My first thought is that I like these ideas. On its face, a rule-based temporary rate limit seems better than a mod-enforced permanent one.
Issues with karma- and post-count-based rate limits
Users can write zero-karma filler posts to avoid or end a rate limit that’s based on the net karma of the last N posts.
It gives a lot of extra power to fast-acting activist or high-karma minority to squelch pushback with downvotes. If I know that arguing an unpopular view sets me up for downvotes, and that as a result, I not only will see my post collapse but may be seriously impacted in my ability to use the site, that makes me a lot less eager to make such arguments.
Even if you think LW doesn’t have a problem with this now, I think putting this extra power in the hands of the silent downvote squad will change their behavior, and that it will change poster’s behavior in anticipation of this risk. If this rule was in place, I could go through the profiles of LessWrong users, look for anyone whose last 5 comments had less than 8 karma, and strong-downvote them to eliminate their ability to use the site. When they posted their next post, I could once again strong-downvote it to block their ability to return for as long as I cared to do so.
There is an asymmetric justice issue here. The best thing that can happen if you get a lot of upvotes is you have a little more insulation against downvotes (except in the LessWrong review, where you might get paid on the discretion of the mods, which is correlated with upvotes). The worst thing that can happen if you get a lot of downvotes is you get rate-limited or banned, which is much worse. I’m not exactly sure how to deal with this—I doubt the money exists to just “pay people to write upvoted content,” but of course I could be wrong.
Of lower import, we already suppress visibility of downvoted posts, and I think the visibility and status/emotional cost impact of downvotes is roughly proportional to the quality signal contained in the action of downvoting a post. Attaching a rate limit as well seems excessive.
Rate limiting people’s ability to award upvotes and downvotes
I would feel much better about rate-limiting people’s ability to assign karma to posts, restricting that power to more established (high-karma) users, and giving users more control over the visibility they assign to specific users, users with certain karma scores, and so on. I am open to severely restricting the ability to assign karma, much more so than the ability to write comments, and only then basing more severe punishments such as rate limiting on the basis of karma.
In general, if you’re attaching more power to karma, then you have to more carefully regulate assignation of karma. If you’re attaching more power to post frequency, then you have to regulate post frequency more carefully. Any such moves effectively empower the entire cohort of active and high-karma users with a fraction of moderator powers, and that marks a fundamental change in how LW is moderated. I think that needs to be done with much more caution than the mods simply giving themselves a new tool in the toolbox.
Rate limiting demon threads
Posts are in a tree structure, with the top-level post as the root, top-level comments as the first level of branches, and so on. It seems possible to calculate the net karma of any particular branch in the comment tree based on some rule like “median karma in this 2+ user thread is zero or negative” and rate-limit participation by all users just in that specific branch (or perhaps in the overall post). They might just jump to a different branch to continue their conversation, but I tentatively think it might help. You could potentially impose broader rate limits on users who consistently are making negative-karma posts in multiple threads tagged in this way as “algorithmically determined demon threads” to prevent people from spawning endless new demon threads when the old one gets rate limited.
I think that with this additional layer of restriction, we have limits of time, “conversational space,” and level of restriction all softening the impact of rate limits. This is where I start to get more comfortable with linking the imposition of rate limits to karma and post count.
I think looking at the median is generally better than the mean. I don’t think a single highly downvoted message should trigger rate limits even if it turns the mean under 0.
I’m not sure median is great either, but I agree with the point of “one highly downvoted comment shouldn’t trigger it, and shouldn’t be that hard to dig yourself out of”.
I think the right function probably looks at number of net-downvoted comments, neutral comments, and comments that gained 2+ karma or something, and triggers based on the ratio.
I used the term message above as hypernym for post/question/comment/shortform. Do you think that it should focus on comments or are you also thinking that all types of messages should count.
Maybe the function should be “median of last X messages that don’t have neutral karma”?
