One of the reasons why I like rate-limits instead of bans is that it allows people to complain about the rate-limiting and to participate in discussion on their own posts (so seeing a harsh rate-limit of something like “1 comment per 3 days” is not equivalent to a general ban from LessWrong, but should be more interpreted as “please comment primarily on your own posts”, though of course it shares many important properties of a ban).
Things that seem most important to bring up in terms of moderation philosophy:
Moderation on LessWrong does not depend on effort
Another thing I’ve noticed is that almost all the users are trying. They are trying to use rationality, trying to understand what’s been written here, trying to apply Baye’s rule or understand AI. Even some of the users with negative karma are trying, just having more difficulty.
Just because someone is genuinely trying to contribute to LessWrong, does not mean LessWrong is a good place for them. LessWrong has a particular culture, with particular standards and particular interests, and I think many people, even if they are genuinely trying, don’t fit well within that culture and those standards.
In making rate-limiting decisions like this I don’t pay much attention to whether the user in question is “genuinely trying ” to contribute to LW, I am mostly just evaluating the effects I see their actions having on the quality of the discussions happening on the site, and the quality of the ideas they are contributing.
Motivation and goals are of course a relevant component to model, but that mostly pushes in the opposite direction, in that if I have someone who seems to be making great contributions, and I learn they aren’t even trying, then that makes me more excited, since there is upside if they do become more motivated in the future.
Signal to Noise ratio is important
Thomas and Elizabeth pointed this out already, but just because someone’s comments don’t seem actively bad, doesn’t mean I don’t want to limit their ability to contribute. We do a lot of things on LW to improve the signal to noise ratio of content on the site, and one of those things is to reduce the amount of noise, even if the mean of what we remove looks not actively harmful.
We of course also do other things than to remove some of the lower signal content to improve the signal to noise ratio. Voting does a lot, how we sort the frontpage does a lot, subscriptions and notification systems do a lot. But rate-limiting is also a tool I use for the same purpose.
Old users are owed explanations, new users are (mostly) not
I think if you’ve been around for a while on LessWrong, and I decide to rate-limit you, then I think it makes sense for me to make some time to argue with you about that, and give you the opportunity to convince me that I am wrong. But if you are new, and haven’t invested a lot in the site, then I think I owe you relatively little.
I think in doing the above rate-limits, we did not do enough to give established users the affordance to push back and argue with us about them. I do think most of these users are relatively recent or are users we’ve been very straightforward with since shortly after they started commenting that we don’t think they are breaking even on their contributions to the site (like the OP Gerald Monroe, with whom we had 3 separate conversations over the past few months), and for those I don’t think we owe them much of an explanation. LessWrong is a walled garden.
You do not by default have the right to be here, and I don’t want to, and cannot, accept the burden of explaining to everyone who wants to be here but who I don’t want here, why I am making my decisions. As such a moderation principle that we’ve been aspiring to for quite a while is to let new users know as early as possible if we think them being on the site is unlikely to work out, so that if you have been around for a while you can feel stable, and also so that you don’t invest in something that will end up being taken away from you.
Feedback helps a bit, especially if you are young, but usually doesn’t
Maybe there are other people who are much better at giving feedback and helping people grow as commenters, but my personal experience is that giving users feedback, especially the second or third time, rarely tends to substantially improve things.
I think this sucks. I would much rather be in a world where the usual reasons why I think someone isn’t positively contributing to LessWrong were of the type that a short conversation could clear up and fix, but it alas does not appear so, and after having spent many hundreds of hours over the years giving people individualized feedback, I don’t really think “give people specific and detailed feedback” is a viable moderation strategy, at least more than once or twice per user. I recognize that this can feel unfair on the receiving end, and I also feel sad about it.
I do think the one exception here is that if people are young or are non-native english speakers. Do let me know if you are in your teens or you are a non-native english speaker who is still learning the language. People do really get a lot better at communication between the ages of 14-22 and people’s english does get substantially better over time, and this helps with all kinds communication issues.
We consider legibility, but its only a relatively small input into our moderation decisions
It is valuable and a precious public good to make it easy to know which actions you take will cause you to end up being removed from a space. However, that legibility also comes at great cost, especially in social contexts. Every clear and bright-line rule you outline will have people budding right up against it, and de-facto, in my experience, moderation of social spaces like LessWrong is not the kind of thing you can do while being legible in the way that for example modern courts aim to be legible.
As such, we don’t have laws. If anything we have something like case-law which gets established as individual moderation disputes arise, which we then use as guidelines for future decisions, but also a huge fraction of our moderation decisions are downstream of complicated models we formed about what kind of conversations and interactions work on LessWrong, and what role we want LessWrong to play in the broader world, and those shift and change as new evidence comes in and the world changes.
I do ultimately still try pretty hard to give people guidelines and to draw lines that help people feel secure in their relationship to LessWrong, and I care a lot about this, but at the end of the day I will still make many from-the-outside-arbitrary-seeming-decisions in order to keep LessWrong the precious walled garden that it is.
I try really hard to not build an ideological echo chamber
When making moderation decisions, it’s always at the top of my mind whether I am tempted to make a decision one way or another because they disagree with me on some object-level issue. I try pretty hard to not have that affect my decisions, and as a result have what feels to me a subjectively substantially higher standard for rate-limiting or banning people who disagree with me, than for people who agree with me. I think this is reflected in the decisions above.
