When it comes to missing frames you said nothing about explaining norms of behavior and having a discussions about norms of how to comment.
I did a bit, though I agree it wasn’t as clear as I would like it to be. In the recommendations of the methodological frame I said:
We want to make it easy to discuss the collective methodology of the site, and allow authors and commenters to improve the methodological standards we are applying.
And at least in my internal model, this was basically saying exactly that: Focus on explaining the norms, culture and methodology of the community, and generally ensure that productive meta-discussion is happening.
We want to make it easy to discuss the collective methodology of the site, and allow authors and commenters to improve the methodological standards we are applying.
But you also wrote
we might make it so that to create a comment that points out some meta-level feature about the discussion are taxed with a karma penalty. And so people can create meta-discussions, but they will have to pay a certain tax to do so.
Do these contradict each other? More generally, I don’t understand what’s bad about meta. “What environment encourages productive debate” is surely a very important question and possibly something we don’t talk about enough.
Yeah, they are both valid considerations, pointing in somewhat opposite directions. Though importantly the second paragraph was about someone bringing meta into an object-level discussion, whereas the first one was about generally making it easy for people to discuss the broad trajectory of the site. I am all in favor of people discussing more stuff in the meta section, but fairly against people derailing a conversation by talking about the moderation guidelines in the middle of an object-level discussion thread.
There are two ways I remember previous admin behavior not following what I have in mind:
Shutting down commenting to a particular comment without explanation and then moving to shut down a discussion about that by shutting down comments again.
Claiming that karma voting isn’t made with “the whole website in mind” and nobody knows why people vote the way they did. I think it’s part of LW’s culture to often have people say “I downvoted because of X” in a comment and then that comment can be discussed.
It’s also possible to ask “Why was this downvoted?”. This usually results in either someone writing an explanation or readers thinking “I don’t see any reason why this should be low karma, I’ll upvote it.” Those discussions are productive ways to form a shared understanding about what we downvote and I consider them an important addition to threads on meta/
I agree. Soft power goes a long way. I expect that most of the time a mod messaging someone and asking them to be nicer would work, although you’d want to write the message very carefully because you don’t want the person to feel embarassed and leave LW.
When it comes to missing frames you said nothing about explaining norms of behavior and having a discussions about norms of how to comment.
The idea that you can talk to people to convince them to act in a better way from a paragraph like:
Especially in rationalist circles, I would prefer attempts at convincing people over trying to solve the problem with carrots and sticks.
It’s not easy to have shared conversations about what’s too critical and what isn’t but those conversations are likely necessary.
I did a bit, though I agree it wasn’t as clear as I would like it to be. In the recommendations of the methodological frame I said:
And at least in my internal model, this was basically saying exactly that: Focus on explaining the norms, culture and methodology of the community, and generally ensure that productive meta-discussion is happening.
But you also wrote
Do these contradict each other? More generally, I don’t understand what’s bad about meta. “What environment encourages productive debate” is surely a very important question and possibly something we don’t talk about enough.
Yeah, they are both valid considerations, pointing in somewhat opposite directions. Though importantly the second paragraph was about someone bringing meta into an object-level discussion, whereas the first one was about generally making it easy for people to discuss the broad trajectory of the site. I am all in favor of people discussing more stuff in the meta section, but fairly against people derailing a conversation by talking about the moderation guidelines in the middle of an object-level discussion thread.
There are two ways I remember previous admin behavior not following what I have in mind:
Shutting down commenting to a particular comment without explanation and then moving to shut down a discussion about that by shutting down comments again.
Claiming that karma voting isn’t made with “the whole website in mind” and nobody knows why people vote the way they did. I think it’s part of LW’s culture to often have people say “I downvoted because of X” in a comment and then that comment can be discussed.
It’s also possible to ask “Why was this downvoted?”. This usually results in either someone writing an explanation or readers thinking “I don’t see any reason why this should be low karma, I’ll upvote it.” Those discussions are productive ways to form a shared understanding about what we downvote and I consider them an important addition to threads on meta/
I agree. Soft power goes a long way. I expect that most of the time a mod messaging someone and asking them to be nicer would work, although you’d want to write the message very carefully because you don’t want the person to feel embarassed and leave LW.