Speculative feature request: anonymous commenting and private commenting
Sometimes people might want to comment anonymously because they want to say something that could hurt their reputation or relationships, or affect the response to the criticism in an undesirable way. For example,. OpenPhil staff criticising a CEA or 80K post would have awkward dynamics because OpenPhil funds these organizations partly. Having an option to comment anonymously (but let the default be with names) will allow more free speech.
Relatedly, some comments could be marked as “only readable by the author”, because it’s a remark about sensitive information. For example, feedback on someone’s writing style or a warning about information hazards when the warning itself is also an information hazard. A risk of this feature is that it will be overused, which reduces how much information is spread to all the readers.
Meta: not sure if this thread is the best for these feature requests, but I don’t know where else :)
Relatedly, some comments could be marked as “only readable by the author”, because it’s a remark about sensitive information. For example, feedback on someone’s writing style or a warning about information hazards when the warning itself is also an information hazard. A risk of this feature is that it will be overused, which reduces how much information is spread to all the readers.
Forgive me if I’m being slow, but wouldn’t private messages (already in the LW2 codebase) accomplish this?
Yes you’re right and I had not thought of it. I still think private commenting has a slight benefit because it lowers the barrier (I frequently comment on posts, but wouldn’t send someone a private message). However, I don’t think the benefit is big enough to put effort into.
I agree that it’s sometimes useful for people to be able to post anonymously. Currently this is done by people creating separate anonymous accounts, which seems like a reasonable work-around. (And +1 to Greg’s comment about your second use case.)
(I’m not the OP.) How about nobody knows who submits it but the comment only appears if the mods approve it? And to deter rule-violating comments, maybe only people with a certain level of karma should be allowed to submit anonymous comments and they should lose a certain amount of karma if the comment is rejected (though we’d have to figure out how to hide that loss from the moderators)?
I would first opt for the low-effort approach: allow anonymous commenting and only have mods step in when it’s reported. If this doesn’t work, then you could have all anonymous comments moderated.
I think having a certain level of karma (not high) is a good addition.
Speculative feature request: anonymous commenting and private commenting
Sometimes people might want to comment anonymously because they want to say something that could hurt their reputation or relationships, or affect the response to the criticism in an undesirable way. For example,. OpenPhil staff criticising a CEA or 80K post would have awkward dynamics because OpenPhil funds these organizations partly. Having an option to comment anonymously (but let the default be with names) will allow more free speech.
Relatedly, some comments could be marked as “only readable by the author”, because it’s a remark about sensitive information. For example, feedback on someone’s writing style or a warning about information hazards when the warning itself is also an information hazard. A risk of this feature is that it will be overused, which reduces how much information is spread to all the readers.
Meta: not sure if this thread is the best for these feature requests, but I don’t know where else :)
Forgive me if I’m being slow, but wouldn’t private messages (already in the LW2 codebase) accomplish this?
Yes you’re right and I had not thought of it. I still think private commenting has a slight benefit because it lowers the barrier (I frequently comment on posts, but wouldn’t send someone a private message). However, I don’t think the benefit is big enough to put effort into.
I agree that it’s sometimes useful for people to be able to post anonymously. Currently this is done by people creating separate anonymous accounts, which seems like a reasonable work-around. (And +1 to Greg’s comment about your second use case.)
How anonymous would you want this to be? Like would the mods still know who posted it?
(I’m not the OP.) How about nobody knows who submits it but the comment only appears if the mods approve it? And to deter rule-violating comments, maybe only people with a certain level of karma should be allowed to submit anonymous comments and they should lose a certain amount of karma if the comment is rejected (though we’d have to figure out how to hide that loss from the moderators)?
I would first opt for the low-effort approach: allow anonymous commenting and only have mods step in when it’s reported. If this doesn’t work, then you could have all anonymous comments moderated.
I think having a certain level of karma (not high) is a good addition.
I think the mods might know, as long as we won’t have too many mods. I have no strong opinion either way.