The Hamming Problem of Group Rationality

Does Wordpress have such a system?

No, at least, not in an automated way without plugins, and not that I can recall seeing on any Wordpress blog I've visited. And I don't think I'd want one for my own Wordpress blog; comments there fall very neatly into two categories, "legitimate comments that I want to keep" and "spam by automated web crawlers that I want to obliterate without a trace". I wouldn't want a public moderation log if that log was just going to be a list of spam links.

I think SSC without the moderation log absolutely would have a dramatically different comment section, but… I hesitate to speak of the reason in public because it touches on certain issues that, as I understand, Scott prefers not to see discussed overtly in connection with the site, and I’d like to respect that preference. However, I think this is an important matter; perhaps we could discuss it privately? I can be found via webchat at chat.myfullname.net, or by email at myfirstname@myfullname.net.

In general the comments have gotten better as Scott has been willing to ban people more arbitrarily AFAICT

I think this is likely true (which is to say, it’s true that Scott has been willing to ban people more, and it’s true that the comment section has improved; correlation is of course not causation, but it does seem plausible in this case).

However, I think without the mod log, things would be different (see above).

The following is in no way a comment on this specific moderator-user interaction (about which it is not my place to speak), but a general comment about approaches to moderation:

Asking someone, even in private (perhaps especially in private) to accept some sort of punishment (such as restrictions on commenting), or informing them that you’re going to apply corrective measures and that they might then get back into your good graces (in order to avoid further sanction), also involves a lot of—as you put it—“weird status dynamics”.

In general, the approach you describe—though I understand some of the reasons why it appeals to you (some of which are indeed perfectly noble and praiseworthy reasons)—essentially sets you up as a “corrective” authority. There are some quite unfortunate status/etc. implications of such a relationship.

PDV, I like you and often agree with you and am on your side about the circling thing, so I hope you will take this in the sense it is meant, but I agree with gworley. In particular, I think you often tend to escalate arguments you're part of, sometimes to the point of transforming them into demon threads even though they didn't have to be. That's a good trait to have sometimes: it's what lets you point out that the emperor has no clothes. But I get the feeling that you're not deploying it particularly tactically, and you'd probably do better at advancing your goals if you also deescalated sometimes.

If I can be direct since you often are, at least for myself I appreciate that you disagree, but I really dislike the way you do it. In particular you are often unnecessarily confrontational in ways that end up insulting other people on the site or assume bad faith on the part of your interlocutors.

For example you already did this in the comments on this post when you replied to Oli to say he was wrong about his own motivation. I think it's fair to point out that someone may be mistaken about their own motivations, but you do it in a way that shuts down rather than invites discussion. Whatever your intended effect, it ends up reading like your motivation is to score points, in your own words, "in a way trivially predictable by monkey dynamics", and makes comments on LW feel like a slightly more hostile place.

I'm in favor of you being able to participate because your comments have at times proved helpful, and calling out that which you disagree with is important for the health of the site, but only if you can do so in a way that leads to productive discussion rather than threatening it.