The reason is provided (the column to the right). Often the reason is empty (we get lots of spam, and eugin clones, and occasional people who posted a comment twice which mods often quietly remove), and we generally err on the side of one-click deleting those just to get them out of the way.
Well, this is what I see right now if I go to the mod log:
If there’s a field for the reason, but you don’t put anything in there, then that doesn’t count as “the reason is provided”!
Once again I must emphasize that the point of this feature is transparency. You know that you deleted a comment for a good and uncontroversial reason. But you would know that even without the moderation log. We (non-mods) do not know that, and even with the moderation log—as it stands now—we still do not know that!
As to your list of prospective changes, I certainly support them. (Although I note that a jury-rigged approach to the second one is simply to have a Sticky or a TextEdit file or something that you keep open, that has some common reasons, for you to copy&paste into the “reason” field.)
That said, I am curious to know whether the idea of showing the text of the deleted comment is entirely off the table; and if so, why? It seems to me that this would make the feature tremendously more useful… but I don’t recall that the matter was addressed to my satisfaction, when last the moderation log was discussed.
I’m all for being able to agree that spam is spam. Potentially with the “phone number” or other contact details deleted so that it’s not searchable.
I’d be against the “Eugine” comments being visible because the user has a habit of reposting comments word for word after they have been banned for vote manipulation. To let them be recorded—even in a moderation log is to not delete them fully. With these comments—the username is indicative too.
Well I would like to see what this Eugine fellow has to say. What benefit do you gain from locking his words behind more than the trivial inconveniences required to tend to the garden? Reddit with its undeletion mirrors seems to do just fine.
LessWrong 2.0 is necessary because LessWrong 1.0 was killed, on purpose, by one troll with a vendetta who made it sufficiently un-fun to play in that everyone left, and created armies of sockpuppets after being banned. We are long past the point of taking anything he has to say seriously.
I notice that a lot of the comments in this thread that defend having Eugine’s comments invisible have been downvoted. That could well be “on their merits”—there are certainly good arguments for not making deleted comments completely invisible—but if some moderator is feeling zealous, it might be worth looking for signs of Eugine-socks that might hitherto have been missed...
Sorry, that was my bad. It looks like I broke the thing that reversed all of Eugine’s votes everytime we banned him. I fixed it now, and the votes on this and other threads should soon be restored to normal. I did a bit of analysis, and it seems that he made a total of about 80 votes or so, so a good chunk, but nothing that overwhelmingly skewed the discussion outside of this thread (since those votes were distributed over a very large number of comments).
Do you think it would be detrimental to LWs fun if I am able to dig up what he’s saying? Do you think it’s more about punishing him than protecting the Gurkenglas attack vector from his ideas?
Do you think it would be detrimental to LWs fun if I am able to dig up what he’s saying?
Yes. Because moderation is exhausting, and every time we have to rehash it costs moderator time and attention, leading to things ranging from “less attention for more important things” to “moderator burnout.” This is in fact essentially my whole point in the first place.
If you have the posts visible in the moderation log—where everyone can see that they are, indeed, the same old Eugine comments, reposted over and over—then there’s no reason at all why we’d have to rehash anything. Everyone can scroll through the log, see the same lame comments posted over and over, and feel secure in the knowledge that all that’s happening here is that a troll is being rightly kept out of the garden. No one will need to comment on this, and no one will.
Whereas if they’re hidden, then folks begin, quite rightly, to wonder just what it is that you have to hide so thoroughly.
“No one will need to comment on this, and no one will.”—bets please, lizardman constant, etc etc.
Tradeoffs. Do the mods have to deal with more BS because they show the text and a handful of people are like “but reeeeaaaallly? I got something good from that one comment!” or because they hide the text and a handful of people are like “but reeeeaaaallly? What if you’re acting in bad faith?” I assume that’s what’s going on here.
Or maybe it’s just wishful thinking. “What do we have to do to make Eugine just go away forever and we never have to talk about it again?” ==> disappear everything and hope
Tradeoffs. Do the mods have to deal with more BS because they show the text and a handful of people are like “but reeeeaaaallly? I got something good from that one comment!”
