Eliezer and I grew up at different times and have seen different communities. He saw communities ruined by foolish chat drowning out the intelligent discussion; I see communities ruined by people misusing vote systems to downvote people who don’t agree with them and upvote people who hold their beliefs regardless of the quality of those people’s arguments, moderators abusing their power to help their friends instead of doing what helps overall discussion, and so on.
I don’t know whether that’s different “eras of the Internet”, just different experiences, or what. But my experience has not much been one where communities refuse to defend themselves against bad norms, trolls, and the like—instead, it’s been one where voting systems are often used to enforce groupthink and stifle legitimate criticisms, moderators protect their friends’ interests rather than upholding norms, and so on.
This very site I think has been damaged by similar issues. For a long time, LW 1.0 was well known to have silly, nitpicky comments and voting patterns that drove away its best people—not because the community wasn’t protecting its norms, but because the norms that were locally protected were bad and unpleasant to deal with! If the majority were promoting such behavior, action should have been taken to censure the majority—though in point of fact the extent to which this was a majority issue is unclear, because LW 1.0 voting was infamously subverted by someone who used multiple accounts to heavily influence voting towards his own preferred ideas.
Similarly, on LW 2.0 we lost our best poster (Duncan_Sabien) because moderation did not stand up for the deep, important values and Duncan wasn’t willing to put up with it.
It is really very, very important that moderation not take the side of the bullies. That doesn’t mean giving in to trolls, that doesn’t mean letting people waste everyone’s time—but it does mean that if there’s someone making good, well-reasoned arguments who is getting hassled with bad comments because those arguments support locally unpopular conclusions, it is the job of the moderators to protect the person making good arguments, not to protect the local social order.
Only if nitpicking (or the resulting lower posting volume, or something like that) demotivates good posters more strongly than it demotivates mediocre posters. If this is true, it requires an explanation. My naive guess would be it demotivates mediocre posters more strongly because they’re wrong more often.
My naive guess would be it demotivates mediocre posters more strongly because they’re wrong more often.
A lot of the time, “mediocre posters” tend to be the source of the nitpicking. This is because writing up a nuanced objection takes time and effort, and requires much of the same skills as writing a good top-level post; whereas posting low-effort nitpicks is easy, especially if other people reward you with karma when you do so. (And empirically, I observed a great deal of poorly reasoned comments receiving upvotes on LW 1.0 towards the end of its lifespan, although I will decline to speculate publicly as to the cause of this.)
It doesn’t have to demotivate good posters more often, it just has to demotivate them enough to make them come less.
There are (at least) two types of mediocre posters – those that produce mediocre content, and those that like nitpicking and or picking fights. If you evenly drive away all content producers, and are left with nitpicking and drama, it doesn’t matter if the mediocre content producers are wrong more often. (And the effect doesn’t seem to be that strong to start an evaporative cooling process)
This seems like an argument for the hypothesis that nitpicking is net bad, but not for mr-hire’s hypothesis in the great-grandparent comment that nitpicking caused LW 1.0 to have a lot of mediocre content as a second-order effect.
I’m not 100% sure what mr hire meant, but I saw my comments as being in line with this shorter comment by Davis. Not sure if that’s the same or different from what you meant.
(That said, I get that this subthread was about your particular experience and if the issue was lack of good, positive content it makes sense for the above model to apply less.
I do think there’s an alternate model which might or might not apply to your experience, which is:
‘What matters is whether the good posters come faster than they leave, independent of how much mediocre there is.’
i.e. if a site has at least a core group of good content generators, it’s easier to pick those people out of a crowd, even if there’s a lot of mediocre content. And it doesn’t take much nitpicking for good posters to feel like they’d rather be someplace else)
(I agree with this and made the uncle comment before seeing it. Also, my experience wasn’t like that most of the time; I think it was mainly that way toward the end of LW 1.0.)