I meant to be using ‘comment’ also as a more generic term, sorry for confusion. (I do think there are important differences between comments and posts, though, so I wouldn’t necessarily treat them interchangeably here)
That’s true. My main concern is really the amount of power this places in ordinary users’ hands to suppress the activity of other users, and your point here emphasizes just how much power that really is.
I could go through the profiles of LessWrong users, look for anyone whose last 5 comments had less than 8 karma, and strong-downvote them to eliminate their ability to use the site.
I would expect that this would quite often result in other people upvoting those downvoted posts. But you are likely right that you don’t want the votes of a single user to be able to start the rate limits for any established user.
I would feel much better about rate-limiting people’s ability to assign karma to posts, restricting that power to more established (high-karma) users, and giving users more control over the visibility they assign to specific users, users with certain karma scores, and so on. I am open to severely restricting the ability to assign karma, much more so than the ability to write comments, and only then basing more severe punishments such as rate limiting on the basis of karma.
I strongly don’t agree with this one. If anything, I think people should vote (honestly) more often. It’s a valuable signal. If it weren’t this easy, we wouldn’t get the feedback at all. If I got rate-limited on voting, I’d still be reading the same number of posts, but it would be too much extra work to budget my allocation to the most important things I’d read, so I wouldn’t bother.
I do worry about karma getting gamed. We’ve already had an issue with that, with one user mass-downvoting unrelated old posts of another as a means of attack for a current dispute. The mods are on top of it for now, but I could imagine other exploits we haven’t thought of popping up. I just don’t think rate limits on votes are the answer.
Hm. In theory, I agree with you—I think a good equilibrium (ignoring the cost of taking the time to vote on stuff all the time) would be lots and lots of voting to express views on how worthwhile the content is.
Let me articulate a little bit more of how I perceive karma being used in practice on LW.
Sometimes, it’s a scout-mindset way of saying “this is a worthwhile comment. It should be more visible, I think people widely agree on that, and I’m going to help it out by upvoting.” It’s a similar function to what Kriss describes as the old function of hipsters. This is good and I would want this sort of voting to continue unrestricted.
Sometimes, it’s a soldier-mindset way of saying “I’m on the side that’s for/against this point, and I have to up/downvote it lest it appear that the other side is more popular!” In soldier-mindset situations where the post supports the majority view, this looks like a lot of upvotes, but with many more total votes than upvotes. If the post supports a minority view, this looks like a post with a decent number of downvotes, a couple upvotes, never getting much oxygen because the soldier-mindset majority has inevitably suppressed it. Overall, this seems bad for site epistemics, and I would want to see zero or rate-limited voting in these situations.
Sometimes, it’s a more intimate way of expressing warmth/appreciation/encouragement or saying “I read this,” or coldness/discouragement, where you often can guess exactly who upvoted/downvoted you. Here, upvotes seem good (a signal of a valuable discussion), whereas downvotes seem bad (by creating bad feelings while not actually terminating an unproductive discussion, and potentially catalyzing demon thread formation).
I think that if LW implemented rate-limited voting, we’d still get the scout-mindset form of voting, and my intuition is that most people, especially established users, would mainly choose to spend their upvotes on rewarding quality content, punishing unusually bad content, and encouraging conversations they’d like to have. And they would reallocate votes away from sides-taking contests and demon threads.
I could be very wrong about that, but it’s these intuitions that make me support rate-limited voting.
It gives a lot of extra power to fast-acting activist or high-karma minority to squelch pushback with downvotes. If I know that arguing an unpopular view sets me up for downvotes, and that as a result, I not only will see my post collapse but may be seriously impacted in my ability to use the site, that makes me a lot less eager to make such arguments.
This is a solid point.
I’ve found many interesting comments and posts from many folks on LW that weren’t too far from neutral, i.e. −10 < karma < 10 (after excluding low effort trolling and such)
Where the highly upvoted stuff is usually far more predictable and not nearly as interesting.
