I strong downvoted all of this person’s recent comments (and strong downvoted my own comment you are reading) because this person’s content is toxic, borderline abusive, and I think downvoting suppresses the content.
This is the worst content I have ever seen on the forum. What makes it bad is how it steals attention by raiding EA norms and existing criticism, smearing this all into a long slur made meaningless with an endless stream of discursion/pivots/padding.
I literally just don’t want Aaron G. or someone else to spend time on this (Aaron’s comment was lavish and I think other eyeballs and thoughts will spend time on this).
Separately and additionally, I can justify the downvoting by terrible content/lack of modesty/etc.
I am not “friends with Aaron” or anything like that. I’m not virtuous or anything like that.
I’ve upvoted most of Holocron’s comments on this thread. They’re not perfect, but I think they deserve a better response than this. (My votes were based on comment quality, not just because I wanted to reverse downvotes.)
Mass-downvoting everything a person writes is against the Forum’s rules. If you disagree this vehemently with someone, explain why (in more detail than “this person’s content is toxic” — I’ve read all of their comments and I have no idea what you mean).
I’m discussing this comment with our moderation team to see if we want to take further action.
Sometimes, when someone believes they perceive ill-intent of a certain character, they will react very strongly, so if they are wrong, this can be very inappropriate.
Thanks Aaron, I’m happy to see this is an actively enforced community norm. I must admit that not knowing that it was a norm, in I did downvote comments in response, then subsequently propose a monitoring system (or even a system warning against this as it’s being done). Will undo (or feel free to undo on my behalf) downvotes.
If you have feedback on making comments more great, please let me know!
I’ll leave your votes to you — we don’t actively remove votes unless the circumstances are extreme (e.g. removing all votes from a sockpuppet account someone used to upvote their own content).
I am very sorry you feel that way. I hope that by starting off my comment with “My apologies for the extended delay in response! I appreciate the engagement” I’m not indicating I’m “toxic” and “borderline abusive.”
It’s very concerning to see continual inaction on these matters since I care about the future of this movement and the world, so when bringing up long unaddressed problems (which you seem to be implicitly recognizing as somewhat valid) I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take a more critical tone. I’m fairly confident I can find a lot of content that is written in much more severe a manner on this forum and most certainly on LessWrong.
How exactly am I “raiding EA norms?” In my communication style and terminology? Doesn’t seem like a problem to me even if that was the case.
I literally just don’t want Aaron G. or someone else to spend time on this (Aaron’s comment was lavish and I think other eyeballs and thoughts will spend time on this).
You wish for people to ignore legitimate feedback, and to suppress it with downvoting? That doesn’t sound like a way for a movement to improve. I do appreciate Aaron’s engagement. While I think he may have misunderstood certain points I was trying to make, his information was legitimately helpful, nonetheless as indicated by the other commenter on this thread.
While this may not get much engagement, as you seem to recognize, there are very legitimate issues here, and a complete lack of action on multiple fronts. My views most certainly mirror those in the community, even recent EA forum posts alluding at similar ideas.
I think that pointing out legitimate areas of potential improvement should be valued in communities, and it should be acceptable to take somewhat critical tones as long as the intent is to not cause any emotional harm.
Unfortunately I don’t have an unlimited amount of time every day to refine my tone and write detailed writeups on the lack of progress happening on several key fronts, given my low confidence that this is sufficient to induce change, as evidenced by all of the “existing criticism” that you are talking about.
Following up on my earlier comment: Because of the clear violation of the Forum’s rules, we’re issuing a two-week ban to Charles, starting today.
While he expressed an intent to step away from the Forum for a while, and I appreciate his walking back the original comment, we don’t want a voluntary self-defined commitment to preempt an actual ban in cases like this.
I firmly believe that such “suppression,” especially if done unilaterally by a single person, is exceptionally likely to be harmful. I strongly condemn such actions.
Furthermore, this is an ineffective strategy given that I can simply (and probably should) write up additional top-level posts that contain other informed views on EA.
