One big motivation for switching from Reddit codebase was that we had a dedicated spammer we couldn’t stop. Imagine someone creating hundreds of accounts, upvoting himself, downvoting people he didn’t like. The existing moderation tools were insufficient; fighting this one person wasted a lot of moderator time. We needed solutions in code. But the Reddit code was very difficult to understand and modify, despite having a lot of software developers in this community. Ultimately, it was easier to rewrite from scratch, even if that took months (or years? not sure) of work.
Adding new features that we always wished (plus a few more were weren’t sure about but wanted to try) was also nice. But the opportunity costs were high. I think it was the spammer who changed the perception of rewriting the code from “would be nice to have” to “we must do this, or this community dies”.
EDIT:
A few rules (I don’t remember the rules exactly) were specifically designed against this kind of attack. Not just one person creating hundreds of accounts, which probably could be detected by using the same IP address or some other heuristics, but imagine hundred new people joining at the same time. e.g. because LW was linked from some belligerent online community. So, for example, the votes of existing members are stronger than the votes of new members. Making new accounts can temporarily be turned off. I suspect that moderators also have some automated tools for checking suspicious behavior of new users.
So the ultimate trigger to move wasn’t some hifalutin’ desires to apply media ecology theories to optimize for inquiry (as was my theory), but much more mundane and urgent needs to fight spam and trolls!
I found this announcement of LessWrong 2.0, which indeed mentions spam and trolls. The main innovation seems to be the delightfully named “Eigenkarma”, which I think is approximated by ForumMagnum by making your vote strength approximately the log of your karma.
One big motivation for switching from Reddit codebase was that we had a dedicated spammer we couldn’t stop. Imagine someone creating hundreds of accounts, upvoting himself, downvoting people he didn’t like. The existing moderation tools were insufficient; fighting this one person wasted a lot of moderator time. We needed solutions in code. But the Reddit code was very difficult to understand and modify, despite having a lot of software developers in this community. Ultimately, it was easier to rewrite from scratch, even if that took months (or years? not sure) of work.
Adding new features that we always wished (plus a few more were weren’t sure about but wanted to try) was also nice. But the opportunity costs were high. I think it was the spammer who changed the perception of rewriting the code from “would be nice to have” to “we must do this, or this community dies”.
EDIT:
A few rules (I don’t remember the rules exactly) were specifically designed against this kind of attack. Not just one person creating hundreds of accounts, which probably could be detected by using the same IP address or some other heuristics, but imagine hundred new people joining at the same time. e.g. because LW was linked from some belligerent online community. So, for example, the votes of existing members are stronger than the votes of new members. Making new accounts can temporarily be turned off. I suspect that moderators also have some automated tools for checking suspicious behavior of new users.
So the ultimate trigger to move wasn’t some hifalutin’ desires to apply media ecology theories to optimize for inquiry (as was my theory), but much more mundane and urgent needs to fight spam and trolls!
I found this announcement of LessWrong 2.0, which indeed mentions spam and trolls. The main innovation seems to be the delightfully named “Eigenkarma”, which I think is approximated by ForumMagnum by making your vote strength approximately the log of your karma.