This, basically. A lot of individual Eugin comments look fine. It’s only when you know the entire history of him that it’s clear how important it is that he banned and stay banned. He optimizes his comments for soaking up as much time and attention as possible.
We delete about 10 Eugin comments around once a week. It’s a pain. Everything that makes it more of a pain is detracting from our ability to do things like:
give friendly responses to newcomers who look like they have something to offer but could use some help understanding the site culture
resolve disputes between longterm members
actually code stuff (since several of the mods are also developers)
A lot of individual Eugin comments look fine. It’s only when you know the entire history of him that it’s clear how important it is that be banned and stay banned.
But I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t ban him. I agree that you should ban him. I agree that you should delete his comments. I have zero quarrel with this.
What I still don’t see is how any of that implies that the text of his deleted comments—much less that of deleted comments in general—shouldn’t be visible in the moderation log.
Everything that makes it more of a pain …
But why would having the moderation log show the text of deleted comments, make it more of a pain to delete Eugin’s comments? I’m not trying to be dense here, but I’m afraid I just don’t see any connection…
Here’s a question, that might make me better understand your view on this. Is the issue here that you, for some reason, specifically object to having Eugin’s comments be displayed at all, in any way? And if the answer is “yes”, then would it be reasonable to suppose that you would have no objections to displaying the text of deleted comments in general, but having a special “Eugin exception” (i.e., where the text of the deleted comment would normally be, there might instead be some text in the vein of “REDACTED, because this was a comment by a Eugin.”)?
(Similarly, perhaps there could be—as I think I might’ve suggested in the past—a “doxxing exception”, and a “the contents of this comment violated U.S. law exception”, etc.)
I don’t have strong opinions on whether Eugine’s comments should or shouldn’t be visible in the deletion log, but here (I think) is the best argument for making them not be: It’s about incentives. Eugine wants LW to be his soapbox; in so far as his actions still have any motivation to them beyond mere malice, his goal is to propagate his opinions and punish those with conflicting opinions; the best hope of making him go away is for him to get nothing from posting to LW. If his comments’ text is preserved, then that gives him an incentive to keep posting them.
(I fear that in fact there is nothing left but malice, and the mere knowledge that he’s wasting moderators’ time is enough for him. But I hope he hasn’t gone so far down the path from “reasonable human being” to “entity of pure malice” for that to keep him at it indefinitely.)
[Note on spelling: definitely “Eugine” rather than “Eugin”, though I believe neither is his real name.]
If the mods want to enforce “no one comments on topic X”, they can easily do so.
The two alleged alternatives you list are not at all symmetric. In the former case, there’s simply a disagreement with a moderator decision; the response to that is “yep, you’re entitled to your opinion, but this is the way it is”, and further discussion after that can simply be disallowed. If anyone doesn’t like that, they can leave; but everyone knows where everyone stands.
Whereas in the latter case, you’re eroding the trust of your user base, in a quiet way, a way that will slowly corrode the administration’s relationship with the users, lead to interminable, vague arguments (because there’s no clear, public, specific decisions and actions to talk about—just suspicion, innuendo, suppositions, and conjecture), and take up far more energy and use up far more good will than simply a firm but public stance.
Edit: Oh, the “they” in your sentence referred to the user, not to the comments. (How confusing!) Well, in that case, I don’t understand your logic. Why does the fact that a troll is reposting comments after being banned, mean that those comments shouldn’t be visible in the comment log? Help me out, here; I’m not following your reasoning.
They are unwelcome to make any impact on the site. And at this point they are still going to be unwelcome five or ten years from now. Comments are daily. And deleted daily.
I’d be happy if the log didn’t even reflect the existence of the deleting of the comments.
So, to be clear: you propose to punish the entirety of the Less Wrong commentariat for the transgression of one person? That seems extreme, not to mention unproductive.
To be clear. I’m talking about only the E comments. The rest should be in a log.
