Well, I don’t do that, clearly, since I don’t run such an Internet forum.
Less trivially, though… yeah, I suspect I would do so. The tendency to take more seriously people whose faces I can see is pretty strong. Especially if it were a case like this one, where what the RL people are telling me synchronizes better with what I want to do in the first place, and thus gives me a plausible-feeling justification for doing it.
I suspect you’re not really asking me what I do, though, so much as implicitly suggesting that what EY is doing is the wrong thing to do… that the admins ought to attend more to commenters and voters who are actually participating on the thread, rather than attending primarily to the folks who attend the minicamp or Alicorn’s dinner parties.
If so, I don’t think it’s that simple. Fundamentally it depends on whether LW’s sponsors want it to be a forum that demonstrates and teaches superior Internet discourse or whether it wants to be a forum for people interested in rational thinking to discuss stuff they like to discuss. If it’s the latter, then democracy is appropriate. If it’s the former, then purging stuff that fails to demonstrate superior Internet discourse is appropriate.
LW has seemed uncertain about which role it is playing for as long as I’ve been here.
LW has seemed uncertain about which role it is playing for as long as I’ve been here.
Yes, that’s certainly the single largest problem. If the LW moderators decided on their goals for the site, and committed to a plan for achieving those goals, the meta-tedium would be significantly reduced. The way it’s currently being done, there’s too much risk of overlap between run of the mill moderation squabbles and the pernicious Eliezer Yudkowsky cult/anticult squabbles.
Even when the topic on which you are receiving input is how to run an internet forum (on which the real-life folks don’t post)?
Well, I don’t do that, clearly, since I don’t run such an Internet forum.
Less trivially, though… yeah, I suspect I would do so. The tendency to take more seriously people whose faces I can see is pretty strong. Especially if it were a case like this one, where what the RL people are telling me synchronizes better with what I want to do in the first place, and thus gives me a plausible-feeling justification for doing it.
I suspect you’re not really asking me what I do, though, so much as implicitly suggesting that what EY is doing is the wrong thing to do… that the admins ought to attend more to commenters and voters who are actually participating on the thread, rather than attending primarily to the folks who attend the minicamp or Alicorn’s dinner parties.
If so, I don’t think it’s that simple. Fundamentally it depends on whether LW’s sponsors want it to be a forum that demonstrates and teaches superior Internet discourse or whether it wants to be a forum for people interested in rational thinking to discuss stuff they like to discuss. If it’s the latter, then democracy is appropriate. If it’s the former, then purging stuff that fails to demonstrate superior Internet discourse is appropriate.
LW has seemed uncertain about which role it is playing for as long as I’ve been here.
Yes, that’s certainly the single largest problem. If the LW moderators decided on their goals for the site, and committed to a plan for achieving those goals, the meta-tedium would be significantly reduced. The way it’s currently being done, there’s too much risk of overlap between run of the mill moderation squabbles and the pernicious Eliezer Yudkowsky cult/anticult squabbles.