I do feel comfortable judging people on the methodologies and abstract principles that they seem to use to arrive at their conclusions. LessWrong has a specific epistemology, and I care about protecting that. If you are primarily trying to…
argue from authority,
don’t like speaking in probabilistic terms,
aren’t comfortable holding multiple conflicting models in your head at the same time,
or are averse to breaking things down into mechanistic and reductionist terms,
then LW is probably not for you, and I feel fine with that. I feel comfortable reducing the visibility or volume of content on the site that is in conflict with these epistemological principles (of course this list isn’t exhaustive, in-general the LW sequences are the best pointer towards the epistemological foundations of the site).
If you see me or other LW moderators fail to judge people on epistemological principles but instead see us directly rate-limiting or banning users on the basis of object-level opinions that even if they seem wrong seem to have been arrived at via relatively sane principles, then I do really think you should complain and push back at us. I see my mandate as head of LW to only extend towards enforcing what seems to me the shared epistemological foundation of LW, and to not have the mandate to enforce my own object-level beliefs on the participants of this site.
Now some more comments on the object-level:
I overall feel good about rate-limiting everyone on the above list. I think it will probably make the conversations on the site go better and make more people contribute to the site.
Us doing more extensive rate-limiting is an experiment, and we will see how it goes. As kave said in the other response to this post, the rule that suggested these specific rate-limits does not seem like it has an amazing track record, though I currently endorse it as something that calls things to my attention (among many other heuristics).
Also, if anyone reading this is worried about being rate-limited or banned in the future, feel free to reach out to me or other moderators on Intercom. I am generally happy to give people direct and frank feedback about their contributions to the site, as well as how likely I am to take future moderator actions. Uncertainty is costly, and I think it’s worth a lot of my time to help people understand to what degree investing in LessWrong makes sense for them.
I very much appreciate @habryka taking the time to lay out your thoughts; posting like this is also a great example of modeling out your principles. I’ve spent copious amounts of time shaping the Manifold community’s discourse and norms, and this comment has a mix of patterns I find true out of my own experiences (eg the bits about case law and avoiding echo chambers), and good learnings for me (eg young/non-English speakers improve more easily).
Re: post/comment quality, one thing I do suspect helps which I didn’t see anyone mention (and imo a potential upside of rate-limiting) is that age-old forum standard, lurking moar. I think it can actually be hugely valuable to spend awhile reading the historical and present discussion of a site and absorbing its norms of discourse before attempting to contribute; in particular, it’s useful for picking up illegible subtleties of phrasing and thought that distinguish quality from non-quality contributors, and for getting a sense of the shared context and background knowledge that users expect each other to have.
So I’m one of the rate limited users. I suspect it’s because I made a bad early April fools joke about a WorldsEnd movement that would encourage people to maximise utility over the next 25 years instead of pursuing long term goals for humanity like alignment. Made some people upset and it hit me that this site doesn’t really have the right culture for those kinds of jokes. I apologise and don’t contest being rate limited.
feature proposal: when someone is rate limited, they can still write comments. their comments are auto-delayed until the next time they’d be unratelimited. they can queue up to k comments before it behaves the same as it does now. I suggest k be 1. I expect this would reduce the emotional banneyness-feeling by around 10%.
feature proposal: when someone is ratelimited, the moderators can give a public reason and/or a private reason. if the reason is public, it invites public feedback as well as indicating to users passing by what things might get moderated. I would encourage moderators to give both positive and negative reasoning: why they appreciate the user’s input, and what they’d want to change. I expect this would reduce banneyness feeling by 3-10%, though it may increase it.
feature proposal: make the ui of the ratelimit smaller. I expect this would reduce emotional banneyness-feeling by 2-10%, as emotional valence depends somewhat on literal visual intensity, though this is only a fragment of it.
feature proposal: in the ratelimit indicator, add some of the words you wrote here, such as “this is not equivalent to a general ban from LessWrong. Your comments are still welcome. The moderators will likely be highly willing to give feedback on intercom in the bottom right.”
feature proposal: make karma/(comment+posts) visible on user profile, make total karma require hover of karma/(comments+posts) number to view.
I strongly suspect that spending time building features for rate limited users is not valuable enough to be worthwhile. I suspect this mainly because:
There aren’t a lot of rate limited users who would benefit from it.
The value that the rate limited users receive is marginal.
It’s unclear whether doing things that benefit users who have been rate limited is a good thing.
I don’t see any sorts of second order effects that would make it worthwhile, such as non-rate-limited people seeing these features and being more inclined to be involved in the community because of them.
There are lots of other very valuable things the team could be working on.
sure. I wouldn’t propose bending over backwards to do anything. I suggested some things, up to the team what they do. the most obviously good one is just editing some text, second most obviously good one is just changing some css. would take 20 minutes.
Features to benefit people accused of X may benefit mostly people who have been unjustly accused. So looking at the value to the entire category “people accused of X” may be wrong. You should look at the value to the subset that it was meant to protect.
feature proposal: when someone is rate limited, they can still write comments. their comments are auto-delayed until the next time they’d be unratelimited. they can queue up to k comments before it behaves the same as it does now. I suggest k be 1. I expect this would reduce the emotional banneyness-feeling by around 10%.
If (as I suspect is the case) one of the in-practice purposes or benefits of a limit is to make it harder for an escalation spiral to continue via comments written in a heated emotional state, delaying the reading destroys that effect compared to delaying the writing. If the limited user is in a calm state and believes it’s worth it to push back, they can save their own draft elsewhere and set their own timer.
If someone is rate-limited because their posts are perceived as low quality, and they write a comment ahead of time, it’s good when they reread that comment before posting. If the process of posts from the queue getting posted is automatic that doesn’t happen the same way than when someone has their queue in their Google Doc (or whatever way the use to organize their thoughts) for copy-pasting.
The moderators will likely be highly willing to give feedback on intercom in the bottom right.”
