You’re not crediting the fact that having upvoted, unobjected-to libel of one’s personal character on LessWrong can be an active and ongoing hurt/threat; that in this case the LessWrong platform was being unfairly abused by Ben to make my lifeactively worse, and that this was allowed to go on for more than a week as if that hurt to me is of no consequence whatsoever.
Expecting some public action to be taken in nine days does not feel, to me, like an unreasonable request of a moderation team with at least five people on it. We’ll never know how long it would’ve taken, if I hadn’t caved and responded myself, but I think it’s reasonable to posit that it would’ve been at least a few more days, meaning something like two weeks in total.
It is the job of moderators to moderate. If, in nine days and with plenty of pointing, none of the moderators could manage to get here and just drop a quick note like “We’re going to follow up on this privately, but just for the record, this doesn’t match my reading of the quote,” then something has gone deeply wrong with moderation as a whole.
That one sentence would’ve been enough, to signal that Ben’s statement was recognized as problematic without harming Ben. Instead, users have been coming by for nine days and seeing an upvoted comment and drawing from that whatever conclusions they will—both about me and about the norms of the site as a whole.
I don’t want to engage with this too much right now, but do want to give a tiny bit more background that I don’t think settles this issue, but does complicate it a bit:
In practice, on this specific issue, the moderation team consisted of just Ray and me and not really anyone else. We discussed the issues with other moderators, but because of the high-stakes nature of this conflict, I thought that it was important that the relevant decisions and comments were made by the people who I thought had the most detailed background on both the people involved, and the long-term goals of LessWrong moderation. This usually would have also included Ben Pace, but he isn’t around for this month.
I don’t think that in retrospect (mostly implicitly) restricting moderation action on this issue to just Ray and me was a bad call, given the constraints at the time. I think criticizing us for not having scaled our moderation team better, and establishing procedures that allow everyone on the team to meaningfully contribute to this situation, is a valid criticism, and something I do think we could have done better. I also think that even with just me and Ray, being more immediately transparent would have been achievable, and something I plan to be better at in the future. But I do think the error is significantly less severe than it would have been had we had access to 5 moderators instead of just 2.
You’re not crediting the fact that having upvoted, unobjected-to libel of one’s personal character on LessWrong can be an active and ongoing hurt/threat; that in this case the LessWrong platform was being unfairly abused by Ben to make my life actively worse, and that this was allowed to go on for more than a week as if that hurt to me is of no consequence whatsoever.
Expecting some public action to be taken in nine days does not feel, to me, like an unreasonable request of a moderation team with at least five people on it. We’ll never know how long it would’ve taken, if I hadn’t caved and responded myself, but I think it’s reasonable to posit that it would’ve been at least a few more days, meaning something like two weeks in total.
It is the job of moderators to moderate. If, in nine days and with plenty of pointing, none of the moderators could manage to get here and just drop a quick note like “We’re going to follow up on this privately, but just for the record, this doesn’t match my reading of the quote,” then something has gone deeply wrong with moderation as a whole.
That one sentence would’ve been enough, to signal that Ben’s statement was recognized as problematic without harming Ben. Instead, users have been coming by for nine days and seeing an upvoted comment and drawing from that whatever conclusions they will—both about me and about the norms of the site as a whole.
I don’t want to engage with this too much right now, but do want to give a tiny bit more background that I don’t think settles this issue, but does complicate it a bit:
In practice, on this specific issue, the moderation team consisted of just Ray and me and not really anyone else. We discussed the issues with other moderators, but because of the high-stakes nature of this conflict, I thought that it was important that the relevant decisions and comments were made by the people who I thought had the most detailed background on both the people involved, and the long-term goals of LessWrong moderation. This usually would have also included Ben Pace, but he isn’t around for this month.
I don’t think that in retrospect (mostly implicitly) restricting moderation action on this issue to just Ray and me was a bad call, given the constraints at the time. I think criticizing us for not having scaled our moderation team better, and establishing procedures that allow everyone on the team to meaningfully contribute to this situation, is a valid criticism, and something I do think we could have done better. I also think that even with just me and Ray, being more immediately transparent would have been achievable, and something I plan to be better at in the future. But I do think the error is significantly less severe than it would have been had we had access to 5 moderators instead of just 2.
I appreciate this for its position in the Venn diagram of (true things) and (olive branches).
I too would have preferred it if something like this had happened.