Discourse Norms: Moderators Must Not Bully

Eliezer and I grew up at different times and have seen different communities. He saw communities ruined by foolish chat drowning out the intelligent discussion; I see communities ruined by people misusing vote systems to downvote people who don't agree with them and upvote people who hold their beliefs regardless of the quality of those people's arguments, moderators abusing their power to help their friends instead of doing what helps overall discussion, and so on.

I don't know whether that's different "eras of the Internet", just different experiences, or what. But my experience has not much been one where communities refuse to defend themselves against bad norms, trolls, and the like - instead, it's been one where voting systems are often used to enforce groupthink and stifle legitimate criticisms, moderators protect their friends' interests rather than upholding norms, and so on.

This very site I think has been damaged by similar issues. For a long time, LW 1.0 was well known to have silly, nitpicky comments and voting patterns that drove away its best people - not because the community wasn't protecting its norms, but because the norms that were locally protected were bad and unpleasant to deal with! If the majority were promoting such behavior, action should have been taken to censure the majority - though in point of fact the extent to which this was a majority issue is unclear, because LW 1.0 voting was infamously subverted by someone who used multiple accounts to heavily influence voting towards his own preferred ideas.

Similarly, on LW 2.0 we lost our best poster (Duncan_Sabien) because moderation did not stand up for the deep, important values and Duncan wasn't willing to put up with it.

It is really very, very important that moderation not take the side of the bullies. That doesn't mean giving in to trolls, that doesn't mean letting people waste everyone's time - but it does mean that if there's someone making good, well-reasoned arguments who is getting hassled with bad comments because those arguments support locally unpopular conclusions, it is the job of the moderators to protect the person making good arguments, not to protect the local social order.

eliezer's problem is what you have if your friend group is getting diluted. this problem is what you have if you're trying to dilute your friend group as much as you can.

I agree with this classification, but want to note something that sometimes happens, that is seen incorrectly as an example of the latter scenario (i.e., of the “small errors mistaken for big ones”).

I am talking about a case like this:

Alice: Blah blah. For example, so-and-so.

Bob: Now, hang on there, Alice; so-and-so is actually not an example of blah blah (and possibly so-and-so does not even exist / so-and-so does not happen the way you say / etc.)!

Alice: Yes, sure, fine. That’s just an example, though, don’t nitpick.

Now, at this point Alice often simply ignores anything else Bob says, or gets frustrated and angry and stops reading the comments, etc., but if the conversation continues, what Bob says (or might properly say) would be—

Bob: But wait—what do you mean, “just” an example? It was the only example in your post! And now that you have (apparently) agreed with me that your purported example is actually not an example of your thesis, your post is left with no examples! That is a very serious flaw; you are now presenting a thesis with no empirical support or case studies whatsoever. And I note that you haven’t made any attempt, in your response to me, to replace the defeated example with others, which is odd, since you claim the thing you describe is commonplace… You say I’m nitpicking, yet as far as I can tell, I have inflicted a serious blow on the whole edifice of your essay!

(I once summarized this as: “that [example] was not an example of the thing you mention; but also and relatedly, maybe the thing you mention doesn’t really exist?”)

And in my experience, this never results in Alice seriously re-examining her thesis, because “dismantling an example” is, somehow, automatically classified as “irrelevant nitpicking”, even when that classification is completely nonsensical because without examples, the entire piece of writing is just empty noise.

It turns out that cranks and hucksters are indistinguishable from confused and vulnerable newbies. And protectors of conversational norms are indistinguishable from bullies. I think others have pointed out that your footnote hides the entire problem, because you don't actually have a nazi detector.

I think that's just false. If a moderator can't tell the difference between a Nazi and someone who's just locally unpopular, they have no business being a moderator. It's not actually hard to tell - I've moderated active communities before and never really had much trouble with it!

Nope. My post is primarily about something else - this is just a footnote that serves to point out that it's totally fine to have a civic/public space that nevertheless holds that the most extreme content and ideologies are over the line.

Agreed that there hasn't been bullying but has been nitpicking. I think the comments here have gone seriously off-track from the main intent of my post and I intend to write another post that deals with the "is it OK to ban Nazis" issue more directly; I'm unsure whether I'll write a new version of this post.

This situation has made me less likely to want to write on LW in the future, but it's not to the point where I'm quitting or whatever.