Of course, it’s true that they could ignore serious criticism is they wanted to, but my sense is that people actually quite often feel unable to ignore criticism.
As someone sympathetic to many of Habryka’s positions, while also disagreeing with many of Habryka’s positions, my immediate reaction to this was “well that seems like a bad thing”, c.f.
shallow criticism often gets valorized
I’d feel differently if you had said “people feel obliged to take criticism seriously if it points at a real problem” or something like that, but I agree with you that the mechanism is more like “people are unable to ignore criticism irrespective of its quality” (the popularity of the criticism matters, but sadly that is only weakly correlated with quality).
I appreciate you sharing your views on this! I agree that as a whole, this is suboptimal.
I don’t currently feel confident enough about the take that “shallow criticism often gets valorized” to prioritize tackling it, though I am spending some time thinking about moderation and managing user-generated content and I expect that the mod team (including myself) will discuss how we’d like to handle critical comments, so this will probably come up in our discussions.
I’m kind of worried that there’s not necessarily an objective truth to how shallow/low-quality any particular criticism is, and I personally would prefer to err on the side of allowing more criticism. So it’s possible that not much changes in the public discourse, and any interventions we do may need to be behind the scenes (such as our team spending more time talking with people who get criticized).
As someone sympathetic to many of Habryka’s positions, while also disagreeing with many of Habryka’s positions, my immediate reaction to this was “well that seems like a bad thing”, c.f.
I’d feel differently if you had said “people feel obliged to take criticism seriously if it points at a real problem” or something like that, but I agree with you that the mechanism is more like “people are unable to ignore criticism irrespective of its quality” (the popularity of the criticism matters, but sadly that is only weakly correlated with quality).
I appreciate you sharing your views on this! I agree that as a whole, this is suboptimal.
I don’t currently feel confident enough about the take that “shallow criticism often gets valorized” to prioritize tackling it, though I am spending some time thinking about moderation and managing user-generated content and I expect that the mod team (including myself) will discuss how we’d like to handle critical comments, so this will probably come up in our discussions.
I’m kind of worried that there’s not necessarily an objective truth to how shallow/low-quality any particular criticism is, and I personally would prefer to err on the side of allowing more criticism. So it’s possible that not much changes in the public discourse, and any interventions we do may need to be behind the scenes (such as our team spending more time talking with people who get criticized).