Richard Ngo has a selection of open-questions in his recent post. One question that caught my eye:
How much censorship is the EA forum doing (e.g. of thought experiments) and why?
I originally created this account to share a thought experiment I suspected might be a little too ‘out there’ for the moderation team. Indeed, it was briefly redacted and didn’t appear in the comment section for a while (it does now). It was, admittedly, a slightly confrontational point and I don’t begrudge the moderation team for censoring it. They were patient and transparent in explaining why it was briefly redacted. You can read the comment and probably guess correctly why it was flagged.
Still, I am curious to hear of other cases like this. My guess is that in most of them, the average forum reader will side with the moderation team.
LessWrong publishes most of their rejected posts and comments on a separate webpage. I say ‘most’ as I suspect infohazards are censored from that list. I would be interested to hear the EA forum’s moderation team’s thoughts on this approach/whether it’s something they’ve considered, should they read this and have time to respond.[1]
Creating such a page would also allow them to collect on Ngo’s bounty, since they would be answer both how much censorship they do and (assuming they attach moderation notes) why
However, some content (like your first comment) requires additional back and forth internally (such as checking with moderators) and/or with the new user. This process involves various non-obvious judgement calls, which is what caused a long delay between your submitting the comment and us reaching out to you (plus the fact that many people were out over the winter holidays). In the case of your comment, we asked you to edit it and you didn’t respond to us or edit the comment for over a week, and then our facilitator felt bad for keeping you in the queue for so long so they approved your comment.
We currently do not use the rejected content feature that LW uses. Instead, almost all[1] of the content that may have been rejected under their system ends up appearing on the rest of our site, and we currently mostly rely on users voting to make content more or less visible (for example, karma affects where a post is displayed on the Frontpage). I plan to seriously consider whether we should start using the rejected content feature here soon; if so, then I expect that we’ll have the same page set up.
I think that, if we had been using the rejected content feature, the right move would have been for us to reject your comment instead of approving it.
My guess is that there are edge cases, but in practice we keep our queue clear, so my understanding is that users are typically not in limbo for more than a few days. Things like spam are not rejected — accounts that post spam are banned.
Thanks for taking the time to respond thoroughly! I sincerely appreciate that.
I can’t quite remember when I read the message sent from the facilitator, but my memory is that it was after the comment was restored (feel free to check on your end if that’s possible). I was slightly bummed out that a comment which took some effort to write was rejected and wasn’t super motivated to respond defending it.
At the time, I was aware that the metaphor was abrasive, but hoped I had sanded off the edges by adding a disclaimer at the start. It can be difficult to balance ‘writing the thing I honestly believe’ with ‘not upset anybody or make them uncomfortable when discussing moral issues 100% of the time.’ I did hum and haw over whether I should post it, but ultimately decided that most people wouldn’t be upset by the metaphor or would even agree with it’s accuracy (given that the meat/dairy industries are both rife with animal sexual abuse). Seeing as how it was interpreted as flame bait / trolling, I somewhat regret posting it.
On a final note; am I able to ask why you would reject it? I.e. do you believe I was trolling or flame baiting? I won’t be insulted either way, but would find it useful going forward to know how I should better write my comments.
Two final notes:
• I am pleased to hear you are considering a rejected content feature.
• I used the word ‘censorship’ in my original short form post and want to underscore that I don’t think it’s intrinsically bad to censor. I.e. the moderation team should be doing some level of censorship (and I suspect most forum users would agree).
Thanks for the feedback! I think moderation is tricky and I’m relatively new at it myself. I’m sad at how long users can get stuck in the queue, and I’d love to improve how fast we resolve moderation questions, but where exactly we draw these lines will probably be a learning process for me, and we’ll continue to iterate on that.
It looks like you submitted the comment on Dec 17, and our facilitator messaged you on Jan 6 (the delay partly being due to people being out for the holidays), and then they approved your comment a little over a week after messaging you. Yeah I agree that this was an edge case, and I don’t think you were being malicious, but I think you could have made your point more productively by, for example, just using “torture”.
I feel that using the rejected content feature would give our team more leeway to be opinionated about shaping the home page of our site (compared to now), and we’d feel somewhat free to reject things that don’t fit the type of discussions we want to see. For example, it looks like LW rejects posts from new users that don’t have a clear introduction. So I think if something is an edge case in the current system, then it would likely get rejected under the other system.
