Open Thread, February 1-14, 2013

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

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/

Criticism =/= trolling

Gardening =/= censorship

This reads like a boilerplate reply you would email to a random idiot who complained about their post being deleted, not an actual answer to questions about deleting honest criticism and anything even mentioning the b-word. It's also not a response to the PR ramifications of these sorts of activities. Please stop acting like your moderation behavior is normal or like people who respond to it are crazy for not agreeing with it.

And as always: Telling people there are plenty of other places they can go is childish and petulant.

7Elithrion13y

My personal guess would be that they are gathering here because many seeds are blown here (from HPMoR, for the usefulness of the sequences and other materials), and the gardening does not have a significant net positive impact. This is mostly based on the fact that I have spent time on ungardened forums and I have never felt that the lack of gardening was a real problem. Where they declined it was because the inflow of members died down, not because members were turned off by trolls. I'm not sure there's any evidence out there to settle this one way or the other, and certainly in the end you can do whatever you want, but I think you should at least take note that what seems to be a significant part of the userbase thinks strict moderation does more harm than good.

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Open Thread, February 1-14, 2013

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Open Thread, February 1-14, 2013

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