I strong downvoted all of this person’s recent comments (and strong downvoted my own comment you are reading) because this person’s content is toxic, borderline abusive, and I think downvoting suppresses the content.
This is the worst content I have ever seen on the forum. What makes it bad is how it steals attention by raiding EA norms and existing criticism, smearing this all into a long slur made meaningless with an endless stream of discursion/pivots/padding.
I literally just don’t want Aaron G. or someone else to spend time on this (Aaron’s comment was lavish and I think other eyeballs and thoughts will spend time on this).
Separately and additionally, I can justify the downvoting by terrible content/lack of modesty/etc.
I am not “friends with Aaron” or anything like that. I’m not virtuous or anything like that.
I’ve upvoted most of Holocron’s comments on this thread. They’re not perfect, but I think they deserve a better response than this. (My votes were based on comment quality, not just because I wanted to reverse downvotes.)
Mass-downvoting everything a person writes is against the Forum’s rules. If you disagree this vehemently with someone, explain why (in more detail than “this person’s content is toxic” — I’ve read all of their comments and I have no idea what you mean).
I’m discussing this comment with our moderation team to see if we want to take further action.
My behavior above was a major mistake.
Sometimes, when someone believes they perceive ill-intent of a certain character, they will react very strongly, so if they are wrong, this can be very inappropriate.
I won’t be on the forum for a while.
Thank you for your generous efforts.
Thanks Aaron, I’m happy to see this is an actively enforced community norm. I must admit that not knowing that it was a norm, in I did downvote comments in response, then subsequently propose a monitoring system (or even a system warning against this as it’s being done). Will undo (or feel free to undo on my behalf) downvotes.
If you have feedback on making comments more great, please let me know!
I’ll leave your votes to you — we don’t actively remove votes unless the circumstances are extreme (e.g. removing all votes from a sockpuppet account someone used to upvote their own content).
Hi Charles,
I am very sorry you feel that way. I hope that by starting off my comment with “My apologies for the extended delay in response! I appreciate the engagement” I’m not indicating I’m “toxic” and “borderline abusive.”
It’s very concerning to see continual inaction on these matters since I care about the future of this movement and the world, so when bringing up long unaddressed problems (which you seem to be implicitly recognizing as somewhat valid) I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take a more critical tone. I’m fairly confident I can find a lot of content that is written in much more severe a manner on this forum and most certainly on LessWrong.
How exactly am I “raiding EA norms?” In my communication style and terminology? Doesn’t seem like a problem to me even if that was the case.
You wish for people to ignore legitimate feedback, and to suppress it with downvoting? That doesn’t sound like a way for a movement to improve. I do appreciate Aaron’s engagement. While I think he may have misunderstood certain points I was trying to make, his information was legitimately helpful, nonetheless as indicated by the other commenter on this thread.
While this may not get much engagement, as you seem to recognize, there are very legitimate issues here, and a complete lack of action on multiple fronts. My views most certainly mirror those in the community, even recent EA forum posts alluding at similar ideas.
I think that pointing out legitimate areas of potential improvement should be valued in communities, and it should be acceptable to take somewhat critical tones as long as the intent is to not cause any emotional harm.
Unfortunately I don’t have an unlimited amount of time every day to refine my tone and write detailed writeups on the lack of progress happening on several key fronts, given my low confidence that this is sufficient to induce change, as evidenced by all of the “existing criticism” that you are talking about.
Following up on my earlier comment: Because of the clear violation of the Forum’s rules, we’re issuing a two-week ban to Charles, starting today.
While he expressed an intent to step away from the Forum for a while, and I appreciate his walking back the original comment, we don’t want a voluntary self-defined commitment to preempt an actual ban in cases like this.
I firmly believe that such “suppression,” especially if done unilaterally by a single person, is exceptionally likely to be harmful. I strongly condemn such actions.
Furthermore, this is an ineffective strategy given that I can simply (and probably should) write up additional top-level posts that contain other informed views on EA.