FYI I appreciate this writeup (an awkward thing about the current situation with moderation is that I do strongly think some significant actions need to be taken, which are going to make some authors/commenters upset. I do care about those authors/commenters' experience – it's a major aspect of the overall site experience which is normally something I'd like to get user-interview feedback on, but there's something awkward about asking "hey, we think you should somehow comment less, and we want to build tools that handle this semi-automatically because we're busy... uh, which way of doing this feels least bad to you?")

Some notes for now:

• Our current (this week) set of moderation practices are a combination of "an experiment" and "a compromise with our current degree of tooling." We're building out new tools as we go. Right now we don't have a distinction between rate-limiting posts and rate-limiting comments, but we're working on it, and most likely in this case we'd have applied the post rate limit but not the commenting one.
• We're planning to modify the rate-limiting system so users can comment as much as they want on their own posts."
• The intent with rate-limiting is not "you're permanently in a rate-limited box", it's a soft limit meant to encourage the user to change something about their posting behavior. The ideal outcome is that the user (re?)-reads the site guidelines, changes some thing about their commenting/posting behavior, and then the rate limit is retracted.
• We're working on various improvements to the /moderation page that make it easier to sanity-check the choices moderators are making, and I expect to fine-tune our response over time.
• We're thinking through how to write good top-level posts and onboarding-UI that help spell out our intended norms/vibe/site-culture in a way that feels actively positive rather than retroactively punishing.

That's probably not that reassuring.

The situation is pretty difficult because there's just a really huge amount of content that needs moderating (we're spending a couple person-hours a day moderating it right now now while also building lots of new moderation features). That amount of content is increasing, so even if we decided to work fulltime on reading things thoroughly and providing good feedback right now, it wouldn't be sustainable going forward.

People have suggested various ways of addressing this (such as outsourcing moderation to more established users, spreading the load around). I have various concerns and issues with that, which I'll followup on when I have more time.

I'm curious what posts have disappeared from @amelia.

Moderation is a delicate thing. It seems like the team is looking for a certain type of discourse, mainly higher level and well thought out interactions. If that is the goal of the platform then that should be stated and whatever measures they take to get there is their prerogative. A willingness to iterate on policy, experimenting and changing it depending on the audience and such is probably a good idea. 

I do like the idea of a more general place where you can write about a wider variety of topics. I really like LessWrong, the aesthetic the quality of posts. A think a set of features for dividing up posts besides the tags would be great. Types of posts that are specifically for discussion like “All AGI Safety Questions” where you beginners can learn and eventually work their way up into higher level conversations. Something like this would be a good way to encourage the Err part without diluting the discourse on the posts that should have that standard. 

Like short post, post and question, but more and filterable. A type of post for quickly putting down an idea. Then a curious observer might provide feedback that could improve it. A ranking system where a post starts out like a quick messy idea but through a collaborative iterative process could end up being a front-page post. 

There are a lot of interesting possibilities and I would love to see some features that improved the conversation rather than moderation that controlled the conversation.

To the people who upvoted this post, 

Thank you very much for the support. As you maybe saw below, the restriction on my account has been lifted! 

As I also mentioned below, I might not take advantage of the restored liberty in the short term. I’ve already begun consolidating all my writing on my personal website (AmeliaJones.org), with links to Medium blog posts for the writing. (The writing that was on LW would mostly be under writing...AI, or writing....physics. There are also short stories and other right-brain type stuff, but I don't think LW folks would be too interested in that i.e. just ignore it.) 

However, I might return to LW in the longer term. For now, please don’t be offended if I don’t respond to comments on this post. I don’t think I will be checking in too often. This will allow me to focus more on my new platform. 

Warmest wishes to all of you, and thanks again for the support when I really needed it, 

Amelia