And I think of it as protecting LW from a persistent bad actor. Despite multiple attempts to ask for them to join mediation or talk about what the problem is or even do anything other than repost the same text of a comment.
Once again, I need absolutely no convincing of the fact that Eugine’s lifetime ban is well-deserved. I certainly never did nor ever would suggest that any attempt at “rehabilitation” should be made.
My concerns are exclusively about the good of the site and its non-banned users, not about any “rights” of Eugine, or leniency, or charity, etc., toward him (as nothing remotely like that is warranted).
What I am questioning is whether hiding Eugine’s deleted comments is good for me (for instance; and for the rest of the commentariat). I am not at all convinced that it is. This is what I’d like to see a cogent argument for.
That said, it seems like “show deleted comments, but make certain extremely rare exceptions—such as for Eugine” might be the least controversial solution (if not 100% ideal from all perspectives—but perhaps “100% ideal” is an unrealistic goal).
It’s not obvious to me whether access to Eugine’s deleted comments is a net benefit to the LW readership.
Reading something has a cost (in time, attention, etc.) as well as whatever benefits it brings, and a lot of the things we might read are rubbish; so we seek out various sorts of probably-better-than-average writing. Removing something from a given corpus of writing may well be beneficial, if the thing removed is of notably lower quality than the rest of the corpus and isn’t required in order to make sense of the rest of it. (This applies even if the thing, in absolute terms, isn’t so bad.) Or if, in absolute terms, it’s not interesting enough to be worth the trouble of reading it.
It is plausible to me that Eugine’s mod-deleted comments are in fact of notably lower quality than the rest of the mod-deleted comments, if only because they are so damn repetititititititive.
“Quality” here means “whatever it is that one might be looking for in reading through deleted LW comments”. That might be much the same as quality of ordinary comments, if you’re reading the deleted ones for fear of missing something good. (In that case, my guess is that Eugine’s comments are better than average for deleted comments—at least, if there were some mechanism for collapsing the vast numbers of dupes. But I doubt many people will be reading the deletion log on the off chance of finding hidden gems.) It might be amount of information about moderator decisions. (Eugine’s deleted comments are very low in such information, because they all reflect a single decision to delete all his comments.) Etc.
Let’s suppose arguendo that the ability to read Eugine’s deleted comments is on average of benefit. I’d like to note that it wouldn’t follow from that that they should be made accessible, because e.g. the deterrent value of having it be known that if you behave like Eugine then you are liable to be maximally excluded from the LW community might be sufficient to outweigh that benefit. (If someone commits a serious crime and is imprisoned for it, this greatly reduces others’ access to conversation with them, to their ideas, etc. You could call this “punishing the entirety of the rest of the world for the transgression of the one person”, but that seems to me an unhelpful way to look at it.)
To recap this comment and an earlier one of mine, I suggest three reasons why it may be reasonable for Eugine’s comments to be permanently destroyed. (1) To reduce his incentive to make them. (2) To deter future Eugines. (3) Because including them may be of negative net benefit because they’re particularly uninteresting even among deleted comments on LW. On the other side, I guess we have (a) the merits of a policy of never deleting comments permanently, for the sake of transparency, and (b) the possibility that to some people Eugine’s comments might be very interesting or valuable. It’s not obvious to me how (1,2,3) weigh up against (a,b), but it does seem obvious to me that it isn’t obvious that (a,b) massively outweigh (1,2,3). Do you agree?
(I ask the last question because one impression I get from your comments on this is of incredulity, as if you find it baffling that anyone would think it makes sense to delete Eugine’s comments permanently. I’m not sure whether I’m imagining that, nor whether if I’m not the incredulity is real rather than adopted; if it’s real, then I hope to have made it less baffling that some people want Eugine’s comments nuked.)
whether hiding Eugine’s deleted comments is good for me
yeah. I can see how you might want to make that decision for yourself. In which case you can probably try to get in touch with this person off platform.
I give Mods the permission to sometimes make these decisions for the users.
