Hi, I think this is incorrect. I had to wait 7 days to write this comment and then almost forgot to. I wrote a comment critiquing a very long post (which was later removed) and was down-voted (by a single user I think) after justifying why I wrote the comment with AI-assistance. My understanding is that a single user with enough karma power can effectively "silence" any opinion they don't like by down-voting a few comments in an exchange.
I think the site has changed enough over the last several months that I am considering leaving. For me personally, choosing between having a conversation with a random commenter on this site vs. an AI model is just about at a wash. I even hesitate to write this comment given how over-confident your comment seemed i.e. I won't be able to interact with this site again for another week.
[Deleted]
[Deleted]
[Deleted]
Just wanted to give some validation. I left a comment on this post a while ago pointing out how one (or apparently a few) users can essentially down vote you however they like to silence opinions they don't agree with. Moderation is tricky and it is important to remember why. Most users on a website forum are lurkers meaning that trying to gather feedback on moderation policies has a biased sampling problem. The irony on likely not being able to leave another comment or engage in discussion is not lost on me.
At first, I thought getting soft-banned meant my "contributions" weren't valuable. For context, I study AI and integrate it into my thinking which hadn't been received well on this site. Ironically, not being able to interact with other people pushed me to explore deeper discussions with AI. For example, I have this entire thread to Claude3 and it agreed there were some changes to be made on the rate-limiting system.
It does seem concerning that as a PhD student studying AI alignment, I was effectively pushed out of participating in discussions on LessWrong and the AI Alignment Forum due to the automatic rate limiting system and disagreements with senior user whose downvotes carry much more weight. On the other hand, compared to a few years ago during COVID, now I have colleagues and AI that I have a lot more shared context with than users on this forum so this just matters less to me. I return only because I am taking a class on social computing and am revisiting what makes for good/bad experiences.
Anyway, hopefully this gives you some solace. I would encourage you to seek other sources of validation. There are so many more options than you think! :)