It’s not necessary for good posters to be disproportionately effected. Good posters already HAVE a disproportionate effect on the health of a community, so a small impact on good posters is worse than a large impact on mediocre posters.
So I think there’s a core of good advice somewhere here. Don’t nitpick is different from don’t bully, of course.
And, of course, whether pointing out a flaw in a post is bullying, or nitpicking, or assisting in finding the best expression of a valuable idea, is in the eye of the beholder.
eliezer’s problem is what you have if your friend group is getting diluted. this problem is what you have if you’re trying to dilute your friend group as much as you can.
I’m not sure I like the word “dilute”/”diluted” here, but in any case Eliezer and I are responding to rather different circumstances. Eliezer was writing after having experienced the SL4 mailing list being overrun by low-quality discussions and withering away; I’m writing after having experienced LW1.0 being overrun by overly high standards and withering away.
SL4 quite plausibly died thanks to pacifism; LW1.0, on the other hand, quite plausibly died to enforcement of the wrong standards. In other words, one might say SL4 was *too* welcoming, even to low-quality content; by contrast, I would say LW1.0 wasn’t welcoming *enough*, and I believe my opinion on this matter is shared by many of its top contributors, who found it too annoying to deal with all the nitpicking and critical comments!
(Now, one might argue that the nitpicking and overly critical comments themselves represent LW1.0 dying by pacifism—but in my view it’s still notable that SL4 and whatever other groups Eliezer is alluding to in his post seem to have died thanks to letting too much bad content in, while LW1.0 seems to me to have died thanks to screening too much good content out!)
I strongly agree with this point. This is the core reason I have mostly stopped using less wrong. I just made a post, and being able to set my own moderation standards is kind of cool. That might make less wrong worth of use as a blog, actually.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism
I think you should explain in substantially more detail why you think communities should do the opposite of following Eliezer’s advice.
Eliezer and I grew up at different times and have seen different communities. He saw communities ruined by foolish chat drowning out the intelligent discussion; I see communities ruined by people misusing vote systems to downvote people who don’t agree with them and upvote people who hold their beliefs regardless of the quality of those people’s arguments, moderators abusing their power to help their friends instead of doing what helps overall discussion, and so on.
I don’t know whether that’s different “eras of the Internet”, just different experiences, or what. But my experience has not much been one where communities refuse to defend themselves against bad norms, trolls, and the like—instead, it’s been one where voting systems are often used to enforce groupthink and stifle legitimate criticisms, moderators protect their friends’ interests rather than upholding norms, and so on.
This very site I think has been damaged by similar issues. For a long time, LW 1.0 was well known to have silly, nitpicky comments and voting patterns that drove away its best people—not because the community wasn’t protecting its norms, but because the norms that were locally protected were bad and unpleasant to deal with! If the majority were promoting such behavior, action should have been taken to censure the majority—though in point of fact the extent to which this was a majority issue is unclear, because LW 1.0 voting was infamously subverted by someone who used multiple accounts to heavily influence voting towards his own preferred ideas.
Similarly, on LW 2.0 we lost our best poster (Duncan_Sabien) because moderation did not stand up for the deep, important values and Duncan wasn’t willing to put up with it.
It is really very, very important that moderation not take the side of the bullies. That doesn’t mean giving in to trolls, that doesn’t mean letting people waste everyone’s time—but it does mean that if there’s someone making good, well-reasoned arguments who is getting hassled with bad comments because those arguments support locally unpopular conclusions, it is the job of the moderators to protect the person making good arguments, not to protect the local social order.
My memory of LW 1.0 is that it had a lot of mediocre content that made me not want to read it regularly.
This at least plausibly seems like it could be a clear second order effect of the thing Davis was pointing out.
Only if nitpicking (or the resulting lower posting volume, or something like that) demotivates good posters more strongly than it demotivates mediocre posters. If this is true, it requires an explanation. My naive guess would be it demotivates mediocre posters more strongly because they’re wrong more often.
