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shminux comments on [meta] New LW moderator: Viliam_Bur - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (51)
One proactive action a mod could take is to figure out the forum ethics, make it explicit and summarize it in a post, so that people could refer to it and refer others to it. This way if there is an argument, the participants could check their actions against the explicit written norms. In my experience a forum ethics is some combination of consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics. Some examples from other forums:
Admittedly, this forum has been working reasonably well without explicit guidelines, and a discussion of forum ethics might be a net negative, so maybe one should leave well enough alone.
Several of the high-quality forums* I read explicitly (ha) do not have formal rules; the rationale being that having them written down enables the antisocial behavior of doing the worst thing that's still within the rules. However, these forums also have attentive and active moderators (as opposed to silent-except-when-things-go-seriously-wrong moderators) who speak up to discourage bad patterns early, which is not the case for Less Wrong and probably can't be made the case.
* forums in the general sense, not in the genre-of-web-site sense.
I consider my role to be a cop, not a lawgiver. Describing forum ethics is not a part of my job. We already have tools to enforce the things you said: if someone writes stupid comments, spoilers, or trolling comments, anyone can downvote them. My superpowers will be needed if someone starts abusing these tools, e.g. by mass downvoting, because that's what other users cannot investigate.
What I said is orthogonal to whether having explicit debate about forum ethics is good or bad. I can imagine it going either way. I think most people would agree with the examples you gave here. Anyone should feel equally free to initate this kind of debate, and my opinion should have no special weight there. Opinions of people from MIRI or CFAR should have extra weight, I think, but I am not in that set.
Right, As long as you know what laws to enforce.