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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Meta: LW Policy: When to prohibit Alice from replying to Bob's arguments? - Less Wrong Discussion
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The parent is bad, but someone banned it (I unbanned it for now), and I'm not aware of a policy that permits banning in such cases. Please clarify.
What is the current LW moderation policy? I did a search but couldn't find it. (I have the power to ban individual comments and posts but have never used it except on obvious spam.)
There is none. Moderation power is exercised arbitrarily at the whims of the enforcers.
(Arbitrarily rather than at random, to be precise.)
What is the distinction that you wish to draw?
Not sure why the parent was downvoted.
"Arbitrary" and "random" tend to be used in different senses. "Random" connotes unpredictability, while "arbitrary" connotes subjectivity to individual judgement.
I was not intending to claim that the moderators' actions are based on rolling dice, for example.
("Meaning" and "sense" have very similar meaning and sense to me.)
And so we see that I am a terrible communicator. I would blame the study of philosophy for introducing me to wonderful distinctions that no one else uses, though I'm sure a student of philosophy would tell me that "sense" and "reference" are the relevant subcategories of "meaning", and both of what I referred to above fall under "sense". Is Frege or C.S.Peirce in the house?
But seriously, fixed (I hope).
Thanks, fixed
This is false, see above (or refer to counterexamples).
(Edit: I shouldn't have made this comment, it doesn't usefully move the discussion.)
No, neither of those is false. There is no stated LW moderation policy, which as far as I'm concerned is equivalent to having no moderation policy. And given the lack of policy, moderation power is necessarily exercised arbitrarily. This does not imply that your judgement is bad, nor does it imply that other moderators' judgement is good.
If there is some official LW moderation or comment policy, I'd appreciate being pointed to it. But again, I've been active here since the beginning and I'm not aware of one, so it might as well not exist.
As I understand it, the word "arbitrary" refers to lack of relevant or systematic explanation or reason for something. I'm not sure what meaning you intend, the word is confusing the way you use it in this context. (Suppose hypothetically that the policy I stated above was more prominently stated previously.)
Ah, glancing at a dictionary, I had intended "Based on or subject to individual judgement or preference" with a splash of "despotic".
As I understand it, moderators are expected to use their judgement, and do not have any firm guidelines on where to apply it. Alicorn recently commented that the best she got for guidance was "ban shoe ads" (quoted from memory).
Yes, if the putative policy you stated above was more prominently stated before, that would help. Notably, if it were on record somewhere, endorsed by those who run the site, in a place where we could cite it and more importantly argue that it's inappropriate and should be changed.
The policy that I follow and that others don't seem to be violating is that apart from spam and very rare unusual cases (like retroactive edits by sockpuppets), the only comments that can be banned are bad comments by users who managed to accumulate minus hundreds of 30-day Karma (or applied a lot of concentrated and highly downvoted effort more quickly). Bad comments are not banned if they are rare or in form of occasional bursts, for example. If I'm not forgetting someone, of the active users, currently only Will_Newsome and sam0345 have this distinction. (Edit: and now also eridu.)
At least as of today this also applies to Eridu.
Right, didn't see that yet. Minus 169 30-day Karma at this moment.
Basing any action on 30-day karma seems unfair in this case. There was a relatively short window during which the comments were being downvoted, and now they're banned; typically for a controversial topic, those would have been reversed by upvotes over the next week. I don't know if that would have happened in this case, but now we'll never know.
Systematically downvoted comments indicate some sort of failure mode, even when it's not the failure mode of being wrong, or when it's a failure mode on the part of downvoters. It's usually possible to reframe the debate in a more constructive manner, long before you get remotely close to start getting banned. I'm not aware of any cases where persisting in highly downvoted behavior on LW achieved anything, apart from some unpleasantness (more unpleasantness the more the behavior persists).
I might agree with you about this in most cases, but that does not really ameliorate the problem of unfairness I referenced. If those comments were not banned and you showed up tomorrow, for example, eridu might not have made the list.
Perhaps notably, if I were aware that Eridu's downvotes would result in banning of his comments, then I might have correctively upvoted his comments so that they would not be banned, since I do believe there were some valuable pieces in that discussion. Though I don't know if we want to encourage my sort of behavior.
Incorrect is a suspected Will Newsome sockpuppet and I've been told to - er - fire at will.
It was supposed to be a sarcastic response about being too strict with definitions but obviously didn't end up being funny.
I am not a Will Newsome sockpuppet. I'll refrain from making the lower quality subset of my comments henceforth.
I agree about Will Newsome, who recently fell under the "Put on probation if reaches minus hundreds of 30-day Karma" (his current 30-day Karma is minus 334), but "suspected Will Newsome sockpuppet" doesn't seem reliable enough to me. (I wasn't suspecting that, for example, did I miss something obvious?)
Began suspecting in this thread. Agree/disagree?
Plausible, not conclusive. It's an old enough user account to be more conservative on the odd chance that there is an alternative explanation. (Unbanned Incorrect in that thread so that others can judge, it's not that toxic on its own. As a result, there are currently no (recent) comments by Incorrect that are banned.)
I admire your restrain. I'm also really glad to see Alicorn taking the hands on approach to Will's disruptions. As a curious observer, and for whatever it is worth I'm approximately neutral with respect to the "Ban Incorrect" decision. I naturally agree that banning on suspicion is a potentially abhorrent heuristic. Justice systems are so much better when "beyond reasonable doubt" is applied. However in this case the mistake isn't banning someone who is innocent. It is banning someone who is acting like a willfully obnoxious fool who delights in baiting people for responses by saying stupid things in a way that looks like it could be Will Newsome. If the last part happens to be false then hey, at least Alicorn still got rid of comments by someone who was deliberately being an asshat.
Even when it results in false positives (people behaving like Will at his worst are banned as Will sockpuppets) or false negatives (Will acts like someone who isn't being a dick on one of his sockpuppets so isn't banned) the policy still results in Mission. Fucking. Acomplished.
Purely out of interest Alicorn, do you just ban individual comments by the supsected sockpuppets when they also happen to be silly comments? Or do you just ban all of them? The former option seems like more work but more power to you if you are willing to put in the effort. The latter option would be ok, but then it seems like you just need a 'ban account' feature instead!
The former. We don't have a "ban account" feature, and I read-or-at-least-skim all comments on the entire site anyway.
Well, looking at the banned comments from Will's user page it certainly seems that you're not limiting yourself to silly comments.
Yes, I actually noticed that my favourite comment on this entire thread seems to have been banned (for being made by Will). This is disappointing but something I can accept if it is part of the price of also getting rid of the actually disruptive anti-social contributions.
I didn't personally ban them all.
I had to go back and reread this to really understand the implications. Suddenly it's much clearer to me why you and other moderators care so much about keeping Recent Comments clean and want features like the troll feeding fee. Low quality comments, no matter in what thread, impact your experience much more than mine.
(Not to imply that reading many threads, or Recent Comments, is something only done by moderators.)
How? Through the RSS feed?
Through the Recent Comments pages.
The 'Recent Comments' text is a link. Wow. Never noticed that. Thanks.
Account age isn't a guarantee - I know Will has older accounts than his current main, although I haven't seen them in circulation recently - but I'll abide by your conservatism here.
I'm not saying that the age of an account (strongly) argues against the account being Newsome's, I'm saying it (significantly) increases the disutility of wrongful banning. Which in turn argues for requiring a higher level of certainty for banning an older account. Hence, the distinction between "plausible" and "conclusive" becomes relevant, where it wouldn't be so for a new account that only had a few very-bad-and-highly-suspicious comments.
Love it.