A lot of the time, “mediocre posters” tend to be the source of the nitpicking. This is because writing up a nuanced objection takes time and effort, and requires much of the same skills as writing a good top-level post; whereas posting low-effort nitpicks is easy, especially if other people reward you with karma when you do so. (And empirically, I observed a great deal of poorly reasoned comments receiving upvotes on LW 1.0 towards the end of its lifespan, although I will decline to speculate publicly as to the cause of this.)
It doesn’t have to demotivate good posters more often, it just has to demotivate them enough to make them come less.
There are (at least) two types of mediocre posters – those that produce mediocre content, and those that like nitpicking and or picking fights. If you evenly drive away all content producers, and are left with nitpicking and drama, it doesn’t matter if the mediocre content producers are wrong more often. (And the effect doesn’t seem to be that strong to start an evaporative cooling process)
This seems like an argument for the hypothesis that nitpicking is net bad, but not for mr-hire’s hypothesis in the great-grandparent comment that nitpicking caused LW 1.0 to have a lot of mediocre content as a second-order effect.
I’m not 100% sure what mr hire meant, but I saw my comments as being in line with this shorter comment by Davis. Not sure if that’s the same or different from what you meant.
(That said, I get that this subthread was about your particular experience and if the issue was lack of good, positive content it makes sense for the above model to apply less.
I do think there’s an alternate model which might or might not apply to your experience, which is:
‘What matters is whether the good posters come faster than they leave, independent of how much mediocre there is.’
i.e. if a site has at least a core group of good content generators, it’s easier to pick those people out of a crowd, even if there’s a lot of mediocre content. And it doesn’t take much nitpicking for good posters to feel like they’d rather be someplace else)
(I agree with this and made the uncle comment before seeing it. Also, my experience wasn’t like that most of the time; I think it was mainly that way toward the end of LW 1.0.)
It’s not necessary for good posters to be disproportionately effected. Good posters already HAVE a disproportionate effect on the health of a community, so a small impact on good posters is worse than a large impact on mediocre posters.
Yes, that’s my view. My model of what went wrong with LW 1.0 culturally was something like:
1. Nitpicky standards get into the culture
2. Many of the strongest contributors dislike interacting with the nitpicky standards and move elsewhere
3. Many of the remaining contributors don’t have as good content to contribute
4. LW is perceived as mediocre and no longer “the place to go”, reinforcing migration away from the site
So I think there’s a core of good advice somewhere here. Don’t nitpick is different from don’t bully, of course.
And, of course, whether pointing out a flaw in a post is bullying, or nitpicking, or assisting in finding the best expression of a valuable idea, is in the eye of the beholder.
eliezer’s problem is what you have if your friend group is getting diluted. this problem is what you have if you’re trying to dilute your friend group as much as you can.
I’m not sure I like the word “dilute”/”diluted” here, but in any case Eliezer and I are responding to rather different circumstances. Eliezer was writing after having experienced the SL4 mailing list being overrun by low-quality discussions and withering away; I’m writing after having experienced LW1.0 being overrun by overly high standards and withering away.
SL4 quite plausibly died thanks to pacifism; LW1.0, on the other hand, quite plausibly died to enforcement of the wrong standards. In other words, one might say SL4 was *too* welcoming, even to low-quality content; by contrast, I would say LW1.0 wasn’t welcoming *enough*, and I believe my opinion on this matter is shared by many of its top contributors, who found it too annoying to deal with all the nitpicking and critical comments!
(Now, one might argue that the nitpicking and overly critical comments themselves represent LW1.0 dying by pacifism—but in my view it’s still notable that SL4 and whatever other groups Eliezer is alluding to in his post seem to have died thanks to letting too much bad content in, while LW1.0 seems to me to have died thanks to screening too much good content out!)
I strongly agree with this point. This is the core reason I have mostly stopped using less wrong. I just made a post, and being able to set my own moderation standards is kind of cool. That might make less wrong worth of use as a blog, actually.