I keep being told that there are no resources for my ideas for automatically fighting trolls, so after a user admits to being a troll I've been going through manually and deleting comments that strike me as trollish - in the sense of intended to provoke. I also suspect we have fake accounts upvoting and hence do not refrain from deleting upvoted comments. I'm not particularly happy with the way things are, but don't see an obvious way to make them better without somebody being willing to devote an awful lot of full-time-equivalent work to modifying the LW codebase. And yes, this forum practices (gasp!) censorship. It always has since the day I started deleting Caledonian's comments on Overcoming Bias because he was successfully making posting no-longer-fun for me. Before that, the SL4 mailing list was subject to threads frequently being terminated. We have always been up-front about pruning the tree, and nowadays there's an official Deletion Policy page. Please stop acting like this is some sort of shocking surreptitious secret. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Deletion_policy Note that this includes deletion of replies to trolls, although I often just downvote those instead. It would be helpful if people could see that many deleted comments are (in some cases, not all) from the same small set of trolls, but the basic rule is that we have no resources for developing anything so we can't show the author of deleted comments. 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. EDIT: Attempted solution: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/gkv/official_lw_uncensored_thread_on_reddit/

This is really concerning to me. Also, what is the rationale behind obfuscating basilisks? From what I understand, it could lead to thoughts of, "There's no point to all this after all," but there exists many other avenues to arrive at that same thought; why attempt to bury LW's avenue? It signals quite disturbingly, "We do not wish to risk disillusionment of our followers." Would those particularly vulnerable to such thoughts not benefit from being taught how to build mental fortitude without sacrificing open-mindedness? I don't specifically know how the above might be accomplished, but surely deleting critiques and other signals considered unsavoury will only increase the probability of a mental breakdown. What is the argument for helping each other tackle basilisks in a safe environment? Hiding the cause does not deal with the underlying susceptibility. I understand deletion of annoying noise, but how can anything reasoned that does not utilise Dark Arts be considered noise when presenting a sound argument? A separate point: Harry advocates for scientific secrecy in HP:MoR, as an analogue to how powerful wizards keep their most powerful tricks secret. However, the latter is widely known to be an agreed cultural convention of the magical world, as is the rationale for doing so understood. Hiding active secrecy without sharing a reason for same only inspires revulsion to that secrecy. The analogue is intriguing and not without merit, but only insofar as it stays an analogue and not a permutation. ---------------------------------------- Edit: Perhaps I should clarify that I truly am asking questions - they are not rhetorical by any means. If I am wrong, please tell me how; that is the point of the site, yes?