The commenting restrictions on LessWrong seem bad

I think being unable to reply to comments on your own posts is very likely a mistake and we should change that. (Possibly if the conditions under which we think that was warranted, we should issue a ban.)

"I'm downvoted because I'm controversial" is a go-to stance for people getting downvoted (and resultantly rate-limited), though in my experience the issue is quality rather than controversy (or rather both in combination).

Overall though, we've been thinking about the rate limit system and its effects. I think there are likely bad effects even if it's successfully in some case reducing low quality stuff.

We don't currently have karma and agree/disagree voting broken out separately on posts (like we do on comments). But I'm pretty sure that if we did, your posts would still be heavily downvoted. The problem is not that people disagree with you; "controversial views that many on LW don't like" isn't the central issue. The problem is that you're presenting arguments which have been repeatedly floated for years and which most long-time LWers have long since dismissed as dumb. This is being correctly rate-limited, for exactly the same reasons that the site would downvote (and then rate-limit) e.g. someone who came along arguing that we can't dismiss the existence of God because epistemic modesty, or someone who came along arguing that Searle's Chinese room argument proves AI will never be an X-risk, or some similarly stupid (but not-completely-dead-outside-LW) argument.

As someone who gets rate-limited due to downvoted comments occasionally, I can see a rather strong correlation between the style/tone and the response. It is very much possible to express controversial, contrarian or even outright silly views without being downvoted. The rule of thumb is to be respectful and charitable to your opponents and, well, read the room. The more your view diverges from the local mainstream, the better, tighter and clearer your argument must be. 

It is standard practice when writing scientific papers to first demonstrate intimate familiarity with the views you argue against later. This is what you would want from someone else writing a refutation of your argument, right? So give them the same courtesy. You can cut corners if your post or comment is close to the mainstream, but it is not a great habit. If you want to learn how to do it right, read ACX, Scott is a master of this art.

it is a common pitfall to blame the society/subculture for the negative reaction you get. It is almost never a constructive way to proceed. 

If you are in doubt as to how your post would be received, and you want to get through to more people, consider reaching out to someone familiar with this site to review your draft. Or to anyone, really. The bar for writing a post or a comment with non-negative expected karma is pretty low.

Some thoughts:

First: 

Overall, I've updated that it's too confusing to have any rate limits that restrict commenters' ability to comment on their own posts. (There are 8 rules that create commenting rate limits, and previously only 2 of them rate limited you on your own posts). I personally think the 2 rules were reasonable, but I think they've mostly resulted in people forming inaccurate beliefs about how the rate limit system works. (i.e. they don't realize it's a rare exception for rate limiting to affect your own posts)

So, I've just shipped a code-update that makes it so there are now 0 ways to get rate limited on your own posts. (Well, one exception for the universal "you can't comment more than 'every 8 seconds'" rule, but that's a pretty different rule)

Two:

I do basically think it's correct for you to have been rate limited, for the reasons John/Shminux and others have described. You argued poorly about a topic that we've covered a lot, in a fairly inflammatory way. This is precisely what the rate limits are there to nudge people away from.

I do think that people get more downvoted on some kinds of tribally-loaded topics, and I wish that were different. I've tried to tune the rate limits so that they do correctly rate-limit-people when they make bad arguments and get downvoted, but don't excessively rate limit people when they get "excessively tribally downvoted". I'm not sure if I've exactly succeeded at this, but I've been tracking the rate limits that get applied over the past month and I think mostly endorsed how things shook out.

Three:

More positively: fwiw, I have felt like your other recent posts seem like your doing a fairly reasonable thought process, given your current epistemic state / skills. (This is based on a cursory glance rather than reading them in detail, I don't know that I think all your mental motions make sense, but, like, it looks like you're trying to think through and argue about various object-level issues in a way that seems healthy)

It's perhaps worth noting that, whatever internal function people use to decide how to vote, the effect of their votes is to make up-voted things more visible and make down-voted things less visible on the margin, and this sends a feedback signal to incentivize writing things that get up-voted to the extent you want your writing to be seen by more people.

