After discussing it with other mods, I'm giving @Gerald Monroe a 3 month "1 comment per week" and "1 post per week" rate limit. This isn't because any one comment was banworthy, but because of an overall pattern that added up to noticeably detracting from comment-section quality, while also commenting fairly prolifically. The combination of patterns include:
Reminder of the general philosophy that LessWrong is aiming to be a Well-Kept Garden, which means setting standards higher and more particularly than might feel natural if you're used to civic participation norms.
We gave Gerald a manual rate limit several months ago. Since then we've implemented the automoderation feature and it's flagged Gerald multiple times, and we've heard two complaints from nod-mods, as well members of the LW team generally finding his comments to make discussion sections worse.
We're giving him a 1-comment-per-week / 1-post-per-week rate limit for now. In three months when we check in, we'd need to see him make significant changes in commenting style to avoid further mod action. (I think the main request is a general "make more effort to understand where people are coming from, not making false claims about what they believe)
(Reminder that rate-limited users can still comment as often as they want on their own posts, and if you want rate limited users to be able to comment unrestrictedly on your post, you can enable the "ignore rate limits " setting)
Frontpage commenting guidelines:
Get curious. If I disagree with someone, what might they be thinking; what are the moving parts of their beliefs? What model do I think they are running? Ask yourself - what about this topic do I not understand? What evidence could I get, or what evidence do I already have?
Agree that curiosity is important, but it's just really hard to sustain that when I have trouble understanding almost all of your comments. We get a lot of spam that I need to deal with quickly, so your comments and content fell prey to that pressure.
Your two comments today were a lot clearer, and while I think they weren't great, I think it makes sense to give you another chance. I do think that a lot of the comments you made were basically indecipherable, and ended up taking up quite a bit of bandwidth on the site without producing much value. They also were pretty universally downvoted, so I wasn't the only one with that problem. If that continues, we will enforce the ban.
Ok, thanks for re-instating my original account. Will that reactivate my discussion topic "discussion of society scale benefits. . . " https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CLMh2Ne7D2H9EaXzy/discussion-re-implementation-of-society-scale-benefits-that ? I see that it did not. Perhaps you decided to renege on your plan to lift the ban?
Sorry for the confusing comments. The information I am sharing was deliberately dispersed into separate channels to prevent them from being casually combined into an active concept with a high viral capacity. Most of the dispersed comments were intended for an answer to a single reply to my topic thread and a discussion with one significant poster who did reply. I also received several upvotes and thanks for some of my other comments. Please be considerate of banning people with mixed reviews. A good review and a bad one should not result in a banishment should it? Do you have the ability to search for an put all my content together for making a decision? It's kind of easy and more wrong to take one or even 5 comments from anyone that upset someone and ignore a lot of good ones if that's your MO.
@jacob_cannell is receiving a warning for mass-downvoting TekhneMakre's content. They downvoted ~40 posts and comments in the span of 1-2 hours, with a median time between votes of 8 seconds, which indicates they didn't read the content before voting, and the order of votes seems to correspond roughly to just the order of content on TekhneMakre's profile. We are reverting the relevant votes. If Jacob decides to do something like this again (broadly construed), we will likely issue a multi-month ban.
We banned Thoth Hermes for being a new account created by a user we had previously banned, and for generally writing a lot of pretty heavily downvoted content that also seemed to me to often veer into unnecessary conflict (at -150 net karma across both of his accounts he is among the lowest karma users on the site).
Update: This hasn't been updated since 2021, and we're no longer updating it.
This post is a (continually updated) list of moderation bans and warnings of LWers, with a link to the comment thread where they happened.
(Added: Note that the vast majority of bans are for brand new users who are norm-violating in their first comments or otherwise seem like bad user growth for their site, and they are not listed here. This list is for users who have had a fair bit of activity on the site.)