After seeing another LW user (sorry, forgot who) mention this post in their commenting guidelines, I’ve decided to change my own commenting guidelines to the following, matching pretty close to the SSC commenting guidelines that I forgot existed until just a couple days ago:
Comments should be at least two of true, useful, and kind, i.e. you believe what you say, you think the world would be worse without this comment, and you think the comment will be positively received.
I like this because it’s simple and it says what rather than how. My old guidelines were all about how:
Seek to foster greater mutual understanding and prefer good faith to bad, nurture to combat, collaboration to argument, and dialectic to debate. Do that by:
-aiming to understand the author and their intent, not what you want them to have said or fear that they said
-being charitable about potential misunderstandings, assuming each person is trying their best to be clearly understood and to advance understanding
-resolving disagreement by finding the crux or synthesizing contrary views to sublimate the disagreement
I’m fairly tolerant, but if you’re making comments that are actively counterproductive to fruitful conversation by failing to read and think about what someone else is saying I’m likely to ask you to stop and, if you don’t, delete your comments and, if you continue, ban you from commenting on my posts.Some behavior that is especially likely to receive warnings, deletions, and bans:
More generally, I think the SSC commenting guidelines might be a good cluster for those of us who want LW comment sections to be “nice” and so mark our posts as norm enforcing. If this catches on this might help deal with finding the few clusters of commenting norms that make people want without having lots of variation between authors.
After seeing another LW user (sorry, forgot who) mention this post in their commenting guidelines, I’ve decided to change my own commenting guidelines to the following, matching pretty close to the SSC commenting guidelines that I forgot existed until just a couple days ago:
I like this because it’s simple and it says what rather than how. My old guidelines were all about how:
More generally, I think the SSC commenting guidelines might be a good cluster for those of us who want LW comment sections to be “nice” and so mark our posts as norm enforcing. If this catches on this might help deal with finding the few clusters of commenting norms that make people want without having lots of variation between authors.