I would suggest experimenting with an off-topic section first and reserving the ability to delete comments for mods. It would more transparently give us an indication of how this is likely to play out if high karma users were to later be given the delete ability. Further, by providing these feature first, high karma users would be more likely to default to marking as off-topic rather than deleting.
If Elizier wants to delete comments on his posts, just give him mod privileges if he doesn’t already have them. That’s far better than distributing them widely as per the current plan, even if it is limited to their own posts.
So on one hand “just give Eliezer mod powers because like the whole site was his idea and it seems fair, and most other users have more restrictions” isn’t obviously wrong to me.
My main preference for not-that-plan is that I just don’t actually expect people to abuse their powers much, and if it turns out to be a problem a) it won’t be that hard to undo (both for individual comments, and for users with mod privileges), and b) the people who did so will almost certainly end up facing social judgment.
the people who did so will almost certainly end up facing social judgment
Hm, Oli told me that complaining about bad moderation is not allowed. Has that policy changed? If not, I don’t see how social judgement can serve as a corrective.
One advantage of a non-participant referee is that a participant referee has to worry more about social judgement for appearing partisan. (I also think participant referees are, in fact, more partisan. But the degree to which partisanship is affecting one’s moderation preferences might not always be introspectively obvious.)
A possible compromise would be to have authors write moderation guidelines for third party moderators to follow on their posts. However, it takes time to accumulate enough examples to know what good guidelines are. I suppose this is an argument in favor of centralized guideline development.
I would suggest experimenting with an off-topic section first and reserving the ability to delete comments for mods. It would more transparently give us an indication of how this is likely to play out if high karma users were to later be given the delete ability. Further, by providing these feature first, high karma users would be more likely to default to marking as off-topic rather than deleting.
If Elizier wants to delete comments on his posts, just give him mod privileges if he doesn’t already have them. That’s far better than distributing them widely as per the current plan, even if it is limited to their own posts.
So on one hand “just give Eliezer mod powers because like the whole site was his idea and it seems fair, and most other users have more restrictions” isn’t obviously wrong to me.
My main preference for not-that-plan is that I just don’t actually expect people to abuse their powers much, and if it turns out to be a problem a) it won’t be that hard to undo (both for individual comments, and for users with mod privileges), and b) the people who did so will almost certainly end up facing social judgment.
Hm, Oli told me that complaining about bad moderation is not allowed. Has that policy changed? If not, I don’t see how social judgement can serve as a corrective.
One advantage of a non-participant referee is that a participant referee has to worry more about social judgement for appearing partisan. (I also think participant referees are, in fact, more partisan. But the degree to which partisanship is affecting one’s moderation preferences might not always be introspectively obvious.)
A possible compromise would be to have authors write moderation guidelines for third party moderators to follow on their posts. However, it takes time to accumulate enough examples to know what good guidelines are. I suppose this is an argument in favor of centralized guideline development.