Update: I corresponded with Aaron Gertler & Oliver Habryka about this. Some things I learned below.
Was the comment author informed that their comment was being deleted?
Comment authors receive an automatically generated notice when their comment is deleted by a moderator.
Did the comment author consent to have their comment deleted?
As we discussed this, I realized that “consent” is not very coherent in this context, as being a moderator means being empowered to take actions that sometimes cut against the desires of content authors.
There seems to be a pretty fundamental tension between a “freedom of expression” consideration & a “mods are empowered to take actions that maintain discourse norms” consideration.
It’s not obvious where on that tradeoff curve is ideal for the EA Forum (I biased more towards “free expression”, Oli biased more towards “empowered mods”).
What about the comment led to it being deleted by a mod?
The deleted comment was by a former CFAR instructor about their experience working at CFAR. It included a lot of details specific to CFAR; my understanding is that it was deleted to avoid having the discussion of burnout be all about CFAR.
I still don’t really understand the case for deleting a comment like this (probably because I weight the “free expression” consideration higher than the Forum mods seem to).
It seems like comments are being deleted by mods infrequently enough that this isn’t particularly worrisome.
Update: I corresponded with Aaron Gertler & Oliver Habryka about this. Some things I learned below.
Comment authors receive an automatically generated notice when their comment is deleted by a moderator.
As we discussed this, I realized that “consent” is not very coherent in this context, as being a moderator means being empowered to take actions that sometimes cut against the desires of content authors.
There seems to be a pretty fundamental tension between a “freedom of expression” consideration & a “mods are empowered to take actions that maintain discourse norms” consideration.
It’s not obvious where on that tradeoff curve is ideal for the EA Forum (I biased more towards “free expression”, Oli biased more towards “empowered mods”).
The deleted comment was by a former CFAR instructor about their experience working at CFAR. It included a lot of details specific to CFAR; my understanding is that it was deleted to avoid having the discussion of burnout be all about CFAR.
I still don’t really understand the case for deleting a comment like this (probably because I weight the “free expression” consideration higher than the Forum mods seem to).
It seems like comments are being deleted by mods infrequently enough that this isn’t particularly worrisome.