Well, this is what I see right now if I go to the mod log:
If there’s a field for the reason, but you don’t put anything in there, then that doesn’t count as “the reason is provided”!
Once again I must emphasize that the point of this feature is transparency. You know that you deleted a comment for a good and uncontroversial reason. But you would know that even without the moderation log. We (non-mods) do not know that, and even with the moderation log—as it stands now—we still do not know that!
As to your list of prospective changes, I certainly support them. (Although I note that a jury-rigged approach to the second one is simply to have a Sticky or a TextEdit file or something that you keep open, that has some common reasons, for you to copy&paste into the “reason” field.)
That said, I am curious to know whether the idea of showing the text of the deleted comment is entirely off the table; and if so, why? It seems to me that this would make the feature tremendously more useful… but I don’t recall that the matter was addressed to my satisfaction, when last the moderation log was discussed.
I fixed and deployed the “user is the same as deleted by user” issue.
Excellent, thank you!
I’m all for being able to agree that spam is spam. Potentially with the “phone number” or other contact details deleted so that it’s not searchable.
I’d be against the “Eugine” comments being visible because the user has a habit of reposting comments word for word after they have been banned for vote manipulation. To let them be recorded—even in a moderation log is to not delete them fully. With these comments—the username is indicative too.
Well I would like to see what this Eugine fellow has to say. What benefit do you gain from locking his words behind more than the trivial inconveniences required to tend to the garden? Reddit with its undeletion mirrors seems to do just fine.
LessWrong 2.0 is necessary because LessWrong 1.0 was killed, on purpose, by one troll with a vendetta who made it sufficiently un-fun to play in that everyone left, and created armies of sockpuppets after being banned. We are long past the point of taking anything he has to say seriously.
I notice that a lot of the comments in this thread that defend having Eugine’s comments invisible have been downvoted. That could well be “on their merits”—there are certainly good arguments for not making deleted comments completely invisible—but if some moderator is feeling zealous, it might be worth looking for signs of Eugine-socks that might hitherto have been missed...
...yup, that looks pretty likely.
Sorry, that was my bad. It looks like I broke the thing that reversed all of Eugine’s votes everytime we banned him. I fixed it now, and the votes on this and other threads should soon be restored to normal. I did a bit of analysis, and it seems that he made a total of about 80 votes or so, so a good chunk, but nothing that overwhelmingly skewed the discussion outside of this thread (since those votes were distributed over a very large number of comments).
Do you think it would be detrimental to LWs fun if I am able to dig up what he’s saying? Do you think it’s more about punishing him than protecting the Gurkenglas attack vector from his ideas?
Yes. Because moderation is exhausting, and every time we have to rehash it costs moderator time and attention, leading to things ranging from “less attention for more important things” to “moderator burnout.” This is in fact essentially my whole point in the first place.
But why would we have to rehash it?
If you have the posts visible in the moderation log—where everyone can see that they are, indeed, the same old Eugine comments, reposted over and over—then there’s no reason at all why we’d have to rehash anything. Everyone can scroll through the log, see the same lame comments posted over and over, and feel secure in the knowledge that all that’s happening here is that a troll is being rightly kept out of the garden. No one will need to comment on this, and no one will.
Whereas if they’re hidden, then folks begin, quite rightly, to wonder just what it is that you have to hide so thoroughly.
“No one will need to comment on this, and no one will.”—bets please, lizardman constant, etc etc.
Tradeoffs. Do the mods have to deal with more BS because they show the text and a handful of people are like “but reeeeaaaallly? I got something good from that one comment!” or because they hide the text and a handful of people are like “but reeeeaaaallly? What if you’re acting in bad faith?” I assume that’s what’s going on here.
Or maybe it’s just wishful thinking. “What do we have to do to make Eugine just go away forever and we never have to talk about it again?” ==> disappear everything and hope
This, basically. A lot of individual Eugin comments look fine. It’s only when you know the entire history of him that it’s clear how important it is that he banned and stay banned. He optimizes his comments for soaking up as much time and attention as possible.
