Disruptive users evading permanent bans never helped any community ever.
Queue the public spectacle associated with “are you Eugine Nier?”. It’s trivially easy to get a new IP address and to avoid, say, “exceeding the quote limits per rationality thread”. So what then? You know the evil rule-skirter is still around. It could be nearly anyone. Such community navel-gazing, the internal drama, usually does more damage than a banned user trying to fly under the radar with a new account. But drama, it’s so sweet, so hard to resist, I know[,] right!
I just really dislike it when someone skirts the rules like that
Life is about skirting rules. Most optimizing comes from skirting rules, in the sense of interpreting them most favorably vis-a-vis your goals.
You know what, you’re putting it as if I’m doing this for my personal gratification and to the detriment of LW as a whole, when it’s exactly the reverse. I could have saved loads of karma just by not posting this, which I did in fact anticipate (to be honest, I anticipated a score hovering around zero karma or 50%). It’s not my fault that moderation doesn’t seem to be enough of a concern around here for the website to have a well set up infrastructure for reporting, communicating with mods, displaying mod status etc., and when somebody intends to solve such a problem, one has to do it publicly. It’s not easy, or pleasant, and it draws undue attention upon myself rather than the situation. I’m not expecting congratulations, but do you image I like getting flak for pointing out all the shit someone else does?
But I don’t think anything would have gotten done otherwise. Not only because the problem might not register as important unless there’s public support; but also because, when the situation is uncertain and it takes a third party intervention to just check out who downvotes who, the key to the problem might need to be crowdsourced (for instance, the fact that Yvain bothered to check the IPs).
Besides, the user in question never came here to defend himself. Only an intervention from him, proving that he was in fact being harmed in some way by what I said in the post, might have made me retract it; it doesn’t even matter if he was lying. Not doing so translates to implicit confession of guilt, and to cowardly troll behaviour. Good riddance, then.
To anyone who’s worried this sets a bad precedent for dealing with such cases, either you people make LW a Report Post/User button, or increase your resilience to public methods of dealing with rule-breakers. Or face floods of undesirables. Many internet communities have had worse and came out just fine out of the situation.
It’s trivially easy to get a new IP address and to avoid, say, “exceeding the quote limits per rationality thread”. So what then? You know the evil rule-skirter is still around. It could be nearly anyone.
And mass downvoting, and posting exclusively NRx propaganda, and… mission accomplished!
Life is about skirting rules. Most optimizing comes from skirting rules, in the sense of interpreting them most favorably vis-a-vis your goals.
Go tell that to a mod on any functional, actively moderated community. Or to a judge, for that matter. See how that would fly there.
I get it, someone’s gotta be the martyr, for the common good. Watched The Dark Knight too recently?
Since the moderation is too hands-off, we gotta do all this publicly to generate pressure on the mods! In a forum with around 5 threads per day, on a good day. That’s the kind of content conducive to rationality discussions, identifying who may skirt a rule then create a public outcry for blood until the mods have to step in. You do understand he was banned for mass-downvoting, which is something his new account isn’t suspected of? That he contributed a significant number of upvoted comments otherwise?
It’s not easy, or pleasant, and it draws undue attention upon myself rather than the situation.
The hero we deserve. /s
So anyone who isn’t willing to fight/engage a public accusation and step in the ring is implicitly guilty. That’s the kind of community that’s fun to be a part of.
Well, if I accused you of being a poopy head, and you didn’t step in to defend yourself … I guess that would mean, yea exactly: You’re it!
Go tell that to a mod on any functional, actively moderated community. Or to a judge, for that matter. See how that would fly there.
It’s how the world works, not how the world professes to work. There’s a difference. The statement you so vehemently disagree with is mostly a corollary of taking “agents are goal-oriented” as an axiom. It’s so close to a tautology as to be somewhat vacuous.
But we seem to live on different planets. I’m on the planet where corporations use every loophole they can to lower their tax burden. Where political donations use whatever route is just legal enough to achieve their goals. Where close to noone ever has refused, say, a severance package based on “I don’t deserve this and just got it on a technicality”. What are these phenomena like in Dahlen-land, and which xkcd strips are they based on? I apologize: I know I said planet, not land.
As counter-intuitive as it seems, meta-threads which (even inadvertently) fit the “drama bait” label generally increase overall drama, regardless of their actual intent. Drama bait such as this topic is click-bait and attention-bait, unfortunately. If you want to reduce drama, trolls need to be discussed/removed with the least amount of noise possible, not to thundering applause to wake up the mods. People applaud the loudest in the arena, with blood on the sand. That’s not what I want this community to be. In forums I care less about, I’d upvote this topic, just to see shit go down.
(I’m being nice by phrasing this comment so antagonistically. Gives you the option to tap out on that basis. It’s not like you’d want to feed the drama, selflessly promoting publicly identifying rule-breakers. Or rule-skirters, undesirables in any case!)
