[Meta] New moderation tools and moderation guidelines

Let's focus on the substance, please.

There is some sense in what you say, but… before we allow concerns like this to guide design decisions, it would be very good to do some reasonably thorough investigating about whether other platforms that implement moderation logs have this problem. (The admin and moderators of lobste.rs, for example, hang out in the #lobsters IRC channel on Freenode. Why not ask them if they have found the moderation log to result in a significant ban evasion issue?)

A central log would indeed allow anyone to see who was banned and when. My concern is more that such a solution would be practically ineffective. I think that most people reading an article aren't likely to navigate to the central log and search the ban list to see how many people have been banned by said articles author. I'd like to see a system for flagging up bans which is both transparent and easy to access, ideally so anyone reading the page/discussion will notice if banning is taking place and to what extent. Sadly, I haven't been able to think of a good solution which does that.

Consider the possible reasons why you, as the OP, would not want a comment to appear in the comments section of your post. These fall, I think, into two broad categories:

Category 1: Comments that are undesirable because having other people respond to them is undesirable.

Category 2: Comments that are undesirable because having people read them is undesirable (regardless of whether anyone responds to them).

Category 1 (henceforth, C1) includes things like what you just described. Trolling (comments designed to make people angry or upset and thus provoke responses), off-topic comments (which divert attention and effort to threads that have nothing to do with what you want to discuss), low-effort or malicious or intentionally controversial or etc. comments that are likely to spawn “demon threads”, pedantry, nitpicking, nerdsniping, and similar things, all fall into this category as well.

Category 2 (henceforth, C2) is quite different. There, the problem is not the fact that the comment provokes responses (although it certainly might); the problem is that the actual content of the comment is something which you prefer people not to see. This can include everything from doxxing to descriptions of graphic violence to the most banal sorts of spam (CHEAP SOCKS VERY GOOD PRICE) to things which are outright illegal (links to distribution of protected IP, explicit incitement to violence, etc.).

And, importantly, C2 also includes things like criticism of your ideas (or of you!), comments which mention things about you that paint you in a bad light (such as information about conflicts of interest), and any number of similar things.

It should be clear from this description that Category 2 cleaves neatly into two subtypes (let’s call them C2a and C2b), the key distinction between which is this: for comments in C2a, you (the OP) do not want people to read them, and readers themselves also do not want to read them; your interests and those of your readers are aligned. But for comments in C2b, you—even more so than for C2a!—don’t want people to read them… but readers may (indeed, almost certainly do) feel very differently; your interests and those of your readers are at odds.

It seems clear to me that these three types of comments require three different approaches to handling them.

For comments in C1 (those which are undesirable because it’s undesirable for people to respond to them), it does not seem necessary to delete them at all! In fact, they need not even be hidden; simply disable responses to the comment (placing an appropriate flag or moderator note on it; and, ideally, an explanation). I believe LW2 already includes this capability.

Comments in C2a (those which are undesirable because you do not want people to read them, and readers also have no desire to read them) clearly need to be hidden, at the least; by construction, anything less fails to solve the problem. Should they be entirely deleted, however? Well, read on.

Comments in C2b (those which are undesirable to you because you prefer that people not see them, but which may be quite desirable indeed to your readers)… well, this is the crux of the matter. It’s a very dubious proposition, to say that such comments are a problem in the first place. Indeed, I’d claim the opposite is true. Of course, you (the OP) might very much like to delete them without a trace—if you are dishonest, and lacking in integrity! But your readers don’t want you to be able to delete them tracelessly; and it seems obvious to me that the admins of any forum which aims to foster honest seeking after truth, should be on the readers’ side in such cases.

Now let’s go back to comments of type C2a. Should they be entirely deleted, without a trace? No, and here’s why: if you delete a comment, then that is evidence for that comment having been in C2b; certainly it casts a shadow of suspicion on whoever deleted it. Is that really what you want? Is an atmosphere of mistrust, of uncertainty, really what we want to foster? It seems a wholly undesirable side effect of merely wanting to protect your readers from things that they themselves don’t wish to see! Much better simply to hide the comments (in some suitably unobtrusive way—I won’t enumerate possible implementations here, but they are legion). That way, anyone who wishes to assure themselves of your integrity can easily do so, while at the same time, saving readers from having to view spam and other junk text.

Others could, if they are unwise. But they should not. There is no shame in deleting low-effort comments and so no reason to hide the traces of doing so. There is shame in deleting comments for less prosocial reasons, and therefore a reason to hide the traces.

The fact that you desire to hide the traces is evidence that the traces being hidden are of the type it is shameful to create.

If you create an environment where people feel uncomfortable posting their bad ideas and initial guesses on topics, for fear of being torn to shreds by critical commenters, then you simply won’t see that content on this site. And often this means those people will not post hat content anywhere, or post it privately on Facebook, and then a critical step in the idea pipeline will be missing from this community.

… good?

I… am very confused, here. Why do you think this is bad? Do you want to incentivize people to post bad ideas? Why do you want to see that content here?

What makes this “step in the idea pipeline”—the one that consists of discussing bad ideas without criticism—a “critical” one? Maybe we’re operating under some very different assumptions here, so I would love it if you could elaborate on this.

Most importantly, the person you are using as the central example here, namely Eliezer, has always deleted comments and banned people, and was only comfortable posting his content in a place where he had control over the discussion. The amazing comment sections you are referring to are not the result of a policy of open discussion, but of a highly moderated space in which unproductive contributions got moderated and deleted.

This is only true under a very, very different (i.e., much more lax) standard of what qualifies as “unproductive discussion”—so different as to constitute an entirely other sort of regime. Calling Sequence-era OB/LW “highly moderated” seems to me like a serious misuse of the term. I invite you to go back to many of the posts of 2007-2009 and look for yourself.

Allowing someone to moderate their own frontpage posts is similar to them being a side-wide moderator. They can now moderate a bunch of public discussion that is addressed to the whole community. That requires a large amount of trust, and so a high karma threshold seemed appropriate.

No, you can still get traction, if your argument is good enough. It just requires that your rebuttal itself, on the basis of its own content and quality, attracts enough attention to be read, instead of you automatically getting almost as much attention as the original author got just because you are the first voice in the room.

If you give exposure to whoever first enters a conversation opened by someone with a lot of trust, then you will have a lot of people competing to just be the first ones dominating that discussion, because it gives their ideas a free platform. Bandwith is limited, and you need to allocate bandwidth by some measure of expected quality, and authors should feel free to not have their own trust and readership given to bad arguments, or to people furthering an agenda that is not aligned with what they want.

There should be some mechanisms by which the best critiques of popular content get more attention than they would otherwise, to avoid filter bubble effects, but critiques should not be able to just get attention by being aggressive in the comment section of a popular post, or by being the first comment, etc. If we want to generally incentivize critiques, then we can do that via our curation policies, and by getting people to upvote critiques more, or maybe by other technical solutions, but the current situation does not strike me as remotely the best at giving positive incentives towards the best critiques.

Comments on the personal page show up for people who browse Popular Posts/Community and also for people who look at the Daily list of posts.

Giving people with a history of providing value contributions (=high status) a better ability to have an audience is desirable.