It seems contradictory. If LW users believe that the userbase is not competent enough on average to avoid tangential but divisive politics, then why do they believe the ’karma’ average decided by the same, matters?
It’s like a superposition of two extremes:
At one extreme there’s Reddit where a high karma is more of an anti-signal, and having extra karma beyond a pretty low threshold actually increase reader’s suspicions that it’s fluff or unusually deceiving…
At the other extreme, there are traditional old BBS forums with no karma or scoring system whatsoever. And any formal distinction is a huge positive signal.
It’s more that any platform that allows discussion of politics risks becoming a platform that is almost exclusively about politics. Upvoting is a signal of “I want to see more of this content”, while downvoting is a signal of “I want to see less of this content”. So “I will downvote any posts that are about politics or politics-adjacent, because I like this website and would be sad if it turned into yet another politics forum” is a coherent position.
All that said, I also did not vote on the above post.
We believe politics is the mind killer. That is separate from a judgment about user competence. There is no contradiction. Even competent users have emotions and bises, and politics is a common hot button.
Reddit is a flaming mess compared to LW, so the mods here are doing something right—probably a lot.
Sometimes politics IS the core issue, or at least an important underlying cause of the core issue, so a blanket ban on discussing it is a very crude tool.
Because it’s effectively banning any substantial discussion on a wide range of topics, and instead replacing it, at best, with a huge pile of euphemisms and seemingly bizarre back and forths. And at worst, nothing at all.
So user competence as a factor is unlikely to be completely seperate.
Or to look at it from the other angle, in an ideal world with ideal forum participants, there would very likely be a different prevailing norm.
Once you take into account real world factors, such as an expanding userbase leading to less average credibility per user, multiplying political positions, etc… which are all pretty much unavoidable due to regression to the mean…
It really becomes ever closer to an effective blanket ban, to at least try to maintain the same average quality. (Asssuming that is a goal.)
To extrapolate it to an extreme scenario, if the userbase suddenly 100X in size, then even many things considered prosaic might have to be prohibited because the userbase, on average, literally wouldn’t be capable of evaluating discussion beyond a mediocore subreddit otherwise.
It seems contradictory. If LW users believe that the userbase is not competent enough on average to avoid tangential but divisive politics, then why do they believe the ’karma’ average decided by the same, matters?
It’s like a superposition of two extremes:
At one extreme there’s Reddit where a high karma is more of an anti-signal, and having extra karma beyond a pretty low threshold actually increase reader’s suspicions that it’s fluff or unusually deceiving…
At the other extreme, there are traditional old BBS forums with no karma or scoring system whatsoever. And any formal distinction is a huge positive signal.
It’s more that any platform that allows discussion of politics risks becoming a platform that is almost exclusively about politics. Upvoting is a signal of “I want to see more of this content”, while downvoting is a signal of “I want to see less of this content”. So “I will downvote any posts that are about politics or politics-adjacent, because I like this website and would be sad if it turned into yet another politics forum” is a coherent position.
All that said, I also did not vote on the above post.
We believe politics is the mind killer. That is separate from a judgment about user competence. There is no contradiction. Even competent users have emotions and bises, and politics is a common hot button.
Reddit is a flaming mess compared to LW, so the mods here are doing something right—probably a lot.
Sometimes politics IS the core issue, or at least an important underlying cause of the core issue, so a blanket ban on discussing it is a very crude tool.
Because it’s effectively banning any substantial discussion on a wide range of topics, and instead replacing it, at best, with a huge pile of euphemisms and seemingly bizarre back and forths. And at worst, nothing at all.
So user competence as a factor is unlikely to be completely seperate.
Or to look at it from the other angle, in an ideal world with ideal forum participants, there would very likely be a different prevailing norm.
It’s not a blanket ban.
Of course user competence isn’t entirely separate, just mostly.
In a world with ideal forum participants, we wouldn’t be having this conversation :)
Once you take into account real world factors, such as an expanding userbase leading to less average credibility per user, multiplying political positions, etc… which are all pretty much unavoidable due to regression to the mean…
It really becomes ever closer to an effective blanket ban, to at least try to maintain the same average quality. (Asssuming that is a goal.)
To extrapolate it to an extreme scenario, if the userbase suddenly 100X in size, then even many things considered prosaic might have to be prohibited because the userbase, on average, literally wouldn’t be capable of evaluating discussion beyond a mediocore subreddit otherwise.