That’s the kind of content conducive to rationality discussions, identifying who may skirt a rule then create a public outcry for blood until the mods have to step in.
Skirting rules is already not conducive to rationality discussions. Identifying who’s skirting the rules is just a way to mitigate some of the damage, given that the rule makes sense at all. (If skirting rules didn’t cause damage, why would we even have the rule?)
Furthermore, it’s not so much a public outcry for blood as it is a public outcry for something that only moderators can do. Itr’s not the users’ fault that moderators have made examining the evidence of abuse exclusive to themselves and then refuse to actually examine it.
Skirting a rule is not breaking a rule. There isn’t even a rule about creating a new account which is not blatantly identifiable as an old banned account and which does not display any behavior which the old account was banned for. Let alone “calling someone out” for skirting a rule which doesn’t even exist?
Furthermore, it’s not so much a public outcry for blood as it is a public outcry for something that only moderators can do. Itr’s not the users’ fault that moderators have made examining the evidence of abuse exclusive to themselves and then refuse to actually examine it.
If I want to contact one person and I have their number I don’t do an advert in a newspaper they read, especially if it involves naming and shaming a third party based on personal judgment. Creating a “public pressure on mods” scenario to get them to act, by starting your own witchhunt, in a forum which sees little activity anyways, is (choose one based on your level of charitability: not the best course of action; ill-advised; idiotic).
(It was a rhetorical question. Recognizing it as such could also be called a basic sanity check, but I’ll assume your reply was simply a rhetorical response one level up. The problem is that I trust “the moderators”, even if I don’t always agree: That’s the whole point, that I do not trust just anyone to level accusions publicly (the allure of drama is too damn high), even if they all turned out to be true and warranted. Even in that hypothetical, the public aspect of it—not any moderator action—would be toxic. I trust you see the distinction. It is no viable workaround to “but the mooods don’t respond to PMMMMs”.)
The public aspect is toxic. But so is moderators not doing things, and so is people getting away with causing trouble because moderators are not doing things. It’s a tradeoff.
On this specific case: Now that some clear rules (well, at least comparatively, in the UK “case law” sense) have been established, mass downvoting is a bannable offense. However, the new account (even though it was identified as the same poster) didn’t show any signs of “causing trouble” in the “bannable offense” direction. No justice was served. It was a veteran, probably someone whom LW means a lot to, trying to keep that aspect of his life somewhat intact. I have no special bond to the guy, but he did contribute a number of quality comments over the years, that much I remember. There is no indication he hadn’t learned his lesson (about mass downvotes).
This is a decision for a mod to make. It’s not a cry for help because something obviously bad has happened and urgent action is needed. I disagree with public shaming on principle, but in a muddy case like this, it’s especially abominable, in my opinion. It’s a sort of vague justice porn by someone who “really dislikes people skirting the rules”. Skirting, not even breaking! Queue the denunciation! Coming close to Godwin’ing myself, here.
As you say, it can all be seen as a tradeoff. The scales would be weighed differently if this community weren’t so small, and the frequency of new topics so low.
There is no indication he hadn’t learned his lesson (about mass downvotes).
Apart from the fact that there’s some (albeit weak; no one’s done the database-diving to get strong evidence either way) evidence that Azathoth123 has been engaging in mass-downvoting.
(In particular, I saw some weak evidence that he did it to me—though not on quite the scale that Eugine_Nier did before.)
Fair point, that would certainly change my assessment of the guy and the warranted mod action, albeit not of the public aspect of this. As Jiro mentioned up the comment chain, it certainly is a trade-off. Maybe noone would have put the clues together otherwise (or see their suspicions mirrored by others), and yours is important indeed.
I guess the whole “single someone out publicly in a negative way” is my personal ugh-field (who woulda thunk, right?), which may be why I seem to fall on the other side of the trade-off than apparently most other LW’ers.
I avoided replying to the grandparent comment out of expectations of hostility; then I thought I didn’t have a sufficient basis for that impression; now I find that my initial impression was justified.
So your end goal as far as this discussion is concerned is for me to get so irritated with you as to lose patience to engage in any further discussion.
My end goal was to maybe sort of manage to get along with you.
Phrasing doesn’t equal content, a misinterpreted aside at the end in brackets doesn’t equal my “end goal”. That inference is, the PC term is questionable, but I’d really like to say ridiculous.
Fighting against pyromaniacs is usually a losing battle, the lightshow as the house burns down is just too damn enticing for the onlookers and one often gets burned either way. I’m tapping out and hoping that people of the “yay public persecution” persuasion don’t manage to further detract from my LW experience.
More like giving the higher kyu player in Go handicap stones. Which of course, according to you, means the better Go player really wants to lose as his/her end goal.