We delete about 10 Eugin comments around once a week. It’s a pain. Everything that makes it more of a pain is detracting from our ability to do things like:
give friendly responses to newcomers who look like they have something to offer but could use some help understanding the site culture
resolve disputes between longterm members
actually code stuff (since several of the mods are also developers)
But I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t ban him. I agree that you should ban him. I agree that you should delete his comments. I have zero quarrel with this.
What I still don’t see is how any of that implies that the text of his deleted comments—much less that of deleted comments in general—shouldn’t be visible in the moderation log.
But why would having the moderation log show the text of deleted comments, make it more of a pain to delete Eugin’s comments? I’m not trying to be dense here, but I’m afraid I just don’t see any connection…
Here’s a question, that might make me better understand your view on this. Is the issue here that you, for some reason, specifically object to having Eugin’s comments be displayed at all, in any way? And if the answer is “yes”, then would it be reasonable to suppose that you would have no objections to displaying the text of deleted comments in general, but having a special “Eugin exception” (i.e., where the text of the deleted comment would normally be, there might instead be some text in the vein of “REDACTED, because this was a comment by a Eugin.”)?
(Similarly, perhaps there could be—as I think I might’ve suggested in the past—a “doxxing exception”, and a “the contents of this comment violated U.S. law exception”, etc.)
I don’t have strong opinions on whether Eugine’s comments should or shouldn’t be visible in the deletion log, but here (I think) is the best argument for making them not be: It’s about incentives. Eugine wants LW to be his soapbox; in so far as his actions still have any motivation to them beyond mere malice, his goal is to propagate his opinions and punish those with conflicting opinions; the best hope of making him go away is for him to get nothing from posting to LW. If his comments’ text is preserved, then that gives him an incentive to keep posting them.
(I fear that in fact there is nothing left but malice, and the mere knowledge that he’s wasting moderators’ time is enough for him. But I hope he hasn’t gone so far down the path from “reasonable human being” to “entity of pure malice” for that to keep him at it indefinitely.)
[Note on spelling: definitely “Eugine” rather than “Eugin”, though I believe neither is his real name.]
Alright, I suppose that’s an argument. Thank you.
In that case, my question about the “Eugine exception” approach stands.
seems reasonable to me. (including also tags in comment text if necessary)
I’m afraid this really makes very little sense.
If the mods want to enforce “no one comments on topic X”, they can easily do so.
The two alleged alternatives you list are not at all symmetric. In the former case, there’s simply a disagreement with a moderator decision; the response to that is “yep, you’re entitled to your opinion, but this is the way it is”, and further discussion after that can simply be disallowed. If anyone doesn’t like that, they can leave; but everyone knows where everyone stands.
Whereas in the latter case, you’re eroding the trust of your user base, in a quiet way, a way that will slowly corrode the administration’s relationship with the users, lead to interminable, vague arguments (because there’s no clear, public, specific decisions and actions to talk about—just suspicion, innuendo, suppositions, and conjecture), and take up far more energy and use up far more good will than simply a firm but public stance.
You can go talk to them not on lw.
Banned for what now??
Edit: Oh, the “they” in your sentence referred to the user, not to the comments. (How confusing!) Well, in that case, I don’t understand your logic. Why does the fact that a troll is reposting comments after being banned, mean that those comments shouldn’t be visible in the comment log? Help me out, here; I’m not following your reasoning.
They are unwelcome to make any impact on the site. And at this point they are still going to be unwelcome five or ten years from now. Comments are daily. And deleted daily.
I’d be happy if the log didn’t even reflect the existence of the deleting of the comments.
You’re still not making any connection between those two things.
E was banned. That decision is locked in.
Consequences of being banned include—you don’t get to post here and people don’t get to read your comments. Even in a moderation log.
So, to be clear: you propose to punish the entirety of the Less Wrong commentariat for the transgression of one person? That seems extreme, not to mention unproductive.
To be clear. I’m talking about only the E comments. The rest should be in a log.
