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buybuydandavis comments on Communities: A single moderator is often superior to the wisdom of crowds - Less Wrong Discussion

0 Post author: casebash 03 May 2015 09:21AM

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Comment author: buybuydandavis 03 May 2015 11:34:27PM 0 points [-]

Also, who thinks LW is highly moderated?

I don't. Is there all sorts of moderation going on that I'm not aware of?

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 04 May 2015 11:51:44AM *  2 points [-]

There are about 30 accounts banned during the whole history of LW.

Most of them are spammers, who created their accounts, posted one or ten spam comments, subsequently had their accounts banned and comments removed. (The comments of the banned users have to be removed separately; banning the user merely disallows them to log in again.)

For curious people, the spam does not seem related to LW context. There were spam accounts promoting:

  • iPhones,
  • wedding rings,
  • silver earrings,
  • silver necklaces,
  • a Korean casino,
  • astrological service,
  • a computer games website,
  • jackets, caps, and handbags,
  • fake passports and driving licenses,
  • a collection of links without description that I didn't click,
  • some generic text ("I like this website, thank you, also look at my website") followed by a link that I didn't click

The number of non-spam users banned is less than one per year.

In addition to banning users, moderators can also remove individual comments. I don't have a good statistics for this. But I suppose that if this ability would be abused, the users would complain in their other comments.