Under this regime, rate limiting seems fair to me, as it's an extension of controlling how much marginal content you produce can be seen. I'm not sure if it's perfectly well tuned, but seems likely that it's having a useful effect of causing there to be fewer things on Less Wrong that Less Wrong readers don't want to read, and even as salty as I get about it when I think my own insights are under-appreciated or misunderstood, I still accept that's just part of how Less Wrong has to work given that, at least for now, it's got to determine quality based on the aggregation of low-bandwidth signals.

I got rate-limited a few weeks ago for a small number of strong downvotes on a single comment.  I blame the over-indexing on strong-votes, and still overall support the system.  It DOES have some false-positives, but there is a real problem with otherwise-valuable posters getting caught in a high-volume useless back-and-forth, making the entire post hard to think about.

Rate throttling is a transparent, minimally-harmful, time-limited mechanism to limit that harm.  It makes mistakes, and it's annoying when one disagrees with votes.  But I don't know of a better option.

For one thing, there is a difference between disagreement and "overall quality" (good faith, well reasoned, etc), and this division already exists in comments. So maybe it is a good idea to have this feature for posts as well, and only have disciplinary actions taken against posts that meet some low/negative threshold for "overall quality". 

Further, having multiple tiers of moderation/community-regulatory action in response to "overall quality" (encompassing both things like karma and explicit moderator action) seem good to me, and this comment limitation you describe seems like just another tier in such a system, one that is above "just ban them", but below "just let them catch the lower karma from other users downvoting them". 

It's possible that, lacking the existence of the tier you are currently on, the next best tier you'd be rounded-off to would be getting banned. (I haven't read your stuff, and so I'm not suggesting either way that this should or should not be done in your case). 

If you were downvoted for good faith disagreement, and are now limited/penalized, then yeah that's probably bad and maybe a split voting system as mentioned would help. But its possible you were primarily downvoted for the "overall quality" aspect. 

I share your frustration. I made ONE downvoted comment and then was restricted for quite some time. 

Lesswrong will probably have to become invite-only at some point (e.g. if Yudkowsky wins a nobel prize in 2035 or whatever) so the rate limit is a good middle ground for now.

Here goes my one comment for a day. Or may be not? Who knows? It is not like i can look up my restrictions or their history in my account page. I will have to make two comments to figure out if there a some changes. 

One comment per day is heavily discuraging to participation. 

If you're going to come into an echo chamber of doom and then complain about being censored... well, what did you think they were going to do? It's like walking into a Mormon ward and arguing with the bishops that Joseph Smith was a fraud. 

The true believers are not going to simply convert because you disagree with them. The confirmation bias won't allow that when they're in a feedback loop. 

They will gently instruct you to be more "intelligent" in your discourse. Of course, if it turns out they're the "morons" then there will be a moment of amusing reflection when they're still alive twenty years from now and AIs didn't kill everyone.

"Damn it! Our fearless leader promised us we'd all be dead by now." ;-)

If and when they don't die by AI apocalypse they will then have to adhere to a new religion. Maybe aliens coming to take us away? At least that isn't easily falsifiable by the passage of a couple decades. 

Before everyone takes offense and begins writing their Senator, I don't know if they're actually morons, but they love to point out that those with whom they disagree must not be intelligent. Rather than entertaining the possibility that they're the idiot in the room. At least as it relates to their existential risk of AI propaganda.

Their ad hominem attacks are shrouded with all of the window dressings of a religious zealot, "You might not get so many down votes if you stopped saying you disagree with our religious leader and instead reworded it to be so vague that we have no idea what you're trying to say so that we can all just get long. When you say our leader is full of $%^* it makes us sad and we're forced to shun you. "

I'm translating so what we're all on the same page. =-)

I enjoy some of their rhetoric, in the same way I enjoy sci-fi stories. However, a dilettante shouldn't fall in love with their own creative story telling.