And I think of it as protecting LW from a persistent bad actor. Despite multiple attempts to ask for them to join mediation or talk about what the problem is or even do anything other than repost the same text of a comment.
Once again, I need absolutely no convincing of the fact that Eugine’s lifetime ban is well-deserved. I certainly never did nor ever would suggest that any attempt at “rehabilitation” should be made.
My concerns are exclusively about the good of the site and its non-banned users, not about any “rights” of Eugine, or leniency, or charity, etc., toward him (as nothing remotely like that is warranted).
What I am questioning is whether hiding Eugine’s deleted comments is good for me (for instance; and for the rest of the commentariat). I am not at all convinced that it is. This is what I’d like to see a cogent argument for.
That said, it seems like “show deleted comments, but make certain extremely rare exceptions—such as for Eugine” might be the least controversial solution (if not 100% ideal from all perspectives—but perhaps “100% ideal” is an unrealistic goal).
It’s not obvious to me whether access to Eugine’s deleted comments is a net benefit to the LW readership.
Reading something has a cost (in time, attention, etc.) as well as whatever benefits it brings, and a lot of the things we might read are rubbish; so we seek out various sorts of probably-better-than-average writing. Removing something from a given corpus of writing may well be beneficial, if the thing removed is of notably lower quality than the rest of the corpus and isn’t required in order to make sense of the rest of it. (This applies even if the thing, in absolute terms, isn’t so bad.) Or if, in absolute terms, it’s not interesting enough to be worth the trouble of reading it.
It is plausible to me that Eugine’s mod-deleted comments are in fact of notably lower quality than the rest of the mod-deleted comments, if only because they are so damn repetititititititive.
“Quality” here means “whatever it is that one might be looking for in reading through deleted LW comments”. That might be much the same as quality of ordinary comments, if you’re reading the deleted ones for fear of missing something good. (In that case, my guess is that Eugine’s comments are better than average for deleted comments—at least, if there were some mechanism for collapsing the vast numbers of dupes. But I doubt many people will be reading the deletion log on the off chance of finding hidden gems.) It might be amount of information about moderator decisions. (Eugine’s deleted comments are very low in such information, because they all reflect a single decision to delete all his comments.) Etc.
Let’s suppose arguendo that the ability to read Eugine’s deleted comments is on average of benefit. I’d like to note that it wouldn’t follow from that that they should be made accessible, because e.g. the deterrent value of having it be known that if you behave like Eugine then you are liable to be maximally excluded from the LW community might be sufficient to outweigh that benefit. (If someone commits a serious crime and is imprisoned for it, this greatly reduces others’ access to conversation with them, to their ideas, etc. You could call this “punishing the entirety of the rest of the world for the transgression of the one person”, but that seems to me an unhelpful way to look at it.)
To recap this comment and an earlier one of mine, I suggest three reasons why it may be reasonable for Eugine’s comments to be permanently destroyed. (1) To reduce his incentive to make them. (2) To deter future Eugines. (3) Because including them may be of negative net benefit because they’re particularly uninteresting even among deleted comments on LW. On the other side, I guess we have (a) the merits of a policy of never deleting comments permanently, for the sake of transparency, and (b) the possibility that to some people Eugine’s comments might be very interesting or valuable. It’s not obvious to me how (1,2,3) weigh up against (a,b), but it does seem obvious to me that it isn’t obvious that (a,b) massively outweigh (1,2,3). Do you agree?
(I ask the last question because one impression I get from your comments on this is of incredulity, as if you find it baffling that anyone would think it makes sense to delete Eugine’s comments permanently. I’m not sure whether I’m imagining that, nor whether if I’m not the incredulity is real rather than adopted; if it’s real, then I hope to have made it less baffling that some people want Eugine’s comments nuked.)
yeah. I can see how you might want to make that decision for yourself. In which case you can probably try to get in touch with this person off platform.
I give Mods the permission to sometimes make these decisions for the users.
I don’t understand why you keep missing my point, but I have run out of ways to explain it. Perhaps someone else can step in for me.