I think that the council situation is totally fine, if there’s a public process of decision-making. [emphasis added]
I can imagine a system where individual council members speak their mind freely yet the subjects of the realm know that no law gets passed without appropriate process to possibly work quite well, but that “if” is doing a lot of work, and I think it currently does not hold of the LW team.
Certain topics get debated from time to time, but so far as I can recall, not in the context of “we’re laying down the law now, come weigh in.” I fear that people get anxious whenever those topics come up because they feel it might be their fleeting chance to make things go right.
Currently, the main place on LW where law gets formed is in actual decision announcements, and key decisions in that realm are always public, explained, and have comment sections, and everyone is allowed to write comments and posts critiquing those decisions.
I think this is false. For the most part, we have little announced law. We’ve got a few posts on Frontpage vs Personal blogposts, we’ve got the Frontpage guidelines, but nothing that much broader about what’s okay vs not okay communication, what happens if we don’t like something you’re doing, etc. Though individual team members operate in accordance with a number of solid underlying principles, they’re not really publicly or in agreement across the team, and so I’d venture that many decisions seem quite ad hoc.
Most moderation decisions get made behind the proverbial closed doors (in practice we keep our door open to keep CO2 down, but you know– proverbial), and I wouldn’t even call those decisions even law, though maybe they count as precedent.
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I’m optimistic we can rectify this and I think most of the team think it’s likely a top priority for Q1. Yet till we do so, I’m feeling that until such a time as we build trust (and this is difficult to do) and firmly establish a process of law getting developed in public, we don’t necessarily get to have the privilege of sharing random thoughts here and there that are of pretty large significance.
You might be right, the thing I said was oversimplified.
we don’t necessarily get to have the privilege of sharing random thoughts here and there that are of pretty large significance.
Let me be clear, that I am mostly modelling this as having strong positive externalities, distributed amongst many other people, not as being ‘personally easy’. I don’t find it as hard to do nowadays as I’ve practised it a lot, but my internal motivation isn’t just fun or ease or something like that.
I can imagine a system where individual council members speak their mind freely yet the subjects of the realm know that no law gets passed without appropriate process to possibly work quite well, but that “if” is doing a lot of work, and I think it currently does not hold of the LW team.
Certain topics get debated from time to time, but so far as I can recall, not in the context of “we’re laying down the law now, come weigh in.” I fear that people get anxious whenever those topics come up because they feel it might be their fleeting chance to make things go right.
I think this is false. For the most part, we have little announced law. We’ve got a few posts on Frontpage vs Personal blogposts, we’ve got the Frontpage guidelines, but nothing that much broader about what’s okay vs not okay communication, what happens if we don’t like something you’re doing, etc. Though individual team members operate in accordance with a number of solid underlying principles, they’re not really publicly or in agreement across the team, and so I’d venture that many decisions seem quite ad hoc.
Most moderation decisions get made behind the proverbial closed doors (in practice we keep our door open to keep CO2 down, but you know– proverbial), and I wouldn’t even call those decisions even law, though maybe they count as precedent.
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I’m optimistic we can rectify this and I think most of the team think it’s likely a top priority for Q1. Yet till we do so, I’m feeling that until such a time as we build trust (and this is difficult to do) and firmly establish a process of law getting developed in public, we don’t necessarily get to have the privilege of sharing random thoughts here and there that are of pretty large significance.
You might be right, the thing I said was oversimplified.
Let me be clear, that I am mostly modelling this as having strong positive externalities, distributed amongst many other people, not as being ‘personally easy’. I don’t find it as hard to do nowadays as I’ve practised it a lot, but my internal motivation isn’t just fun or ease or something like that.