Just wanted to note that I am thinking about this exchange, hope to chime in at some point. I’m not sure whether I’m on the same page as Ben about it. May take a couple days to have time to respond in full.
[Mod note] I thought for a while about how shortform interacts with moderation here. When Ray initially wrote the shortform announcement post, he described the features, goals, and advice for using it, but didn’t mention moderation. Let me follow-up by saying: You’re welcome and encouraged to enforce whatever moderation guidelines you choose to set on shortform, using tools like comment removal, user bans, and such. As a reminder, see the FAQ section on moderation for instructions on how to use the mod tools. Do whatever you want to help you think your thoughts here in shortform and feel comfortable doing so.
Some background thoughts on this: In other places on the internet, being blocked locks you out of the communal conversation, but there are two factors that make it pretty different here. Firstly, banning someone from a post on LW means they can’t reply to the content they’re banned from, but it doesn’t hide your content from them or their content from you. And secondly, everyone here on LessWrong has a common frontpage where the main conversation happens—the shortform is a low-key place and a relatively unimportant part of the conversation. (You can be banned from posts on frontpage, but that action requires meeting high standards not required for shortform bans.) Relatively speaking, shortform is very low-key, and I expect the median post gets 3x-10x fewer views than the median frontpage post. It’s a place for more casual conversation, hopefully leading to the best ideas getting made into posts—indeed we’re working on adding an option to turn shortform posts into blogposts. This is why we never frontpage a user’s shortform feed—they rarely meet frontpage standards, and they’re not supposed to.
Just to mention this thread in particular, Gordon is well within his rights to ban users or remove their comments from his shortform posts if he wishes to, and the LW mod team will back him up when he wants to do that.
Just wanted to note that I am thinking about this exchange, hope to chime in at some point. I’m not sure whether I’m on the same page as Ben about it. May take a couple days to have time to respond in full.
Just a quick update: the mod team just chatted a bunch about this thread. There’s a few different things going on.
It’ll probably be another day before a mod follows up here.
[Mod note] I thought for a while about how shortform interacts with moderation here. When Ray initially wrote the shortform announcement post, he described the features, goals, and advice for using it, but didn’t mention moderation. Let me follow-up by saying: You’re welcome and encouraged to enforce whatever moderation guidelines you choose to set on shortform, using tools like comment removal, user bans, and such. As a reminder, see the FAQ section on moderation for instructions on how to use the mod tools. Do whatever you want to help you think your thoughts here in shortform and feel comfortable doing so.
Some background thoughts on this: In other places on the internet, being blocked locks you out of the communal conversation, but there are two factors that make it pretty different here. Firstly, banning someone from a post on LW means they can’t reply to the content they’re banned from, but it doesn’t hide your content from them or their content from you. And secondly, everyone here on LessWrong has a common frontpage where the main conversation happens—the shortform is a low-key place and a relatively unimportant part of the conversation. (You can be banned from posts on frontpage, but that action requires meeting high standards not required for shortform bans.) Relatively speaking, shortform is very low-key, and I expect the median post gets 3x-10x fewer views than the median frontpage post. It’s a place for more casual conversation, hopefully leading to the best ideas getting made into posts—indeed we’re working on adding an option to turn shortform posts into blogposts. This is why we never frontpage a user’s shortform feed—they rarely meet frontpage standards, and they’re not supposed to.
Just to mention this thread in particular, Gordon is well within his rights to ban users or remove their comments from his shortform posts if he wishes to, and the LW mod team will back him up when he wants to do that.