Giving someone an option != “would really like you to do that” != (with emphasis!) someone’s ‘end goal’
Spelling it out for you, to save you from potential future embarrassments.
But nothing. Bring your concerns to a moderator.
Queue the public spectacle associated with “are you Eugine Nier?”. It’s trivially easy to get a new IP address and to avoid, say, “exceeding the quote limits per rationality thread”. So what then? You know the evil rule-skirter is still around. It could be nearly anyone. Such community navel-gazing, the internal drama, usually does more damage than a banned user trying to fly under the radar with a new account. But drama, it’s so sweet, so hard to resist, I know[,] right!
Life is about skirting rules. Most optimizing comes from skirting rules, in the sense of interpreting them most favorably vis-a-vis your goals.
You know what, you’re putting it as if I’m doing this for my personal gratification and to the detriment of LW as a whole, when it’s exactly the reverse. I could have saved loads of karma just by not posting this, which I did in fact anticipate (to be honest, I anticipated a score hovering around zero karma or 50%). It’s not my fault that moderation doesn’t seem to be enough of a concern around here for the website to have a well set up infrastructure for reporting, communicating with mods, displaying mod status etc., and when somebody intends to solve such a problem, one has to do it publicly. It’s not easy, or pleasant, and it draws undue attention upon myself rather than the situation. I’m not expecting congratulations, but do you image I like getting flak for pointing out all the shit someone else does?
But I don’t think anything would have gotten done otherwise. Not only because the problem might not register as important unless there’s public support; but also because, when the situation is uncertain and it takes a third party intervention to just check out who downvotes who, the key to the problem might need to be crowdsourced (for instance, the fact that Yvain bothered to check the IPs).
Besides, the user in question never came here to defend himself. Only an intervention from him, proving that he was in fact being harmed in some way by what I said in the post, might have made me retract it; it doesn’t even matter if he was lying. Not doing so translates to implicit confession of guilt, and to cowardly troll behaviour. Good riddance, then.
To anyone who’s worried this sets a bad precedent for dealing with such cases, either you people make LW a Report Post/User button, or increase your resilience to public methods of dealing with rule-breakers. Or face floods of undesirables. Many internet communities have had worse and came out just fine out of the situation.
And mass downvoting, and posting exclusively NRx propaganda, and… mission accomplished!
Go tell that to a mod on any functional, actively moderated community. Or to a judge, for that matter. See how that would fly there.
I get it, someone’s gotta be the martyr, for the common good. Watched The Dark Knight too recently?
Since the moderation is too hands-off, we gotta do all this publicly to generate pressure on the mods! In a forum with around 5 threads per day, on a good day. That’s the kind of content conducive to rationality discussions, identifying who may skirt a rule then create a public outcry for blood until the mods have to step in. You do understand he was banned for mass-downvoting, which is something his new account isn’t suspected of? That he contributed a significant number of upvoted comments otherwise?
The hero we deserve. /s
So anyone who isn’t willing to fight/engage a public accusation and step in the ring is implicitly guilty. That’s the kind of community that’s fun to be a part of.
Well, if I accused you of being a poopy head, and you didn’t step in to defend yourself … I guess that would mean, yea exactly: You’re it!
It’s how the world works, not how the world professes to work. There’s a difference. The statement you so vehemently disagree with is mostly a corollary of taking “agents are goal-oriented” as an axiom. It’s so close to a tautology as to be somewhat vacuous.
But we seem to live on different planets. I’m on the planet where corporations use every loophole they can to lower their tax burden. Where political donations use whatever route is just legal enough to achieve their goals. Where close to noone ever has refused, say, a severance package based on “I don’t deserve this and just got it on a technicality”. What are these phenomena like in Dahlen-land, and which xkcd strips are they based on? I apologize: I know I said planet, not land.
As counter-intuitive as it seems, meta-threads which (even inadvertently) fit the “drama bait” label generally increase overall drama, regardless of their actual intent. Drama bait such as this topic is click-bait and attention-bait, unfortunately. If you want to reduce drama, trolls need to be discussed/removed with the least amount of noise possible, not to thundering applause to wake up the mods. People applaud the loudest in the arena, with blood on the sand. That’s not what I want this community to be. In forums I care less about, I’d upvote this topic, just to see shit go down.
(I’m being nice by phrasing this comment so antagonistically. Gives you the option to tap out on that basis. It’s not like you’d want to feed the drama, selflessly promoting publicly identifying rule-breakers. Or rule-skirters, undesirables in any case!)
Skirting rules is already not conducive to rationality discussions. Identifying who’s skirting the rules is just a way to mitigate some of the damage, given that the rule makes sense at all. (If skirting rules didn’t cause damage, why would we even have the rule?)
Furthermore, it’s not so much a public outcry for blood as it is a public outcry for something that only moderators can do. Itr’s not the users’ fault that moderators have made examining the evidence of abuse exclusive to themselves and then refuse to actually examine it.