The way I interpret this, you only get this if you are a “high ROI” contributor. It’s quite possible that you get specific feedback, including the post they don’t like, if you are considered “high ROI”. I complained about bhauth rate limiting me by abusing downvotes in a discussion, and never got a reply. In fact I never received a reply by intercom about anything I asked about. Not even a “contribute to the site more and we’ll help, k bye”.
Which is fine, but habryka also admitted that
have communicated that we don’t think you are breaking even. Here are some messages we sent to you:
This was never said, I would have immediately deactivated my account had this occurred.
Old users are owed explanations, new users are (mostly) not
This was not done, and habryka admitted this wasn’t done. Also raemon gave the definition for an “established” user and it was an extremely high bar, only a small fraction of all users will meet it.
Feedback helps a bit, especially if you are young, but usually doesn’t
A little casual age discrimination, anyone over 22 isn’t worth helping.
As such, we don’t have laws.
I thought ‘rationality’ was about mechanistic reasoning, not just “do whatever we want on a whim”. As in you build a model on evidence, write it down, data science, take actions based on what the data says, not what you feel. A really great example of moderation using this is https://communitynotes.x.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/ranking-notes . If you don’t do this, or at least use a prediction market, won’t you probably be wrong?
Uncertainty is costly, and I think it’s worth a lot of my time to help people understand to what degree investing in LessWrong makes sense for them.
Wasn’t done for me. Habryka says that they like to communicate with us in ‘subtle’ ways, give ‘hints’. Many of us have some degree of autism and need it spelled out.
I don’t really care about all this, ultimately it is just a game. I just feel incredibly disappointed. I thought rationality was about being actually correct, about being smart and beating the odds, and so on.
I thought that mods like Raemon etc all knew more than me, that I was actually doing something wrong that could be fixed. Not well, what it is.
That ratonality was an idea that ultimately just says next_action = argmax ( actions considered, argmax(EV estimate_algorithm)), where you swap out how you estimate EV to whatever has the strongest predictive power. That we shouldn’t be stuck with “the sequences” if they are wrong.
This was not done, and habryka admitted this wasn’t done
I’m interested in seeing direct evidence of this from DMs. I expect direct evidence would convince me it was in fact done.
If you know, AI doesn’t kill us first. Stopped clocks and all.
Your ongoing assumption that everyone here shares the same beliefs about this continues to be frustrating, though understandable from a less vulcan perspective. Most of your comment appears to be a reply to habryka, not me.
I am confused. The quotes I sent are quotes from DMs we sent to Gerald. Here they are again just for posterity:
You’ve been commenting fairly frequently, and my subjective impression as well as voting patterns suggest most people aren’t finding your comments sufficiently helpful.
And:
To conclude, the rate limit is your warning. Currently I feel your typical comments (even not downvoted) ones aren’t amazing, and now that we’re prioritizing raising standards due the dramatic rise in new users, we’re also getting tougher on contributions from established users that don’t feel like they’re meeting the bar either.
I think we have more but they are in DMs with just Raemon in it, but the above IMO clearly communicate “your current contributions are not breaking even”.
I think we have more but they are in DMs with just Raemon in it, but the above IMO clearly communicate “your current contributions are not breaking even”.
I didn’t draw that conclusion. Feel free to post in Raemon’s DMs.
Again what I am disappointed is ultimately this just seems to be a private fiefdom where you make decisions on a whim. Not altogether different from the new twitter come to think of it.
And that’s fine, and I don’t have to post here, that’s fine. I just feel super disappointed because I’m not seeing anything like rationality here in moderation, just tribalism and the normal outcomes of ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’. “A complex model that I can’t explain to anyone” is ultimately not scalable and frankly not really a very modern way to do it. It just simplifies to a gut feeling, and it cannot moderator better than the moderator’s own knowledge, which is where it fails on topics the moderators don’t actually understand.
You’ve been commenting fairly frequently, and my subjective impression as well as voting patterns suggest most people aren’t finding your comments sufficiently helpful.
why moderate this weird way different from essentially everywhere else?
I don’t see any significant evidence that the moderation here is weird or unusual. Most forums or chats I’ve encountered do not have bright line rules. Only very large forums do, and my impression is that their quality is worse for it. I do not wish to justify this impression at this time, this will likely be near my last comment on this post.
Have you or anyone else on the LW team written anywhere about the effects of your new rate-limiting infrastructure, which was IIRC implemented last year? E.g. have some metrics improved which you care about?
We haven’t written up concrete takeaways. My sense is the effect was relatively minor, mostly because we set quite high rate limits, but it’s quite hard to disentangle from lots of other stuff going on.
This was an experiment in setting stronger rate-limits using more admin-supervision.
I do feel pretty solid in using rate-limiting as the default tool instead of temporary bans as I think most other forums use. I’ve definitely felt things escalate much less unhealthily and have observed a large effect size in how OK it is to reverse a rate-limit (whereas if I ban someone it tends to escalate quite quickly into a very sharp disagreement). It does also seem to reduce chilling effects a lot (as I think posts like this demonstrate).
I think one outcome is ‘we’re actually willing to moderate at all on ambiguous cases’. For years we would accumulate a list of users that seemed like they warranted some kind of intervention, but banning them felt too harsh and they would sit there in an awkwardly growing pile and eventually we’d say ‘well I guess we’re not really going to take action’ and click the ‘approve’ button.
Having rate limits made it feel more possible to intervene, but it still required writing some kind of message which was still very time consuming.
Auto-rate-limits have done a pretty good job of handling most cases in a way I endorse, in a way that helps quickly instead of after months of handwringing.