The exact ratio depends on how popular the topic is overall, how long it stayed on the front page, etc., but I would agree that punishing the bottom half would almost certainly reduce the number of these intriguing writings.
It might also cut down on the low-effort posts so I’m not certain it would be a net negative. Maybe this requires a gut-feel decision by the moderating team?
My first thought is that I like these ideas. On its face, a rule-based temporary rate limit seems better than a mod-enforced permanent one.
Issues with karma- and post-count-based rate limits
Users can write zero-karma filler posts to avoid or end a rate limit that’s based on the net karma of the last N posts.
It gives a lot of extra power to fast-acting activist or high-karma minority to squelch pushback with downvotes. If I know that arguing an unpopular view sets me up for downvotes, and that as a result, I not only will see my post collapse but may be seriously impacted in my ability to use the site, that makes me a lot less eager to make such arguments.
Even if you think LW doesn’t have a problem with this now, I think putting this extra power in the hands of the silent downvote squad will change their behavior, and that it will change poster’s behavior in anticipation of this risk. If this rule was in place, I could go through the profiles of LessWrong users, look for anyone whose last 5 comments had less than 8 karma, and strong-downvote them to eliminate their ability to use the site. When they posted their next post, I could once again strong-downvote it to block their ability to return for as long as I cared to do so.
There is an asymmetric justice issue here. The best thing that can happen if you get a lot of upvotes is you have a little more insulation against downvotes (except in the LessWrong review, where you might get paid on the discretion of the mods, which is correlated with upvotes). The worst thing that can happen if you get a lot of downvotes is you get rate-limited or banned, which is much worse. I’m not exactly sure how to deal with this—I doubt the money exists to just “pay people to write upvoted content,” but of course I could be wrong.
Of lower import, we already suppress visibility of downvoted posts, and I think the visibility and status/emotional cost impact of downvotes is roughly proportional to the quality signal contained in the action of downvoting a post. Attaching a rate limit as well seems excessive.
Rate limiting people’s ability to award upvotes and downvotes
I would feel much better about rate-limiting people’s ability to assign karma to posts, restricting that power to more established (high-karma) users, and giving users more control over the visibility they assign to specific users, users with certain karma scores, and so on. I am open to severely restricting the ability to assign karma, much more so than the ability to write comments, and only then basing more severe punishments such as rate limiting on the basis of karma.
In general, if you’re attaching more power to karma, then you have to more carefully regulate assignation of karma. If you’re attaching more power to post frequency, then you have to regulate post frequency more carefully. Any such moves effectively empower the entire cohort of active and high-karma users with a fraction of moderator powers, and that marks a fundamental change in how LW is moderated. I think that needs to be done with much more caution than the mods simply giving themselves a new tool in the toolbox.
Rate limiting demon threads
Posts are in a tree structure, with the top-level post as the root, top-level comments as the first level of branches, and so on. It seems possible to calculate the net karma of any particular branch in the comment tree based on some rule like “median karma in this 2+ user thread is zero or negative” and rate-limit participation by all users just in that specific branch (or perhaps in the overall post). They might just jump to a different branch to continue their conversation, but I tentatively think it might help. You could potentially impose broader rate limits on users who consistently are making negative-karma posts in multiple threads tagged in this way as “algorithmically determined demon threads” to prevent people from spawning endless new demon threads when the old one gets rate limited.
I think that with this additional layer of restriction, we have limits of time, “conversational space,” and level of restriction all softening the impact of rate limits. This is where I start to get more comfortable with linking the imposition of rate limits to karma and post count.
Note: they can’t do this if ending the rate limit requires positive karma, which is why the threshold is more like +.5 karma per comment than 0.
I think looking at the median is generally better than the mean. I don’t think a single highly downvoted message should trigger rate limits even if it turns the mean under 0.
