I’m also not sure it would hurt to have you ban a quarter of Discussion, but I’m a lot more optimistic that nothing bad goes wrong if you consistently ban everything this horrible.
This was a concrete estimate made by looking at the most recent 35 posts, with quality threshold that happens to be close to how I perceive Will’s post. (It doesn’t appear to me exceptionally horrible, and I expect there are other posts that appear exceptionally horrible to me, but not to you. So if I only deleted the posts that seem to me exceptionally horrible, Will’s post in particular wouldn’t be deleted.)
I agree that it’s better for that post to not be on LW, but banning such things is not standard procedure, and people don’t like it when moderators do surprising things.
It is not clear to me that this should be an important consideration in restraining moderation.
To clarify, the “surprising things” I consider dangerous are decisions that ignore policy, not decisions that follow a policy that’s unusual. With a policy of unrestrained moderation, individual acts of moderation won’t be as surprising in the sense I intended, for example they won’t provoke big discussions focused on them, especially if those too are against the rules.
As a constructive suggestion, I think that as an alternative to permitting deletion of posts, it would be better to give an x10 downvote hammer (in addition to the normal one; and perhaps only for posts) to all users with Karma 10000, or something along those lines (maybe in some form that doesn’t have as much impact on poster’s Karma, to minimize trauma). This at least would require multiple people to agree that something is horrible for it to be effectively removed.
Or an x10 downvote hammer granted by admins to community members they know personally and reasonably well, regardless of karma—an automatic karma threshold rewards volume of commenting, rather than average sanity of comments.
Unfortunately, this suggestion, like so many other good ideas, requires programming resources.
Unfortunately, this suggestion, like so many other good ideas, requires programming resources.
It doesn’t in a strict sense, establishing a protocol for this decisions to be enacted in comments is sufficient. Given a wiki page that describes the protocol and lists people authorized to vote, any of them can create a top-level comment with words “Vote to hide”, link to the wiki page, and possibly an argument. Others can reply to the comment to second/third the suggestion. A rule such as ((Post Karma - (number of votes to hide) * 10) < −20, and Post Karma is less than 10) then decides whether a moderator bans the post. The whole voting thing can even be made invisible to non-moderators, if all comments in it are hidden right after being posted.
I think that as an alternative to permitting deletion of posts, it would be better to give an x10 downvote hammer (in addition to the normal one; and perhaps only for posts) to all users with Karma 10000
I currently have 8,448 karma. I could reach 10,000 in a few weeks if I so desired. I don’t imagine many here would want me to have a downvote hammer. Still, this general category of solutions is good.
Alternatively, let people choose to make their votes public, then provide a way for people to provide an algorithm based on that data to filter/mark posts.
Note that I think the relevant preference controls whether that page is public, so you can’t check whether you enabled it just by looking at your own; you need to look in a logged-out browser.
This was a concrete estimate made by looking at the most recent 35 posts, with quality threshold that happens to be close to how I perceive Will’s post. (It doesn’t appear to me exceptionally horrible, and I expect there are other posts that appear exceptionally horrible to me, but not to you. So if I only deleted the posts that seem to me exceptionally horrible, Will’s post in particular wouldn’t be deleted.)
To clarify, the “surprising things” I consider dangerous are decisions that ignore policy, not decisions that follow a policy that’s unusual. With a policy of unrestrained moderation, individual acts of moderation won’t be as surprising in the sense I intended, for example they won’t provoke big discussions focused on them, especially if those too are against the rules.
As a constructive suggestion, I think that as an alternative to permitting deletion of posts, it would be better to give an x10 downvote hammer (in addition to the normal one; and perhaps only for posts) to all users with Karma 10000, or something along those lines (maybe in some form that doesn’t have as much impact on poster’s Karma, to minimize trauma). This at least would require multiple people to agree that something is horrible for it to be effectively removed.
Or an x10 downvote hammer granted by admins to community members they know personally and reasonably well, regardless of karma—an automatic karma threshold rewards volume of commenting, rather than average sanity of comments.
Unfortunately, this suggestion, like so many other good ideas, requires programming resources.
It doesn’t in a strict sense, establishing a protocol for this decisions to be enacted in comments is sufficient. Given a wiki page that describes the protocol and lists people authorized to vote, any of them can create a top-level comment with words “Vote to hide”, link to the wiki page, and possibly an argument. Others can reply to the comment to second/third the suggestion. A rule such as ((Post Karma - (number of votes to hide) * 10) < −20, and Post Karma is less than 10) then decides whether a moderator bans the post. The whole voting thing can even be made invisible to non-moderators, if all comments in it are hidden right after being posted.
I don’t think anyone would use a system that cumbersome in real life.
I currently have 8,448 karma. I could reach 10,000 in a few weeks if I so desired. I don’t imagine many here would want me to have a downvote hammer. Still, this general category of solutions is good.
Part of me wants to just glimpse that world for a little while.
Alternatively, let people choose to make their votes public, then provide a way for people to provide an algorithm based on that data to filter/mark posts.
Already supported; for example: http://lesswrong.com/user/gwern/liked/ and http://lesswrong.com/user/gwern/disliked/ (there’s even RSS feeds for those pages! like http://lesswrong.com/user/gwern/liked/.rss Nothing stops one from grabbing RSS feeds and doing any processing they please on them.) That, over the past 5 or so years LW has had this feature, no one has noticed or made use of it...
Note that I think the relevant preference controls whether that page is public, so you can’t check whether you enabled it just by looking at your own; you need to look in a logged-out browser.