Richard Ngo has a selection of open-questions in his recent post. One question that caught my eye:
I originally created this account to share a thought experiment I suspected might be a little too ‘out there’ for the moderation team. Indeed, it was briefly redacted and didn’t appear in the comment section for a while (it does now). It was, admittedly, a slightly confrontational point and I don’t begrudge the moderation team for censoring it. They were patient and transparent in explaining why it was briefly redacted. You can read the comment and probably guess correctly why it was flagged.
Still, I am curious to hear of other cases like this. My guess is that in most of them, the average forum reader will side with the moderation team.
LessWrong publishes most of their rejected posts and comments on a separate webpage. I say ‘most’ as I suspect infohazards are censored from that list. I would be interested to hear the EA forum’s moderation team’s thoughts on this approach/whether it’s something they’ve considered, should they read this and have time to respond.[1]
Creating such a page would also allow them to collect on Ngo’s bounty, since they would be answer both how much censorship they do and (assuming they attach moderation notes) why
Hi! I just want to start by clarifying that a user’s first post/comment doesn’t go up immediately while our facilitators/moderators check for spam or a clear norm violation (such as posting flame bait/clear trolling). Ideally this process takes no more than a day, though we currently don’t have anyone checking new users outside of approximately US Eastern Time business hours.
However, some content (like your first comment) requires additional back and forth internally (such as checking with moderators) and/or with the new user. This process involves various non-obvious judgement calls, which is what caused a long delay between your submitting the comment and us reaching out to you (plus the fact that many people were out over the winter holidays). In the case of your comment, we asked you to edit it and you didn’t respond to us or edit the comment for over a week, and then our facilitator felt bad for keeping you in the queue for so long so they approved your comment.
We currently do not use the rejected content feature that LW uses. Instead, almost all[1] of the content that may have been rejected under their system ends up appearing on the rest of our site, and we currently mostly rely on users voting to make content more or less visible (for example, karma affects where a post is displayed on the Frontpage). I plan to seriously consider whether we should start using the rejected content feature here soon; if so, then I expect that we’ll have the same page set up.
I think that, if we had been using the rejected content feature, the right move would have been for us to reject your comment instead of approving it.
My guess is that there are edge cases, but in practice we keep our queue clear, so my understanding is that users are typically not in limbo for more than a few days. Things like spam are not rejected — accounts that post spam are banned.
Hello!
Thanks for taking the time to respond thoroughly! I sincerely appreciate that.
I can’t quite remember when I read the message sent from the facilitator, but my memory is that it was after the comment was restored (feel free to check on your end if that’s possible). I was slightly bummed out that a comment which took some effort to write was rejected and wasn’t super motivated to respond defending it.
At the time, I was aware that the metaphor was abrasive, but hoped I had sanded off the edges by adding a disclaimer at the start. It can be difficult to balance ‘writing the thing I honestly believe’ with ‘not upset anybody or make them uncomfortable when discussing moral issues 100% of the time.’ I did hum and haw over whether I should post it, but ultimately decided that most people wouldn’t be upset by the metaphor or would even agree with it’s accuracy (given that the meat/dairy industries are both rife with animal sexual abuse). Seeing as how it was interpreted as flame bait / trolling, I somewhat regret posting it.
On a final note; am I able to ask why you would reject it? I.e. do you believe I was trolling or flame baiting? I won’t be insulted either way, but would find it useful going forward to know how I should better write my comments.
Two final notes:
• I am pleased to hear you are considering a rejected content feature.
• I used the word ‘censorship’ in my original short form post and want to underscore that I don’t think it’s intrinsically bad to censor. I.e. the moderation team should be doing some level of censorship (and I suspect most forum users would agree).
Thanks for the feedback! I think moderation is tricky and I’m relatively new at it myself. I’m sad at how long users can get stuck in the queue, and I’d love to improve how fast we resolve moderation questions, but where exactly we draw these lines will probably be a learning process for me, and we’ll continue to iterate on that.
It looks like you submitted the comment on Dec 17, and our facilitator messaged you on Jan 6 (the delay partly being due to people being out for the holidays), and then they approved your comment a little over a week after messaging you. Yeah I agree that this was an edge case, and I don’t think you were being malicious, but I think you could have made your point more productively by, for example, just using “torture”.
I feel that using the rejected content feature would give our team more leeway to be opinionated about shaping the home page of our site (compared to now), and we’d feel somewhat free to reject things that don’t fit the type of discussions we want to see. For example, it looks like LW rejects posts from new users that don’t have a clear introduction. So I think if something is an edge case in the current system, then it would likely get rejected under the other system.