Strongly disagree. I’ve been involved in user-facing administration before, and binding yourself to a narrow set of policy rules (especially on a site like LW, where they aren’t well documented) is about as useful as drinking antifreeze. It’s tempting, sure, since we’ve all been socialized to believe in the rule of law and no ex post facto punishment and all that good stuff. But the truth is that that only works in government because government runs a well-developed legal framework that’s had centuries to fill in its loopholes and smooth its rough edges. And it still requires a lot of discretion on the part of its various enforcers.
You can’t make loophole-free policy that’s more specific than “don’t be a jerk”, not if users are going to be interacting with each other in a reasonably natural way. You don’t have the time or the expertise. That means you’ll occasionally need to extend or invent policy to deal with cases that aren’t well covered, and that means you’ll occasionally piss people off. It’s okay. It comes with the territory.
That said, block downvoting is common enough behavior that we probably should have policy to deal with it. Ideally policy and code, but that’s probably not going to happen.
Strongly disagree. I’ve been involved in user-facing administration before, and binding yourself to a narrow set of policy rules (especially on a site like LW, where they aren’t well documented) is about as useful as drinking antifreeze. It’s tempting, sure, since we’ve all been socialized to believe in the rule of law and no ex post facto punishment and all that good stuff. But the truth is that that only works in government because government runs a well-developed legal framework that’s had centuries to fill in its loopholes and smooth its rough edges. And it still requires a lot of discretion on the part of its various enforcers.
You can’t make loophole-free policy that’s more specific than “don’t be a jerk”, not if users are going to be interacting with each other in a reasonably natural way. You don’t have the time or the expertise. That means you’ll occasionally need to extend or invent policy to deal with cases that aren’t well covered, and that means you’ll occasionally piss people off. It’s okay. It comes with the territory.
That said, block downvoting is common enough behavior that we probably should have policy to deal with it. Ideally policy and code, but that’s probably not going to happen.