The actual metric I’d want is ‘do users who produce good content enjoy the site more’, or ‘do readers, authors and/or commenters feel comment sections are better than they used to be?’. This is a bit hard to judge because there are other confounding factors. But it probably would be good to try checking somehow.
what feels to me a subjectively substantially higher standard for rate-limiting or banning people who disagree with me
Positions that are contrarian or wrong in intelligent ways (or within a limited scope of a few key beliefs) provoke valuable discussion, even when they are not supported by legible arguments on the contrarian/wrong side. Without them, there is an “everybody knows” problem where some important ideas are never debated or fail to become common knowledge. I feel there is less of that than optimal on LW, it’s possible to target a level of disruption.
users we’ve been very straightforward with since shortly after they started commenting that we don’t think they are breaking even on their contributions to the site
Why don’t you just say this? Also give a general description of what “ROI” from the point of view your site is. Reddit has no concept of this. I was completely unaware you had a positive goal.
There’s thousands of message boards, this is literally the first one I have ever seen that has even the idea of ROI. Also while negative rules may not exist, positive ones are doable.
You never told me this, and I haven’t seen any mention of this anywhere on the site. Also I think users need more context of what it means to produce content that has high ROI for you, that uh we volunteer to provide for free.
Book worthy posts? Nothing in a comment section that harms your brand? No excessive “emperor has no clothes” comments? I can produce all of that, but I wasn’t aware that I had to.
As far as I knew, the restrictions were:
+karma, don’t do anything that would reasonably get you banned in a subreddit.
Did you ever publish an article on this site explaining this to anyone?
You certainly didn’t even try to link the article if you have one for me or explain your actual expectations.
Finally, I may note that you “invested” time 3 times after failing to give any warnings before punishment whatsoever, or even a positive description of what you wanted, just extremely vague “guidelines” that don’t contain this information. I’m disappointed in your decisions here.
Anyways, it’s an experiment, it’s rather telling that the highest contributors here have moved to Twitter though.
We have really given you a lot of feedback and have communicated that we don’t think you are breaking even. Here are some messages we sent to you:
April 7th 2023:
You’ve been commenting fairly frequently, and my subjective impression as well as voting patterns suggest most people aren’t finding your comments sufficiently helpful.
And from Ruby:
In the “wrong” category, some of your criticisms of the Time piece post seemed to be failing to operating probabilistically which is a fundamental basic I expect from LW users. “May not” is not sufficient argument. You need to talk about probabilities and why yours are different from others. “It’s irrational to worry about X because it might not happen” does not cut it. That’s just something that stuck out to me.
In my mind, the 1 contribution/day is better than a ban because it gives you a chance to improve your contributions and become unrestricted.
Regarding your near-1000 karma, this is not a great sign given you have nearly 900 comments, meaning your average comment is not getting much positive engagement. Unfortunately karma is an imperfect measure and captures the combination of “is good” and “engages a lot” and engaging a lot alone isn’t something we reward.
To conclude, the rate limit is your warning. Currently I feel your typical comments (even not downvoted) ones aren’t amazing, and now that we’re prioritizing raising standards due the dramatic rise in new users, we’re also getting tougher on contributions from established users that don’t feel like they’re meeting the bar either.
Separately, here are some quotes from our about page and new user guide:
This is a hard section to write. The new users who need to read it least are more likely to spend time worrying about the below, and those who need it most are likely to ignore it. Don’t stress too hard. If you submit it and we don’t like it, we’ll give you some feedback.
A lot of the below is written for the people who aren’t putting in much effort at all, so we can at least say “hey, we did give you a heads up in multiple places”.
There are a number of dimensions upon which content submissions may be strong or weak. Strength in one place can compensate for weakness in another, but overall the moderators assess each first post/comment from new users for the following. If the first submission is lacking, it might be rejected and you’ll get feedback on why.
Your first post or comment is more likely to approved by moderators (and upvoted by general site users) if you:
Demonstrate understanding of LessWrong rationality fundamentals. Or at least don’t do anything contravened by them. These are the kinds of things covered in The Sequences such as probabilistic reasoning, proper use of beliefs, being curious about where you might be wrong, avoiding arguing over definitions, etc. See the Foundational Reading section above.
Write a clear introduction. If your first submission is lengthy, i.e. a long post, it’s more likely to get quickly approved if the site moderators can quickly understand what you’re trying to say rather than having to delve deep into your post to figure it out. Once you’re established on the site and people know that you have good things to say, you can pull off having a “literary” opening that doesn’t start with the main point.
Address existing arguments on the topic (if applicable). Many topics have been discussed at length already on LessWrong, or have an answer strongly implied by core content on the site, e.g. from the Sequences (which has rather large relevance to AI questions). Your submission is more likely to be accepted if it’s clear you’re aware of prior relevant discussion and are building upon on it. It’s not a big deal if you weren’t aware, there’s just a chance the moderator team will reject your submission and point you to relevant material.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t question positions commonly held on LessWrong, just that it’s a lot more productive for everyone involved if you’re able to respond to or build upon the existing arguments, e.g. showing why they’re wrong.
Address the LessWrong audience. A recent trend is more and more people crossposting from their personal blogs, e.g. their Substack or Medium, to LessWrong. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that (we welcome good content!) but many of these posts neither strike us as particularly interesting or insightful, nor demonstrate an interest in LessWrong’s culture/norms or audience (as revealed by a very different style and not really responding to anyone on site).
It’s good (though not absolutely necessary) when a post is written for the LessWrong audience and shows that by referencing other discussions on LessWrong (links to other posts are good).
