
Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism - llambda
http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/
======
einhverfr
As a permaculture fan, I say well kept gardens die by being too homogeneous
and rigidly ordered, rather than alive, organic, and vital. Layer plants in
space and time and select them appropriately, and you can leave them
unattended for months on end.

Well-layered gardens (like food forests but also my own flower gardens which
_never_ get weeded) also better support their members as each plant fills
functions which help the other plants.

We need well-layered on-line communities, ones where each layer supports all
others in an interdependent web. In such a community, trolls just simply don't
show up. There is no room for them. As the permaculturists say, all of life's
problems can be solved in a garden.

Lest you doubt my bit about troll-free communities, six years in, I have yet
to have to take action against trolls in the LedgerSMB community. I have also
never seen trolls on the PostgreSQL email lists.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
I'm confused - tightly focused groups with high entry requirements may be able
to get away with less moderation, but how would you create something more
general-purpose, like HN?

~~~
einhverfr
I think the question isn't general-purpose but "what is the purpose?"

If the purpose is collective economic advancement through developing awesome
software, all you have to do is support new members of the community in
getting going.

If the purpose is having fun, spirited debates, then this becomes harder.
However the same rules apply. These are:

1) Stratify the community so not everyone has an equal voice in everything.

2) Every strata has an obligation to help every other strata stay civil and
grow the community and norms together.

------
DenisM
In FIDO.net the problems were largely solved, and they remained solved for a
long time. It worked like this:

1\. Each forum has a list of rules. Not reading rules -> penalty. Breaking the
rules -> penalty.

2\. Each forum forum has a FAQ. Asking a question from FAQ -> penalty. Unless
you can show you read FAQ and there is still something to be discussed.

3\. Each forum has regularly updated off-topic list. Bringing up a topic from
this list -> penalty. Moderator keeps the offtopics up to date,
adding/removing things as needed to maintain calm.

4\. Arguing with moderator or comoderators in public -> penalty. All arguments
should go into private messages.

5\. Telling others what they can and cannot say (usurping moderator's power)
-> penalty. All complains should go into private mail.

6\. Moderator is usually elected (if public forum) or self-appointed (if he
owns the forum). The former can be impeached. The latter can be ignored by
creating an alternative forum.

7\. Moderator appoints co-moderators. If comoderators misbehave, moderator
alone can overrule.

8\. Penalties accumulate, yielding bannination.

The system worked well because bannination was real - most people on FIDO had
real identities. No reason one can't do the same with facebook logins now.

~~~
DrJokepu
FidoNet was network governed by a group petty, power-hungry and insecure
moderators posing as lords of the manor. It was really, really sad. It worked
well in the sense a prison colony could work well. It's a good thing that the
whole thing has pretty much died and replaced by the much bigger and more
diverse Web.

~~~
DenisM
In my corner of the FIDO moderators were harsh but just. I find it that
generally people appreciate tyranny when it leads to excellent result where it
matters, in this case quality discussion on various topics.

------
greggman
downvoting is just as much a problem with fools as well. A good downvote is
when a post/comment is abusive or pointless. A bad downvote is when the voter
disagrees with the opinion expressed. Mention Microsoft on slashdot you'll get
downvoted, period. Mention VisualBasic on any tech forum you'll get downvotes
regardless of the point you're trying to make.

Eventually you learn to stop trying to present alternative points of view and
just go with the flow or leave because the "fools" are now in charge of the
downvoting.

~~~
tokenadult
_A good downvote is when a post/comment is abusive or pointless. A bad
downvote is when the voter disagrees with the opinion expressed._

At least 1568 days ago, the site founder pg was of a different opinion. He
wrote,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171>

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously
the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable
that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness.

"It only becomes abuse when people resort to karma bombing: downvoting a lot
of comments by one user without reading them in order to subtract maximum
karma. Fortunately we now have several levels of software to protect against
that."

My own analysis of the issue is that if I receive a downvote, I'm curious
about why I received it. I understand that not everyone shares all of my
opinions, but perhaps if one of my comments is downvoted, I can learn
something about how to express my opinions so that they are allowed to stand,
without people feeling they have to go out of their way to vote them down. Any
time I have a comment with negative karma (which is a rare occurrence), I look
back on what I said, and think about what I can learn from the other comments
in the same thread and how I might express myself better the next time. I try
to learn from the people who disagree with me as well as from the people who
agree with me.

~~~
sounds
Thank you for quoting the comment more fully. I've seen it paraphrased too
succinctly as "pg says downvotes can mean disagree."

Although pg hasn't implemented a change to this effect, I believe he would
agree that -- "people feeling they have to go out of their way to vote them
down" -- implies a downvote should be more work than an upvote.

I think a downvote should require a response to the parent comment that:

1\. contains at least 15 English words, excluding quoted phrases

2\. quotes at least min(25% of entire comment, 5 consecutive words) of the
parent comment

3\. meets current downvote requirements (karma and downvote bombing
protections spring to mind immediately)

For the sake of argument, such a "required downvote comment" could contribute
almost nothing -- but it would still reduce downvotes. An example of a really
bad downvote comment on this comment might be:

    
    
      > a change to this effect
      
      This is HN, not reddit. Um, did you read the article? I down voted you.
    

The 15 English word requirement sort of requires some sort of explanation.
Does anyone think this would help?

