With the ongoing drama that is currently taking place. I’m worried that the rationalist community will find itself inadvertently caught up in the culture war. This might cause a large influx of new users who are more interested in debating politics than anything else on LW.
It might be a good idea to put a temporary moratorium/barriers on new signups to the site in the event that things become particularly heated.
Something in this space seems pretty plausible to me. We are always monitoring contributions from new users, so I think we would notice relatively quickly, and I agree that as soon as we see a suspicious uptick we might want to limit contributions, but I do think I would want to wait until we see the initial signs.
I wonder whether it would be a good idea to set a “controversial” (e.g. culture war) flag to some posts, and simply not allow new users to comment on those posts.
With some explanation, like: “These posts do not represent the intended content of Less Wrong, which is rationality, artificial intelligence, effective altruism, et cetera.”
To reduce the administrative work, we could assume by default that all articles are noncontroversial, and only set the flag to those where some problems happen or we explicitly expect them to happen. Maybe some keywords in content, such as “Trump” or “social justice”, could show a dialog whether the author wants to flag their article as “controversial (inaccessible to freshly registered users)”.
Yup. This is already a thing we keep an eye out for for new users (I’m less likely to approve a new user if they seem primarily interested in arguing politics), and I agree it makes more sense to be on the lookout for it right now.
When new users post content, moderations check whether they’re spammers, and whether they seem to meet the basic quality bar we want for site users. (In some cases we block accounts, in some cases we send them a message noting that their content isn’t generally up to the standards of the site)
With the ongoing drama that is currently taking place. I’m worried that the rationalist community will find itself inadvertently caught up in the culture war. This might cause a large influx of new users who are more interested in debating politics than anything else on LW.
It might be a good idea to put a temporary moratorium/barriers on new signups to the site in the event that things become particularly heated.
Something in this space seems pretty plausible to me. We are always monitoring contributions from new users, so I think we would notice relatively quickly, and I agree that as soon as we see a suspicious uptick we might want to limit contributions, but I do think I would want to wait until we see the initial signs.
I wonder whether it would be a good idea to set a “controversial” (e.g. culture war) flag to some posts, and simply not allow new users to comment on those posts.
With some explanation, like: “These posts do not represent the intended content of Less Wrong, which is rationality, artificial intelligence, effective altruism, et cetera.”
To reduce the administrative work, we could assume by default that all articles are noncontroversial, and only set the flag to those where some problems happen or we explicitly expect them to happen. Maybe some keywords in content, such as “Trump” or “social justice”, could show a dialog whether the author wants to flag their article as “controversial (inaccessible to freshly registered users)”.
Yup. This is already a thing we keep an eye out for for new users (I’m less likely to approve a new user if they seem primarily interested in arguing politics), and I agree it makes more sense to be on the lookout for it right now.
What do you mean “approve a new user”? AFAIK, registration is totally free.
When new users post content, moderations check whether they’re spammers, and whether they seem to meet the basic quality bar we want for site users. (In some cases we block accounts, in some cases we send them a message noting that their content isn’t generally up to the standards of the site)
“Synchronized moderating” could be an olympic sport I guess :P (We both wrote a reply with functionally the same content at the same time)