Aim for a high standard if you’re contributing on the topic AI. As AI becomes higher and higher profile in the world, many more people are flowing to LessWrong because we have discussion of it. In order to not lose what makes our site uniquely capable of making good intellectual progress, we have particularly high standards for new users showing up to talk about AI. If we don’t think your AI-related contribution is particularly valuable and it’s not clear you’ve tried to understand the site’s culture or values, then it’s possible we’ll reject it.
And on the topic of positive goals for LessWrong and what we are trying to do here:
On LessWrong we attempt (though don’t always succeed) to apply the rationality lessons we’ve accumulated to any topic that interests us, and especially topics that seem important, like how to make the world a better place. We don’t just care about truth in the abstract, but care about having true beliefs about things we care about so that we can make better and more successful decisions.
Right now, AI seems like one of the most (or the most) important topics for humanity. It involves many tricky questions, high stakes, and uncertainty in an unprecedented situation. On LessWrong, many users are attempting to apply their best thinking to ensure that the advent of increasingly powerful AI goes well for humanity.[5]
It’s not amazingly concrete, but I do think it’s clear we are trying to do something specific here. We are here to develop an art of rationality and cause good outcomes on issues like AI and other world-scale outcomes, and we’ll moderate to achieve that.
I’d also want to add LW Team is adjusting moderation policy as a post that laid out some of our thinking here. One section that’s particularly relevant/standalone:
LessWrong has always had a goal of being a well-kept garden. We have higher and more opinionated standards than most of the rest of the internet. In many cases we treat some issues as more “settled” than the rest of the internet, so that instead of endlessly rehashing the same questions we can move on to solving more difficult and interesting questions.
What this translates to in terms of moderation policy is a bit murky. We’ve been stepping up moderation over the past couple months and frequently run into issues like “it seems like this comment is missing some kind of ‘LessWrong basics’, but ‘the basics’ aren’t well indexed and easy to reference.” It’s also not quite clear how to handle that from a moderation perspective.
I’m hoping to improve on “‘the basics’ are better indexed”, but meanwhile it’s just generally the case that if you participate on LessWrong, you are expected to have absorbed the set of principles in The Sequences (AKA Rationality A-Z).
In some cases you can get away without doing that while participating in local object level conversations, and pick up norms along the way. But if you’re getting downvoted and you haven’t read them, it’s likely you’re missing a lot of concepts or norms that are considered basic background reading on LessWrong. I recommend starting with the Sequences Highlights, and I’d also note that you don’t need to read the Sequences in order, you can pick some random posts that seem fun and jump around based on your interest.
(Note: it’s of course pretty important to be able to question all your basic assumptions. But I think doing that in a productive way requires actually understand why the current set of background assumptions are the way they are, and engaging with the object level reasoning)
There’s also a straightforward question of quality. LessWrong deals with complicated questions. It’s a place for making serious progress on those questions. One model I have of LessWrong is something like a university – there’s a role for undergrads who are learning lots of stuff but aren’t yet expected to be contributing to the cutting edge. There are grad students and professors who conduct novel research. But all of this is predicated on there being some barrier-to-entry. Not everyone gets accepted to any given university. You need some combination of intelligence, conscientiousness, etc to get accepted in the first place.
and my subjective impression as well as voting patterns suggest most people aren’t finding your comments sufficiently helpful.
This is astonishingly vague.
You need to talk about probabilities and why yours are different from others.
I did
the rate limit is your warning.
Punishment was in advance of a warning.
page and new user guide
I did everything here on most comments made after this was linked.
We are here to develop an art of rationality and cause good outcomes on issues like AI and other world-scale outcomes, and we’ll moderate to achieve that.
I wish you luck with this. I look forward to seeing the results of your experiment here. I don’t like advance or retroactive punishment or vague rules and no appeals, but I appreciate you have admitted upfront to doing this. Thank you.
Thanks for making this post!
One of the reasons why I like rate-limits instead of bans is that it allows people to complain about the rate-limiting and to participate in discussion on their own posts (so seeing a harsh rate-limit of something like “1 comment per 3 days” is not equivalent to a general ban from LessWrong, but should be more interpreted as “please comment primarily on your own posts”, though of course it shares many important properties of a ban).
Things that seem most important to bring up in terms of moderation philosophy:
Moderation on LessWrong does not depend on effort
Just because someone is genuinely trying to contribute to LessWrong, does not mean LessWrong is a good place for them. LessWrong has a particular culture, with particular standards and particular interests, and I think many people, even if they are genuinely trying, don’t fit well within that culture and those standards.
In making rate-limiting decisions like this I don’t pay much attention to whether the user in question is “genuinely trying ” to contribute to LW, I am mostly just evaluating the effects I see their actions having on the quality of the discussions happening on the site, and the quality of the ideas they are contributing.
Motivation and goals are of course a relevant component to model, but that mostly pushes in the opposite direction, in that if I have someone who seems to be making great contributions, and I learn they aren’t even trying, then that makes me more excited, since there is upside if they do become more motivated in the future.
Signal to Noise ratio is important
Thomas and Elizabeth pointed this out already, but just because someone’s comments don’t seem actively bad, doesn’t mean I don’t want to limit their ability to contribute. We do a lot of things on LW to improve the signal to noise ratio of content on the site, and one of those things is to reduce the amount of noise, even if the mean of what we remove looks not actively harmful.
We of course also do other things than to remove some of the lower signal content to improve the signal to noise ratio. Voting does a lot, how we sort the frontpage does a lot, subscriptions and notification systems do a lot. But rate-limiting is also a tool I use for the same purpose.
Old users are owed explanations, new users are (mostly) not
I think if you’ve been around for a while on LessWrong, and I decide to rate-limit you, then I think it makes sense for me to make some time to argue with you about that, and give you the opportunity to convince me that I am wrong. But if you are new, and haven’t invested a lot in the site, then I think I owe you relatively little.
