Cool idea. I applaud the creativity. Some thoughts:
Thank you for making various cruxes explicit.
It’s one thing to implement this as a permanent thing and never look back, but it’s another to try it for a month as an experiment and re-evaluate from there. I assume the latter is what would actually be done in practice and I think the bar for the latter is much lower than the bar for the former. But I think it can be easy to slip into having a bar closer to the former when evaluating whether this is worth trying.
I’m wondering whether other communities have tried something like this before and if so what can be learned.
I see moderator time as very valuable and something to optimize for.
Something to be careful of: giving more options to moderators may lead to a paradox of choice type of situation where having an additional tool to consider, rate limiting, now always makes you have to wonder whether rate limiting would be a better choice than whatever the alternative would have been.
As AI becomes more powerful I expect more and more users to come to LessWrong. I think it makes sense to explore ideas and prepare for that now.
Other responses:
But at least some people have reported experiencing limits as very costly, and have described it as “being banned.” Ruby has argued it might basically just feel like moderators are trying to ban people without really acknowledging the magnitude of what they’re doing.
Personally I wouldn’t see it that way and would be surprised if more than 20% of people do.
Add a small icon on comments that conveys “this user is under a rate limit and can’t respond right away”.
Seems fine to me.
Maybe even with the icon, it’s just a lot of cognitive overhead for users keeping track of how rate limiting affects conversations?
I don’t see why it would. 1) Extended back-and-forths between two people seem like more the exception than the rule, 2) it’s common for the turnaround time to be 24+ hours anyway, 3) I wouldn’t expect too much rate limiting to happen, and thus it wouldn’t affect too many conversations.
Some authors might actively like users that are under a rate limit.
I don’t see that happening very often. When it does, I expect it to be pretty minor and not worth spending time on. If someone that you like is rate limited it doesn’t seem like too big a deal to wait a little bit for the rate limit to expire.
I think potentially-good-users would mostly see “oh, this place actually has standards. Lemme try and meet the standards and get in”
it’s common for the turnaround time to be 24+ hours anyway
I don’t think we should assume the wait for replies for rate-limited users will be exactly the refresh rate (as in, someone given 1 post every 24 hours will always respond within a day) if the limits are site-wide, because people might want to participate in more than one conversation at time. I don’t necessarily think that’s a problem, I think slower conversations are probably an improvement and it would be weird to say a rate limit is good except it reduces the number of comments people can leave, but I do think it’s important to track that the speed reduction may be greater than planned.
Cool idea. I applaud the creativity. Some thoughts:
Thank you for making various cruxes explicit.
It’s one thing to implement this as a permanent thing and never look back, but it’s another to try it for a month as an experiment and re-evaluate from there. I assume the latter is what would actually be done in practice and I think the bar for the latter is much lower than the bar for the former. But I think it can be easy to slip into having a bar closer to the former when evaluating whether this is worth trying.
I’m wondering whether other communities have tried something like this before and if so what can be learned.
I see moderator time as very valuable and something to optimize for.
Something to be careful of: giving more options to moderators may lead to a paradox of choice type of situation where having an additional tool to consider, rate limiting, now always makes you have to wonder whether rate limiting would be a better choice than whatever the alternative would have been.
As AI becomes more powerful I expect more and more users to come to LessWrong. I think it makes sense to explore ideas and prepare for that now.
Other responses:
Personally I wouldn’t see it that way and would be surprised if more than 20% of people do.
Seems fine to me.
I don’t see why it would. 1) Extended back-and-forths between two people seem like more the exception than the rule, 2) it’s common for the turnaround time to be 24+ hours anyway, 3) I wouldn’t expect too much rate limiting to happen, and thus it wouldn’t affect too many conversations.
I don’t see that happening very often. When it does, I expect it to be pretty minor and not worth spending time on. If someone that you like is rate limited it doesn’t seem like too big a deal to wait a little bit for the rate limit to expire.
Well put. I agree.
I don’t think we should assume the wait for replies for rate-limited users will be exactly the refresh rate (as in, someone given 1 post every 24 hours will always respond within a day) if the limits are site-wide, because people might want to participate in more than one conversation at time. I don’t necessarily think that’s a problem, I think slower conversations are probably an improvement and it would be weird to say a rate limit is good except it reduces the number of comments people can leave, but I do think it’s important to track that the speed reduction may be greater than planned.