
Well-Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism - Tomte
http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
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CM30
To be honest, while I do see his point to some degree (just about every
webmaster forum has become an utter cesspool due to a lack of moderation and a
flood of idiotic posts and signature spammers), I'd also like to point out
that being too harsh can kill a site just as quickly.

For one thing, it makes newer users feel a bit too scared to start
contributing, especially if everything slightly below quality standards get
removed immediatedly. And given that a community depends on new people as its
lifeblood, the result can easily be an ever dwindling pool of site veterans
talking among themselves til everyone loses interest and stops visiting.

So you want to remove the obvious idiots and poor contributors, while not
scaring away people who might otherwise become decent users in the process.

There's also a related issue you need to consider here, and that's that to
some degree, you need to avoid being too strict in terms of what's 'relevant'
to the community. If you've got a programming forum, it may seem tempting to
shut down any 'low quality' conversation about unrelated matters like TV or
films or sports or whatever else, since they're not related to the site. But
people don't purely talk about one thing over and over. It's best to have a
place to discuss these 'unrelated' things (with some semblance of quality
control) so as to bring the community closer together and to see other members
as friends and associates rather than just virtual colleagues.

In other words, keep quality up, but don't brutally remove anything that's
even the slightest bit dodgy or shut down everything not 100% related to the
topic, otherwise you'll likely end up with a perfectly immaculate ghost town.

~~~
DanBC
I saw a really nice post from either sama or pg or dang about /noobcomments.
Someone had suggested that was a page where new users were going to get rapid
downvotes and flags. This person said that they regularly read noobcomments
and upvote the good posts and provide advice to the others.

(I have absolutely no idea what I need to plug into the search box to find
this post. Sorry.)

------
data37
This has been posted 4 or 5 times before, with a frequency of 2 or 3 years. I
would like to add that it is not only about online communities, but it applies
to real communities as well. All of the developed communities in the world are
so pacific (not willing to defend) that it is quite easy for wilder
communities to invade. It is happening more now than before.

~~~
data37
In other words, in medieval ages, if barbarians had a simple goal of kill all
Romans and Romans had a complex rule that says kill only those persons who are
found to be harming good Romans, then obviously barbarians would win by the
simplicity of their work.

------
Karunamon
_Because I really do honestly think that if you want to downvote a comment
that seems low-quality... and yet you hesitate, wondering if maybe you 're
downvoting just because you disagree with the conclusion or dislike the
author... then nine times of ten, I bet, nine times out of ten at least, it is
a comment that really is low-quality._

Five years on Reddit (and a few more on HN) has proven beyond any possible
doubt for me that downvotes are used "9 times out of 10" more for disagreement
rather than an honest value judgement on quality.

It's simply far too easy to mentally conflate "this comment is _wrong_
(because of my own biases)" with "this comment is _low quality_ ", especially
in the midst of a heated discussion.

Speaking of biases, the author here clearly has his own. He lives in a world
where groupthink/hiveminding/circlejerking (pick your favorite term, they are
all synonymous) doesn't exist, where astroturfing never happens, where
moderators never abuse their power, where karma is always used for its stated
purpose, and where censorship isn't a documented and heinous thing.

..which is pretty hilarious when you remember this is an article about
moderation apologia.

~~~
krapp
I honestly believe that "quality" always correlates with personal biases and
collective norms.

Even the guideline for posting here - "anything that good hackers would find
interesting" \- assumes that 1) you should be a "hacker" (a subjective term,
especially on a site with as diverse a community as this) and qualifies this
with "good" (another subjective term.) Are we to assume that stories which are
popular (high karma) are necessarily posted by better hackers than those which
aren't? One should post "anything that gratifies one's intellectual
curiosity," implicitly provided one has the _correct_ sort of intellect. While
this is designed to bias the site in favor of high karma posters (and,
obviously, whatever the mods happen to want) the end result is that quality is
in the eye of the beholder.

It's all arbitrary and it's all subjective.

~~~
Karunamon
I don't think the problem is the subjectiveness as much as the knee-jerk
reaction.

If you're in a heated argument with someone, most any human's first reaction
given the ability to "punish" their opposer will be to click the downvote
button.

The mental heuristic, in our case "anything that good hackers would find
interesting", just never gets run. It's effectively dead code, because the
stack of "do I agree with this" if/then blocks happens a few hundred lines up.

It takes a lot of effort to override that reflex.