I think in doing the above rate-limits, we did not do enough to give established users the affordance to push back and argue with us about them. I do think most of these users are relatively recent or are users we’ve been very straightforward with since shortly after they started commenting that we don’t think they are breaking even on their contributions to the site (like the OP Gerald Monroe, with whom we had 3 separate conversations over the past few months), and for those I don’t think we owe them much of an explanation. LessWrong is a walled garden.
You do not by default have the right to be here, and I don’t want to, and cannot, accept the burden of explaining to everyone who wants to be here but who I don’t want here, why I am making my decisions. As such a moderation principle that we’ve been aspiring to for quite a while is to let new users know as early as possible if we think them being on the site is unlikely to work out, so that if you have been around for a while you can feel stable, and also so that you don’t invest in something that will end up being taken away from you.
Feedback helps a bit, especially if you are young, but usually doesn’t
Maybe there are other people who are much better at giving feedback and helping people grow as commenters, but my personal experience is that giving users feedback, especially the second or third time, rarely tends to substantially improve things.
I think this sucks. I would much rather be in a world where the usual reasons why I think someone isn’t positively contributing to LessWrong were of the type that a short conversation could clear up and fix, but it alas does not appear so, and after having spent many hundreds of hours over the years giving people individualized feedback, I don’t really think “give people specific and detailed feedback” is a viable moderation strategy, at least more than once or twice per user. I recognize that this can feel unfair on the receiving end, and I also feel sad about it.
I do think the one exception here is that if people are young or are non-native english speakers. Do let me know if you are in your teens or you are a non-native english speaker who is still learning the language. People do really get a lot better at communication between the ages of 14-22 and people’s english does get substantially better over time, and this helps with all kinds communication issues.
We consider legibility, but its only a relatively small input into our moderation decisions
It is valuable and a precious public good to make it easy to know which actions you take will cause you to end up being removed from a space. However, that legibility also comes at great cost, especially in social contexts. Every clear and bright-line rule you outline will have people budding right up against it, and de-facto, in my experience, moderation of social spaces like LessWrong is not the kind of thing you can do while being legible in the way that for example modern courts aim to be legible.
As such, we don’t have laws. If anything we have something like case-law which gets established as individual moderation disputes arise, which we then use as guidelines for future decisions, but also a huge fraction of our moderation decisions are downstream of complicated models we formed about what kind of conversations and interactions work on LessWrong, and what role we want LessWrong to play in the broader world, and those shift and change as new evidence comes in and the world changes.
I do ultimately still try pretty hard to give people guidelines and to draw lines that help people feel secure in their relationship to LessWrong, and I care a lot about this, but at the end of the day I will still make many from-the-outside-arbitrary-seeming-decisions in order to keep LessWrong the precious walled garden that it is.
I try really hard to not build an ideological echo chamber
When making moderation decisions, it’s always at the top of my mind whether I am tempted to make a decision one way or another because they disagree with me on some object-level issue. I try pretty hard to not have that affect my decisions, and as a result have what feels to me a subjectively substantially higher standard for rate-limiting or banning people who disagree with me, than for people who agree with me. I think this is reflected in the decisions above.
I do feel comfortable judging people on the methodologies and abstract principles that they seem to use to arrive at their conclusions. LessWrong has a specific epistemology, and I care about protecting that. If you are primarily trying to…
argue from authority,
don’t like speaking in probabilistic terms,
aren’t comfortable holding multiple conflicting models in your head at the same time,
or are averse to breaking things down into mechanistic and reductionist terms,
then LW is probably not for you, and I feel fine with that. I feel comfortable reducing the visibility or volume of content on the site that is in conflict with these epistemological principles (of course this list isn’t exhaustive, in-general the LW sequences are the best pointer towards the epistemological foundations of the site).
If you see me or other LW moderators fail to judge people on epistemological principles but instead see us directly rate-limiting or banning users on the basis of object-level opinions that even if they seem wrong seem to have been arrived at via relatively sane principles, then I do really think you should complain and push back at us. I see my mandate as head of LW to only extend towards enforcing what seems to me the shared epistemological foundation of LW, and to not have the mandate to enforce my own object-level beliefs on the participants of this site.
Now some more comments on the object-level:
I overall feel good about rate-limiting everyone on the above list. I think it will probably make the conversations on the site go better and make more people contribute to the site.
Us doing more extensive rate-limiting is an experiment, and we will see how it goes. As kave said in the other response to this post, the rule that suggested these specific rate-limits does not seem like it has an amazing track record, though I currently endorse it as something that calls things to my attention (among many other heuristics).
Also, if anyone reading this is worried about being rate-limited or banned in the future, feel free to reach out to me or other moderators on Intercom. I am generally happy to give people direct and frank feedback about their contributions to the site, as well as how likely I am to take future moderator actions. Uncertainty is costly, and I think it’s worth a lot of my time to help people understand to what degree investing in LessWrong makes sense for them.
I very much appreciate @habryka taking the time to lay out your thoughts; posting like this is also a great example of modeling out your principles. I’ve spent copious amounts of time shaping the Manifold community’s discourse and norms, and this comment has a mix of patterns I find true out of my own experiences (eg the bits about case law and avoiding echo chambers), and good learnings for me (eg young/non-English speakers improve more easily).
Re: post/comment quality, one thing I do suspect helps which I didn’t see anyone mention (and imo a potential upside of rate-limiting) is that age-old forum standard, lurking moar. I think it can actually be hugely valuable to spend awhile reading the historical and present discussion of a site and absorbing its norms of discourse before attempting to contribute; in particular, it’s useful for picking up illegible subtleties of phrasing and thought that distinguish quality from non-quality contributors, and for getting a sense of the shared context and background knowledge that users expect each other to have.