Now. Viliam and Eliezer did the best they could in this situation.
Skirting a rule is not breaking a rule. There isn’t even a rule about creating a new account which is not blatantly identifiable as an old banned account and which does not display any behavior which the old account was banned for. Let alone “calling someone out” for skirting a rule which doesn’t even exist?
If I want to contact one person and I have their number I don’t do an advert in a newspaper they read, especially if it involves naming and shaming a third party based on personal judgment. Creating a “public pressure on mods” scenario to get them to act, by starting your own witchhunt, in a forum which sees little activity anyways, is (choose one based on your level of charitability: not the best course of action; ill-advised; idiotic).
Jiro, are you Eugine Nier?
The person who used to post under the handle Eugine_Nier was banned from Less Wrong. Returning with a new account is a violation of that ban.
No, I was his victim, and since you could have figured this out without resort to further moderator actions, it fails a basic sanity check.
Nobody is suggesting that the moderators should be required to do things that fail a basic sanity check, so that’s a strawman.
(It was a rhetorical question. Recognizing it as such could also be called a basic sanity check, but I’ll assume your reply was simply a rhetorical response one level up. The problem is that I trust “the moderators”, even if I don’t always agree: That’s the whole point, that I do not trust just anyone to level accusions publicly (the allure of drama is too damn high), even if they all turned out to be true and warranted. Even in that hypothetical, the public aspect of it—not any moderator action—would be toxic. I trust you see the distinction. It is no viable workaround to “but the mooods don’t respond to PMMMMs”.)
The public aspect is toxic. But so is moderators not doing things, and so is people getting away with causing trouble because moderators are not doing things. It’s a tradeoff.
I agree.
On this specific case: Now that some clear rules (well, at least comparatively, in the UK “case law” sense) have been established, mass downvoting is a bannable offense. However, the new account (even though it was identified as the same poster) didn’t show any signs of “causing trouble” in the “bannable offense” direction. No justice was served. It was a veteran, probably someone whom LW means a lot to, trying to keep that aspect of his life somewhat intact. I have no special bond to the guy, but he did contribute a number of quality comments over the years, that much I remember. There is no indication he hadn’t learned his lesson (about mass downvotes).
This is a decision for a mod to make. It’s not a cry for help because something obviously bad has happened and urgent action is needed. I disagree with public shaming on principle, but in a muddy case like this, it’s especially abominable, in my opinion. It’s a sort of vague justice porn by someone who “really dislikes people skirting the rules”. Skirting, not even breaking! Queue the denunciation! Coming close to Godwin’ing myself, here.
As you say, it can all be seen as a tradeoff. The scales would be weighed differently if this community weren’t so small, and the frequency of new topics so low.
Apart from the fact that there’s some (albeit weak; no one’s done the database-diving to get strong evidence either way) evidence that Azathoth123 has been engaging in mass-downvoting.
(In particular, I saw some weak evidence that he did it to me—though not on quite the scale that Eugine_Nier did before.)
Fair point, that would certainly change my assessment of the guy and the warranted mod action, albeit not of the public aspect of this. As Jiro mentioned up the comment chain, it certainly is a trade-off. Maybe noone would have put the clues together otherwise (or see their suspicions mirrored by others), and yours is important indeed.
I guess the whole “single someone out publicly in a negative way” is my personal ugh-field (who woulda thunk, right?), which may be why I seem to fall on the other side of the trade-off than apparently most other LW’ers.
I avoided replying to the grandparent comment out of expectations of hostility; then I thought I didn’t have a sufficient basis for that impression; now I find that my initial impression was justified.
So your end goal as far as this discussion is concerned is for me to get so irritated with you as to lose patience to engage in any further discussion.
My end goal was to maybe sort of manage to get along with you.
What’s it gonna be?
Phrasing doesn’t equal content, a misinterpreted aside at the end in brackets doesn’t equal my “end goal”. That inference is, the PC term is questionable, but I’d really like to say ridiculous.
Fighting against pyromaniacs is usually a losing battle, the lightshow as the house burns down is just too damn enticing for the onlookers and one often gets burned either way. I’m tapping out and hoping that people of the “yay public persecution” persuasion don’t manage to further detract from my LW experience.
“tapping out on the basis of your antagonism” = “me getting so irritated with you that I lose patience to engage in any further discussion”
“tapping out” = “refusing to engage in any further discussion”
“antagonism” = “the reason why I am irritated and lose patience”
“I’m doing X to give you the option to” = “I’d really like you to”
It’s not magic.
More like giving the higher kyu player in Go handicap stones. Which of course, according to you, means the better Go player really wants to lose as his/her end goal.
Giving someone an option != “would really like you to do that” != (with emphasis!) someone’s ‘end goal’
Spelling it out for you, to save you from potential future embarrassments.