, who don't like "surprising moderation" leave and what's left gets more surprisingly moderated because moderators are less worried about consistency, then it's not clear to me that this is net worse. There's a startup cost to more vigorous and less consistent moderation, I think it's already mostly been paid, and then once that cost is paid, maybe things decline more slowly. Maybe they don't. It does not feel to me like leaving absolute obvious crap on Discussion because I'm worried about someone reacting poorly to a surprising moderation, is really much of a net improvement to the expected future.

I'm also not sure it would hurt to have you ban a quarter of Discussion, but I'm a lot more optimistic that nothing bad goes wrong if you consistently ban everything this horrible.

This was a concrete estimate made by looking at the most recent 35 posts, with quality threshold that happens to be close to how I perceive Will's post. (It doesn't appear to me exceptionally horrible, and I expect there are other posts that appear exceptionally horrible to me, but not to you. So if I only deleted the posts that seem to me exceptionally horrible, Will's post i... (read more)

18drethelin12y

I think your personal sense of offense is over-writing your judgement of how actually horrible will's post is. It was poorly written but contained a lot of good fragments of criticism, to the point where I couldn't decide how to vote on it. Your reiteration of how much of an obvious pile of crap it was isn't helping you out here either.

0[anonymous]12y

You are so fascinating. I can't tell if you simply fail to understand simple ideas out of some insanely strong self-deceptive defensiveness, or if you're just consciously choosing to be a pathetic piece of shit. Given your reasoning the solution is simple. Ban me, idiot.