More the former. In particular, there is one user who has been banned repeatedly, has many sockpuppets, and engages in mass-downvoting of people who have in the past expressed opinions contrary to his political position. (It is not clear that he now participates in any way other than by downvoting people he disapproves of, and it’s possible that he would rather burn LW to the ground if he could.) Given better tools it might be easy to identify all his sockpuppets, terminate them with extreme prejudice, and stop him coming back; at present, those tools aren’t in place. The LW moderators don’t have the sort of direct access to the data that would make investigation easy without actually making code changes to the site, and are (I think) not programmer types anyway.
So what needs to happen is for people who have software expertise (but no mod power) to develop what they hope will be suitable tools, without any sort of access to the actual server or data (but there is a procedure, only a few years out of date, for making a sort of LW sandbox on your own computer); for them to provide these to the people who run the site; for the tools to get deployed; for the mods to try to use them to do their job; and for whatever iteration on this process is needed to happen.
(And of course this requires the people with expertise but no power to be sufficiently motivated to do their bit, without any actual way of knowing that the other people involved will actually be willing and able to turn their work into something usable.)
(And of course this requires the people with expertise but no power to be sufficiently motivated to do their bit, without any actual way of knowing that the other people involved will actually be willing and able to turn their work into something usable.)
This makes it sound like coordination is at least as much a problem as expertise. Do the mods have any sort of feature list or request for things they WANT to use to solve the problem?
More the former. In particular, there is one user who has been banned repeatedly, has many sockpuppets, and engages in mass-downvoting of people who have in the past expressed opinions contrary to his political position. (It is not clear that he now participates in any way other than by downvoting people he disapproves of, and it’s possible that he would rather burn LW to the ground if he could.) Given better tools it might be easy to identify all his sockpuppets, terminate them with extreme prejudice, and stop him coming back; at present, those tools aren’t in place. The LW moderators don’t have the sort of direct access to the data that would make investigation easy without actually making code changes to the site, and are (I think) not programmer types anyway.
So what needs to happen is for people who have software expertise (but no mod power) to develop what they hope will be suitable tools, without any sort of access to the actual server or data (but there is a procedure, only a few years out of date, for making a sort of LW sandbox on your own computer); for them to provide these to the people who run the site; for the tools to get deployed; for the mods to try to use them to do their job; and for whatever iteration on this process is needed to happen.
(And of course this requires the people with expertise but no power to be sufficiently motivated to do their bit, without any actual way of knowing that the other people involved will actually be willing and able to turn their work into something usable.)
This makes it sound like coordination is at least as much a problem as expertise. Do the mods have any sort of feature list or request for things they WANT to use to solve the problem?
Yup. The person to talk to would be Elo.