So I’m one of the rate limited users. I suspect it’s because I made a bad early April fools joke about a WorldsEnd movement that would encourage people to maximise utility over the next 25 years instead of pursuing long term goals for humanity like alignment. Made some people upset and it hit me that this site doesn’t really have the right culture for those kinds of jokes. I apologise and don’t contest being rate limited.
feature proposal: when someone is rate limited, they can still write comments. their comments are auto-delayed until the next time they’d be unratelimited. they can queue up to k comments before it behaves the same as it does now. I suggest k be 1. I expect this would reduce the emotional banneyness-feeling by around 10%.
feature proposal: when someone is ratelimited, the moderators can give a public reason and/or a private reason. if the reason is public, it invites public feedback as well as indicating to users passing by what things might get moderated. I would encourage moderators to give both positive and negative reasoning: why they appreciate the user’s input, and what they’d want to change. I expect this would reduce banneyness feeling by 3-10%, though it may increase it.
feature proposal: make the ui of the ratelimit smaller. I expect this would reduce emotional banneyness-feeling by 2-10%, as emotional valence depends somewhat on literal visual intensity, though this is only a fragment of it.
feature proposal: in the ratelimit indicator, add some of the words you wrote here, such as “this is not equivalent to a general ban from LessWrong. Your comments are still welcome. The moderators will likely be highly willing to give feedback on intercom in the bottom right.”
feature proposal: make karma/(comment+posts) visible on user profile, make total karma require hover of karma/(comments+posts) number to view.
I strongly suspect that spending time building features for rate limited users is not valuable enough to be worthwhile. I suspect this mainly because:
There aren’t a lot of rate limited users who would benefit from it.
The value that the rate limited users receive is marginal.
It’s unclear whether doing things that benefit users who have been rate limited is a good thing.
I don’t see any sorts of second order effects that would make it worthwhile, such as non-rate-limited people seeing these features and being more inclined to be involved in the community because of them.
There are lots of other very valuable things the team could be working on.
sure. I wouldn’t propose bending over backwards to do anything. I suggested some things, up to the team what they do. the most obviously good one is just editing some text, second most obviously good one is just changing some css. would take 20 minutes.
Features to benefit people accused of X may benefit mostly people who have been unjustly accused. So looking at the value to the entire category “people accused of X” may be wrong. You should look at the value to the subset that it was meant to protect.
If (as I suspect is the case) one of the in-practice purposes or benefits of a limit is to make it harder for an escalation spiral to continue via comments written in a heated emotional state, delaying the reading destroys that effect compared to delaying the writing. If the limited user is in a calm state and believes it’s worth it to push back, they can save their own draft elsewhere and set their own timer.
If someone is rate-limited because their posts are perceived as low quality, and they write a comment ahead of time, it’s good when they reread that comment before posting. If the process of posts from the queue getting posted is automatic that doesn’t happen the same way than when someone has their queue in their Google Doc (or whatever way the use to organize their thoughts) for copy-pasting.
True—your comment is more or less a duplicate of Rana Dexsin’s, which convinced me of this claim.
The way I interpret this, you only get this if you are a “high ROI” contributor. It’s quite possible that you get specific feedback, including the post they don’t like, if you are considered “high ROI”. I complained about bhauth rate limiting me by abusing downvotes in a discussion, and never got a reply. In fact I never received a reply by intercom about anything I asked about. Not even a “contribute to the site more and we’ll help, k bye”.
Which is fine, but habryka also admitted that
This was never said, I would have immediately deactivated my account had this occurred.
This was not done, and habryka admitted this wasn’t done. Also raemon gave the definition for an “established” user and it was an extremely high bar, only a small fraction of all users will meet it.
A little casual age discrimination, anyone over 22 isn’t worth helping.
I thought ‘rationality’ was about mechanistic reasoning, not just “do whatever we want on a whim”. As in you build a model on evidence, write it down, data science, take actions based on what the data says, not what you feel. A really great example of moderation using this is https://communitynotes.x.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/ranking-notes . If you don’t do this, or at least use a prediction market, won’t you probably be wrong?
Wasn’t done for me. Habryka says that they like to communicate with us in ‘subtle’ ways, give ‘hints’. Many of us have some degree of autism and need it spelled out.
I don’t really care about all this, ultimately it is just a game. I just feel incredibly disappointed. I thought rationality was about being actually correct, about being smart and beating the odds, and so on.
I thought that mods like Raemon etc all knew more than me, that I was actually doing something wrong that could be fixed. Not well, what it is.
That ratonality was an idea that ultimately just says next_action = argmax ( actions considered, argmax(EV estimate_algorithm)), where you swap out how you estimate EV to whatever has the strongest predictive power. That we shouldn’t be stuck with “the sequences” if they are wrong.
But it kinda looks more like a niche organization with the same ultimate fate of : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DtcbfwSrcewFubjxp/the-rationalists-of-the-1950s-and-before-also-called
If you know, AI doesn’t kill us first. Stopped clocks and all.
I’m interested in seeing direct evidence of this from DMs. I expect direct evidence would convince me it was in fact done.
Your ongoing assumption that everyone here shares the same beliefs about this continues to be frustrating, though understandable from a less vulcan perspective. Most of your comment appears to be a reply to habryka, not me.
I am confused. The quotes I sent are quotes from DMs we sent to Gerald. Here they are again just for posterity:
And:
I think we have more but they are in DMs with just Raemon in it, but the above IMO clearly communicate “your current contributions are not breaking even”.
ah. then indeed, I am in fact convinced.
