Just wanted to give some validation. I left a comment on this post a while ago pointing out how one (or apparently a few) users can essentially down vote you however they like to silence opinions they don’t agree with. Moderation is tricky and it is important to remember why. Most users on a website forum are lurkers meaning that trying to gather feedback on moderation policies has a biased sampling problem. The irony on likely not being able to leave another comment or engage in discussion is not lost on me.
At first, I thought getting soft-banned meant my “contributions” weren’t valuable. For context, I study AI and integrate it into my thinking which hadn’t been received well on this site. Ironically, not being able to interact with other people pushed me to explore deeper discussions with AI. For example, I have this entire thread to Claude3 and it agreed there were some changes to be made on the rate-limiting system.
It does seem concerning that as a PhD student studying AI alignment, I was effectively pushed out of participating in discussions on LessWrong and the AI Alignment Forum due to the automatic rate limiting system and disagreements with senior user whose downvotes carry much more weight. On the other hand, compared to a few years ago during COVID, now I have colleagues and AI that I have a lot more shared context with than users on this forum so this just matters less to me. I return only because I am taking a class on social computing and am revisiting what makes for good/bad experiences.
Anyway, hopefully this gives you some solace. I would encourage you to seek other sources of validation. There are so many more options than you think! :)
FWIW, my sense is that the rate-limit system triggering was a mistake on your account, and we tweaked the numbers to make that no longer happen. Still sucks that you got rate-limited for a while, but the numbers are quite different now, and you almost certainly would not have been caught in the manual review that is part of these rate limits.
I would encourage you to seek other sources of validation. There are so many more options than you think! :)
Any examples? That is the one positive thing, lesswrong was a club to discuss Eliezer’s fanfiction, then it went dead for years with nothing but useless fake academic papers as posts, then Covid where it was great for that, then the AI breakthroughs started to actually happen and suddenly it wasn’t an intellectual topic anymore. But then in the last year, this experimental moderation system, which is also fine when it’s not applied manually without any kind of explanation.
Just wanted to give some validation. I left a comment on this post a while ago pointing out how one (or apparently a few) users can essentially down vote you however they like to silence opinions they don’t agree with. Moderation is tricky and it is important to remember why. Most users on a website forum are lurkers meaning that trying to gather feedback on moderation policies has a biased sampling problem. The irony on likely not being able to leave another comment or engage in discussion is not lost on me.
At first, I thought getting soft-banned meant my “contributions” weren’t valuable. For context, I study AI and integrate it into my thinking which hadn’t been received well on this site. Ironically, not being able to interact with other people pushed me to explore deeper discussions with AI. For example, I have this entire thread to Claude3 and it agreed there were some changes to be made on the rate-limiting system.
It does seem concerning that as a PhD student studying AI alignment, I was effectively pushed out of participating in discussions on LessWrong and the AI Alignment Forum due to the automatic rate limiting system and disagreements with senior user whose downvotes carry much more weight. On the other hand, compared to a few years ago during COVID, now I have colleagues and AI that I have a lot more shared context with than users on this forum so this just matters less to me. I return only because I am taking a class on social computing and am revisiting what makes for good/bad experiences.
Anyway, hopefully this gives you some solace. I would encourage you to seek other sources of validation. There are so many more options than you think! :)
FWIW, my sense is that the rate-limit system triggering was a mistake on your account, and we tweaked the numbers to make that no longer happen. Still sucks that you got rate-limited for a while, but the numbers are quite different now, and you almost certainly would not have been caught in the manual review that is part of these rate limits.
Any examples? That is the one positive thing, lesswrong was a club to discuss Eliezer’s fanfiction, then it went dead for years with nothing but useless fake academic papers as posts, then Covid where it was great for that, then the AI breakthroughs started to actually happen and suddenly it wasn’t an intellectual topic anymore. But then in the last year, this experimental moderation system, which is also fine when it’s not applied manually without any kind of explanation.