I’m not sure median is great either, but I agree with the point of “one highly downvoted comment shouldn’t trigger it, and shouldn’t be that hard to dig yourself out of”.
I think the right function probably looks at number of net-downvoted comments, neutral comments, and comments that gained 2+ karma or something, and triggers based on the ratio.
I used the term message above as hypernym for post/question/comment/shortform. Do you think that it should focus on comments or are you also thinking that all types of messages should count.
Maybe the function should be “median of last X messages that don’t have neutral karma”?
I meant to be using ‘comment’ also as a more generic term, sorry for confusion. (I do think there are important differences between comments and posts, though, so I wouldn’t necessarily treat them interchangeably here)
That’s true. My main concern is really the amount of power this places in ordinary users’ hands to suppress the activity of other users, and your point here emphasizes just how much power that really is.
I would expect that this would quite often result in other people upvoting those downvoted posts. But you are likely right that you don’t want the votes of a single user to be able to start the rate limits for any established user.
I strongly don’t agree with this one. If anything, I think people should vote (honestly) more often. It’s a valuable signal. If it weren’t this easy, we wouldn’t get the feedback at all. If I got rate-limited on voting, I’d still be reading the same number of posts, but it would be too much extra work to budget my allocation to the most important things I’d read, so I wouldn’t bother.
I do worry about karma getting gamed. We’ve already had an issue with that, with one user mass-downvoting unrelated old posts of another as a means of attack for a current dispute. The mods are on top of it for now, but I could imagine other exploits we haven’t thought of popping up. I just don’t think rate limits on votes are the answer.
Hm. In theory, I agree with you—I think a good equilibrium (ignoring the cost of taking the time to vote on stuff all the time) would be lots and lots of voting to express views on how worthwhile the content is.
Let me articulate a little bit more of how I perceive karma being used in practice on LW.
Sometimes, it’s a scout-mindset way of saying “this is a worthwhile comment. It should be more visible, I think people widely agree on that, and I’m going to help it out by upvoting.” It’s a similar function to what Kriss describes as the old function of hipsters. This is good and I would want this sort of voting to continue unrestricted.
Sometimes, it’s a soldier-mindset way of saying “I’m on the side that’s for/against this point, and I have to up/downvote it lest it appear that the other side is more popular!” In soldier-mindset situations where the post supports the majority view, this looks like a lot of upvotes, but with many more total votes than upvotes. If the post supports a minority view, this looks like a post with a decent number of downvotes, a couple upvotes, never getting much oxygen because the soldier-mindset majority has inevitably suppressed it. Overall, this seems bad for site epistemics, and I would want to see zero or rate-limited voting in these situations.
Sometimes, it’s a more intimate way of expressing warmth/appreciation/encouragement or saying “I read this,” or coldness/discouragement, where you often can guess exactly who upvoted/downvoted you. Here, upvotes seem good (a signal of a valuable discussion), whereas downvotes seem bad (by creating bad feelings while not actually terminating an unproductive discussion, and potentially catalyzing demon thread formation).
I think that if LW implemented rate-limited voting, we’d still get the scout-mindset form of voting, and my intuition is that most people, especially established users, would mainly choose to spend their upvotes on rewarding quality content, punishing unusually bad content, and encouraging conversations they’d like to have. And they would reallocate votes away from sides-taking contests and demon threads.
I could be very wrong about that, but it’s these intuitions that make me support rate-limited voting.
This is a solid point.
I’ve found many interesting comments and posts from many folks on LW that weren’t too far from neutral, i.e. −10 < karma < 10 (after excluding low effort trolling and such)
Where the highly upvoted stuff is usually far more predictable and not nearly as interesting.
The exact ratio depends on how popular the topic is overall, how long it stayed on the front page, etc., but I would agree that punishing the bottom half would almost certainly reduce the number of these intriguing writings.
It might also cut down on the low-effort posts so I’m not certain it would be a net negative. Maybe this requires a gut-feel decision by the moderating team?