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MathiasZaman comments on 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" - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (204)
I'm not a respected member of the community, but I personally see no problems with parody and criticism. I've read criticism on Less Wrong and HPMOR and I've had no problems with those (although I did have disagreements, of course).
It's just that this particular piece of parody isn't particularly good. It feels like someone critiquing "The Dark Knight Rises" for being about a guy dressed up as a bat. Sure, the movie is about that, but it's not really the core problem with that movie.
I know it's not good parody. I know I'm a bad writer. That's why people should downvote it. It's only the deleting it despite its being upvoted part that I object to.
It is bad enough to border spam quality, especially if you just skim it. The person who took it down probably looked at it, saw that it is mostly nonsense with negative connotations (and written by someone who was inebriated at the time) and took it down. Do you seriously think that if you had instead written a normal criticizing post, which isn't vague as hell, that post would've been deleted, too?
Nobody should consider a post that sits at +7 as spam. The voting shows that enough people valued the post to keep it.
'It is bad enough to border spam quality' does not mean 'It is spam'. I am only talking about the quality of the content.
/shrugs. I know I'm biased and all but I didn't think it was that terrible. I spent like two hours editing it before posting. People sure are being mean about it though, so idk. I guess maybe I'll give up on trying to improve my fiction writing skill for now... Maybe it's a 'you have it or you don't' thing.
If it makes you feel any better, Eliezer's April 1st fiction post wasn't accepted well, and was deleted in the end as well.
At any rate, you had some clever things in there, but it was mostly too vague and random to convey your point much further than telling us that you have some sort of a criticism.
I do not believe this to be the case, based on having seen some people's improvements over time, but I have not researched this.
Well, there are definitely a lot of people who're bad enough that I'd write off the idea of trying to give them advice as hopeless. But I'd suggest that posting bits of fiction directly to Less Wrong's discussion board isn't a very good place to look for that sort of advice in the first place.
1) "bad enough... especially if you just skim it." So moderation is IMPROVED if the articles deleted are just skimmed. A more careful or thoughtful reading might raise questions and we certainly don't want that on a site like this. Or do we?
2) The post had +7 karma. Where were the downvotes for this horrible post? And why do so many posts with massive downvote levels survive on the site, while this one with positive votes is deleted? Are you that dismissive of the other readers of this site that you support someone just skimming an article and deleting regardless of karma?
Probably not. Just downvoted. SO the lesson is you may criticize our ox but only if you are polite and do not gore it? What kind of human bias is that intended to avoid?
Where do I say this? I can see situations where this will be the case (if the workload is massive), but I am not claiming anything like that.
eye rolling
7 Karma is not a lot, so it probably hasn't been a factor in the deletion. In fact, I suspect that the post wouldn't have been deleted if it had a lot of karma (not that I necessarily agree with that).
Because posts aren't deleted based on Karma.
As dowvoted as this criticism of EA with 59 karma on Main, or as downvoted as this thorough criticism of MIRI(http://lesswrong.com/lw/cbs/thoughts_on_the_singularity_institute_si/), which is the most upvoted post on the site ever (249 Karma on Main)?
Nope, the problem here isn't politeness and I never claimed that.
I'm actually more comfortable with it being deleted despite the upvotes, than if it had been downvoted and deleted. Deleting bad content that's getting downvoted anyway feels like censorship. Deleting bad content that gets upvoted might just be gardening. Hacker News doesn't shy away from doing this, for example.
What distinction do you draw between "censorship" and "gardening"?
Removing it for sinister reasons, versus removing it for the mundane reason of "this content is bad and we don't want bad content to be prominent".
Huh. I'd think that content that was bad in the community's eyes (i.e. heavily downvoted) would be more likely to be bad by whatever set of presumptively objective standards the mods should be working from. Or is that automatically sinister?
I mean that downvoted content is already not-prominent. You don't need to remove it; the signal has already been sent that we don't want this kind of thing here.
If there's stuff that we don't want, but that gets upvoted, then the signal still needs to be sent, and one way (not the only way) to send it is to remove the stuff in question.
Two points where we may differ, but I probably don't care enough to argue them:
It seems obvious to me that, at least in theory, stuff can get upvoted that we don't want here, for reasonable values of "we don't want". Do you disagree with this? (And in practice, I think this particular post is an instance of such stuff.)
I don't necessarily think mods should be working from objective standards.
I've said this elsewhere, but I rather suspect that downvoting stuff doesn't decrease its visibility much. I haven't actually applied a regression to the data (though now that I think of it, that'd be an interesting problem), but eyeballing vote totals on my replies heavily downvoted vs. comparably upvoted posts at the same level of the comment tree, I don't see much difference. That implies that about as many readers are expanding the tree as would follow it normally.
Not in principle, but the main class of stuff that would get upvoted but which the community wouldn't reflectively want around is stuff that exploits some kind of short-term bias. Flattery, tribal politics, that sort of thing. I don't see a good case for putting this post into that category.
A flat up/down voting system is insensitive to degrees of dislike, too, and if the response to a post is highly uneven -- lots of lukewarm positive responses and a few very extreme negative ones, say -- then dropping it might be good for the forum despite positive karma. There might be a stronger case for saying this is such a post (though they should generally be rare), but on the other hand this line of reasoning leads to some nasty strategic effects downstream; I think we ought to be extremely cautious about using it as justification for removal.
Huh? Once the post drops below -4 net, it becomes really hard to see it and costly (5 karma) to reply to it. There is a clear threshold effect.
I'm aware of that. And indeed we don't get the massive dogpiles on bad ideas that we used to, or I'd expect downvoting to increase their visibility. But the argument from vote totals still seems to apply.
Probably applies better to downvoted comments than to top-level posts, though. It's much easier to expand a collapsed comment thread than to notice the presence of a post that's been voted off the sidebars, and while curiosity might be a motive for the former I don't think it's sufficient for the latter.
Yes. Although we will allow comments that don't gore any of our oxes but aren't particularly good to stand, perhaps with negative karma to label them, the one thing we insist upon when our faith is challenged is that at least the parody must be good, or else it should just be eliminated.
In this way we insure we are not a cult. Amen.
I do not agree with the deletion of the post. I believe that the karma system should be sufficient moderation for most content. The fact that the post ended up having positive karma is baffling to me, but a poor-quality post at positive karma does not indicate that anything should be deleted. I don't know what the people deleting the post were thinking.