I didn’t draw that conclusion. Feel free to post in Raemon’s DMs.
Again what I am disappointed is ultimately this just seems to be a private fiefdom where you make decisions on a whim. Not altogether different from the new twitter come to think of it.
And that’s fine, and I don’t have to post here, that’s fine. I just feel super disappointed because I’m not seeing anything like rationality here in moderation, just tribalism and the normal outcomes of ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’. “A complex model that I can’t explain to anyone” is ultimately not scalable and frankly not really a very modern way to do it. It just simplifies to a gut feeling, and it cannot moderator better than the moderator’s own knowledge, which is where it fails on topics the moderators don’t actually understand.
This was a form response used word for word to many others. Evidence: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cwRCsCXei2J2CmTxG/lw-account-restricted-ok-for-me-but-not-sure-about-lesswrong
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HShv7oSW23RWaiFmd/rate-limiting-as-a-mod-tool
By the way you put “locally invalid” on a different comment. Care to explain which element is invalid?
I went over:
Permitted norms on reddit, where I have 120k karma and have never been banned.
why moderate this weird way different from essentially everywhere else?
Can you justify a complex theory on weak evidence?
I don’t see any significant evidence that the moderation here is weird or unusual. Most forums or chats I’ve encountered do not have bright line rules. Only very large forums do, and my impression is that their quality is worse for it. I do not wish to justify this impression at this time, this will likely be near my last comment on this post.
Have you or anyone else on the LW team written anywhere about the effects of your new rate-limiting infrastructure, which was IIRC implemented last year? E.g. have some metrics improved which you care about?
We haven’t written up concrete takeaways. My sense is the effect was relatively minor, mostly because we set quite high rate limits, but it’s quite hard to disentangle from lots of other stuff going on.
This was an experiment in setting stronger rate-limits using more admin-supervision.
I do feel pretty solid in using rate-limiting as the default tool instead of temporary bans as I think most other forums use. I’ve definitely felt things escalate much less unhealthily and have observed a large effect size in how OK it is to reverse a rate-limit (whereas if I ban someone it tends to escalate quite quickly into a very sharp disagreement). It does also seem to reduce chilling effects a lot (as I think posts like this demonstrate).
I think one outcome is ‘we’re actually willing to moderate at all on ambiguous cases’. For years we would accumulate a list of users that seemed like they warranted some kind of intervention, but banning them felt too harsh and they would sit there in an awkwardly growing pile and eventually we’d say ‘well I guess we’re not really going to take action’ and click the ‘approve’ button.
Having rate limits made it feel more possible to intervene, but it still required writing some kind of message which was still very time consuming.
Auto-rate-limits have done a pretty good job of handling most cases in a way I endorse, in a way that helps quickly instead of after months of handwringing.
The actual metric I’d want is ‘do users who produce good content enjoy the site more’, or ‘do readers, authors and/or commenters feel comment sections are better than they used to be?’. This is a bit hard to judge because there are other confounding factors. But it probably would be good to try checking somehow.
Positions that are contrarian or wrong in intelligent ways (or within a limited scope of a few key beliefs) provoke valuable discussion, even when they are not supported by legible arguments on the contrarian/wrong side. Without them, there is an “everybody knows” problem where some important ideas are never debated or fail to become common knowledge. I feel there is less of that than optimal on LW, it’s possible to target a level of disruption.
Why don’t you just say this? Also give a general description of what “ROI” from the point of view your site is. Reddit has no concept of this. I was completely unaware you had a positive goal.
There’s thousands of message boards, this is literally the first one I have ever seen that has even the idea of ROI. Also while negative rules may not exist, positive ones are doable.
You never told me this, and I haven’t seen any mention of this anywhere on the site. Also I think users need more context of what it means to produce content that has high ROI for you, that uh we volunteer to provide for free.
Book worthy posts? Nothing in a comment section that harms your brand? No excessive “emperor has no clothes” comments? I can produce all of that, but I wasn’t aware that I had to.
As far as I knew, the restrictions were:
+karma, don’t do anything that would reasonably get you banned in a subreddit.
Did you ever publish an article on this site explaining this to anyone?
You certainly didn’t even try to link the article if you have one for me or explain your actual expectations.
Finally, I may note that you “invested” time 3 times after failing to give any warnings before punishment whatsoever, or even a positive description of what you wanted, just extremely vague “guidelines” that don’t contain this information. I’m disappointed in your decisions here.
Anyways, it’s an experiment, it’s rather telling that the highest contributors here have moved to Twitter though.
We have really given you a lot of feedback and have communicated that we don’t think you are breaking even. Here are some messages we sent to you:
April 7th 2023:
And from Ruby:
Separately, here are some quotes from our about page and new user guide:
And on the topic of positive goals for LessWrong and what we are trying to do here:
It’s not amazingly concrete, but I do think it’s clear we are trying to do something specific here. We are here to develop an art of rationality and cause good outcomes on issues like AI and other world-scale outcomes, and we’ll moderate to achieve that.
I’d also want to add LW Team is adjusting moderation policy as a post that laid out some of our thinking here. One section that’s particularly relevant/standalone:
https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/gerald-monroe?show=comments&sort=top
Worst I ever did:
https://www.greaterwrong.com/users/gerald-monroe?show=comments&sort=top&offset=1260
This is astonishingly vague.
I did
Punishment was in advance of a warning.
I did everything here on most comments made after this was linked.
I wish you luck with this. I look forward to seeing the results of your experiment here. I don’t like advance or retroactive punishment or vague rules and no appeals, but I appreciate you have admitted upfront to doing this. Thank you.