Because this involves conflict of interest, it is a security issue, and people aren’t very good at thinking about those. Often they fail to take the basic step of asking “if I were the attacker, how would I respond to this?”. See Inside the twisted mind of the security professional.
When you think of discussion forum design as a security issue, determining just what should be considered an attack can get pretty tricky. Trying to hack other people’s passwords, sure. Open spamming and verbal abuse in messages, most likely. Deliberate trolling, probably, but how easy is it to tell what the intent of a message was? Formalizing “good faith discussion” isn’t easy. What about people sincerely posting nothing but “rationalist lolcat” macro pictures on the front page and other people sincerely upvoting them? Is a clueless commenter a 14-year-old who is willing to learn forum conventions and is a bit too eager to post in the meantime, or a 57-year-old who would like to engage you in a learned debate to show you the error of your ways of thought and then present you the obvious truth of the Space Tetrahedron Theory of Everything?
Basically that discussion forum failure modes seem to be very complex compared to what an autonomous technical system can handle, and the discussion on improving LW seems to often skirt around the role of human moderators in favor of trying to make a forum work with simple autonomous mechanisms.
Because this involves conflict of interest, it is a security issue, and people aren’t very good at thinking about those. Often they fail to take the basic step of asking “if I were the attacker, how would I respond to this?”. See Inside the twisted mind of the security professional.
When you think of discussion forum design as a security issue, determining just what should be considered an attack can get pretty tricky. Trying to hack other people’s passwords, sure. Open spamming and verbal abuse in messages, most likely. Deliberate trolling, probably, but how easy is it to tell what the intent of a message was? Formalizing “good faith discussion” isn’t easy. What about people sincerely posting nothing but “rationalist lolcat” macro pictures on the front page and other people sincerely upvoting them? Is a clueless commenter a 14-year-old who is willing to learn forum conventions and is a bit too eager to post in the meantime, or a 57-year-old who would like to engage you in a learned debate to show you the error of your ways of thought and then present you the obvious truth of the Space Tetrahedron Theory of Everything?
I’m not sure how what you say above is meant to influence what we recommend wrt possible changes to LW.
Basically that discussion forum failure modes seem to be very complex compared to what an autonomous technical system can handle, and the discussion on improving LW seems to often skirt around the role of human moderators in favor of trying to make a forum work with simple autonomous mechanisms.