First, some background context. When LW2.0 was first launched, the mod team had several back-and-forth with Said over complaints about his commenting style. He was (and I think still is) the most-complained-about LW user. We considered banning him.
Ultimately we told him this:
As Eliezer is wont to say, things are often bad because the way in which they are bad is a Nash equilibrium. If I attempt to apply it here, it suggests we need both a great generative and a great evaluative process before the standards problem is solved, at the same time as the actually-having-a-community-who-likes-to-contribute-thoughtful-and-effortful-essays-about-important-topics problem is solved, and only having one solved does not solve the problem.
I, Oli and Ray will build a better evaluative process for this online community, that incentivises powerful criticism. But right now this site is trying to build a place where we can be generative (and evaluative) together in a way that’s fun and not aggressive. While we have an incentive toward better ideas (weighted karma and curation), it is far from a finished system. We have to build this part as well as the evaluative before the whole system works, and while we’ve not reached there you’re correct to be worried and want to enforce the standards yourself with low-effort comments (and I don’t mean to imply the comments don’t often contain implicit within them very good ideas).
But unfortunately, given your low-effort criticism feels so aggressive (according to me, the mods, and most writers I talk to in the rationality community), this is just going to destroy the first stage before we get the second. If you write further comments in this pattern which I have pointed to above, I will not continue to spend hours trying to pass your ITT and responding; I will just give you warnings and suspensions.
I may write another comment in this thread if there is something simple to clarify or something, but otherwise this is my last comment in this thread.
Followed by:
This was now a week ago. The mod team discussed this a bit more, and I think it’s the correct call to give Said an official warning (link) for causing a significant number of negative experiences for other authors and commenters.
Said, this moderation call is different than most others, because I think there is a place for the kind of communication culture that you’ve advocated for, but LessWrong specifically is not that place, and it’s important to be clear about what kind of culture we are aiming for. I don’t think ill of you or that you are a bad person. Quite the opposite; as I’ve said above, I deeply appreciate a lot of the things you’ve build and advice you’ve given, and this is why I’ve tried to put in a lot of effort and care with my moderation comments and decisions here. I’m afraid I also think LessWrong will overall achieve its aims better if you stop commenting in (some of) the ways you have so far.
Said, if you receive a second official warning, it will come with a 1-month suspension. This will happen if another writer has an extensive interaction with you primarily based around you asking them to do a lot of interpretive labour and not providing the same in return, as I described in my main comment in this thread.
I do have a strong sense of Said being quite law-abiding/honorable about the situation despite disagreeing with us on several object and meta-level moderation policy, which I appreciate a lot.
I do think it’s worth noting that LessWrong 2.0 feels like it’s at a more stable point than it was in 2018. There’s enough critical mass of people posting here I that I’m less worried about annoying commenters killing it completely (which was a very live fear during the initial LW2.0 revival)
But I am still worried about the concerns from 5 years ago, and do basically stand by Ben’s comment. And meanwhile I still think Said’s default commenting style is much worse than nearby styles that would accomplish the upside with less downside.
My summary of previous discussions as I recall them is something like:
Mods: “Said, lots of users have complained about your conversation style, you should change it.”
Said: “I think a) your preferred conversation norms here don’t make sense to me and/or seem actively bad in many cases, and b) I think the thing my conversation style is doing is really important for being a truthtracking forum.”
[...lots of back-and-forth...]
Mods: ”...can you change your commenting style at all?”
Said: “No, but I can just stop commenting in particular ways if you give me particular rules.”
Then we did that, and it sorta worked for awhile. But it hasn’t been wholly satisfying to me. (I do have some sense that Said has recently ended up commenting more in threads that are explicitly about setting norms, and while we didn’t spell this out in our initial mod warning, I do think it is extra costly to ban someone from discussions of moderation norms than from other discussion. I’m not 100% sure how to think about this)
I think some additional relevant context is this discussion from three years ago, which I think was 1) an example of Said asking for definitions without doing any interpretive labor, 2) appreciated by some commenters (including the post author, me), and 3) reacted to strongly by people who expected it to go poorly, including some mods. I can’t quickly find any summaries we posted after the fact.
Recap of mod team history with Said Achmiz
First, some background context. When LW2.0 was first launched, the mod team had several back-and-forth with Said over complaints about his commenting style. He was (and I think still is) the most-complained-about LW user. We considered banning him.
Ultimately we told him this:
Followed by:
I do have a strong sense of Said being quite law-abiding/honorable about the situation despite disagreeing with us on several object and meta-level moderation policy, which I appreciate a lot.
I do think it’s worth noting that LessWrong 2.0 feels like it’s at a more stable point than it was in 2018. There’s enough critical mass of people posting here I that I’m less worried about annoying commenters killing it completely (which was a very live fear during the initial LW2.0 revival)
But I am still worried about the concerns from 5 years ago, and do basically stand by Ben’s comment. And meanwhile I still think Said’s default commenting style is much worse than nearby styles that would accomplish the upside with less downside.
My summary of previous discussions as I recall them is something like:
Then we did that, and it sorta worked for awhile. But it hasn’t been wholly satisfying to me. (I do have some sense that Said has recently ended up commenting more in threads that are explicitly about setting norms, and while we didn’t spell this out in our initial mod warning, I do think it is extra costly to ban someone from discussions of moderation norms than from other discussion. I’m not 100% sure how to think about this)
I think some additional relevant context is this discussion from three years ago, which I think was 1) an example of Said asking for definitions without doing any interpretive labor, 2) appreciated by some commenters (including the post author, me), and 3) reacted to strongly by people who expected it to go poorly, including some mods. I can’t quickly find any summaries we posted after the fact.