~~~
mquander
I think this is an actively bad idea. If I had to reply to a comment,
explaining why the comment is bad, then the most likely scenario is that the
writer replies, arguing with me, and I reply, and now the thread is full of a
bunch of bullshit that nobody wants to read. Multiply this by ten per post.

If the downvote reason was only visible to the writer, then I could go for
that. But it's ridiculous to make a rule that drives people to have huge off-
topic flamewars in the middle of a comments section.

~~~
sounds
Agreed, and good suggestion.

Make the downvote reason only visible to the writer, and do not allow the
writer to reply to the downvote reason - the system already heavily favors
upvotes over downvotes, so that writers can just shrug off the downvotes.

The main thrust of my suggestion is to make downvoting even harder.

------
galfarragem
I'm new here.

In my opinion HN has the most advanced online community control system that I
know. For example I cannot downvote. That's great. I didn't contribute enough
to have that previlege yet, I'm still adapting to community standards. I don't
want my mistakes to weaken the community standards, the same standards that
made me want to join. If the core members don't think I'm contributing I agree
that they should have the power to weaken me. Some control in one website is
not censorship. It WAS MY CHOICE to join this community, I didn't create it.
If I'm not happy at any moment I'm free to go. I'm just being banned from a
community, I'm not being banned from internet, that would be censorship. There
are still thousands of other communities to belong or even start a new one.

This is different from censorship in one country. There you have right to
belong cause you borned there, it WASN'T YOUR CHOICE to join. You are already
a core member. You have the same rights as everybody else to establish the
standards. You need a place to exist.

edit: I think we can use this "logic" to analyze immigration problem.

------
Karunamon
I would give this 50 up votes if I possibly could, mostly because it struck
very close to home.

I've been in a leadership role in a couple of smallish online communities
that, on further reflection, died just because of what this article is talking
about. Fear of doing anything because of not wanting to be labeled another mod
abusing their powers, or what have you. I've been members of communities that
died or were damaged due to outright mod abuse - figure the converse is
better, right? Death through inaction and allowance is better than death
through action and disallowance, right? Intent doesn't even begin to enter
into it.. _right?_

Not so sure anymore.

So like most things in life, it's a balancing act. As a commenter on the
article said, 9 times out of 10, your guess that a comment is crap, will be
correct. Don't start second guessing yourself. You probably have a very finely
tuned crap sensor.

~~~
einhverfr
If you have a couple people in a leadership role that you share power with,
you can make sure everyone acts together and that sticky situations are
discussed beforehand. That helps manage both the impression of abuse of power
and issues in application.

------
unimpressive
>It's just one fool, and if we can't tolerate just one fool, well, we must not
be very tolerant.

Repeat after me:

    
    
      100 times I’ve sworn this oath:
      100 years I’d rather languish in a dungeon,
      100 mountains I’d rather grind to dust,
      If only I don’t have to make a fool to see the truth.
      – Bakhvalan Machmud
    

Now, the problem arises when that fool is you.

~~~
mahyarm
That kind of attitude leads to not being able to take any sort of challenging
by anyone who you label fool or inferior, be it by smarts, knowledge,
experience or other things.

~~~
unimpressive
The quote is a translation as far as I know. (The only reference to it I can
find is in a book translated from Russian about Russia.) So subtle nuances are
likely missing.

To me at least; "to make" a fool to see the truth implies that you will try
and try until you succeed. This approach is ineffective because a large
portion of people are never satisfied. (See: Pretty much any Internet drama or
argument.) And if you adopt the attitude of winning every argument, you will
almost inevitably flood communication channels with your discourse. (See: Any
HN thread where the whole page is a few outlying comments and a majority in a
threaded argument about a topic. Or a forum thread that goes on for pages
where people argue about something.) Such discourse also costs you time to
participate in and prevents you from doing more useful work. (Before writing
this comment I could have _sworn_ that Newton wrote a letter to this effect
explaining why he stopped publishing his works. But I couldn't source it (I
spent around 20 minutes trying.) so I decided that if it exists including this
comment will likely make it appear from the depths of the Internet, if it
doesn't it doesn't.) There comes a point where the best way to resolve an
argument is to either cut it short or not have it.

EDIT: A large portion of this is how one defines the word "fool" if everyone
who disagrees with you is a fool in your mind by default, then I doubt you're
going to listen to anyone who expresses disagreement. Regardless of weather or
not you engage them in conversation.

People as a general rule don't let the people they consider fools change their
mind. Unless by proxy when they learn from their actions.

------
grourk
The problem is you might identify as "fool" someone who simply doesn't agree
with you or the established groupthink. Re-read the first few paragraphs and
replace the word "fool" with "person who doesn't agree with you" -- now it
says something very different.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Now replace fool with dragon. Says something different again. Whoa!

Good mods can tell the difference between people who have other views and
idiots. If the moderators in your community of choice can't, you should
probably choose another community. But your equivocation between silencing
other viewpoints and eliminating unhealthy voices is not useful.

~~~
grourk
I upvoted you before you added the second paragraph because I thought your
joke was funny. "But your equivocation between silencing other viewpoints and
eliminating unhealthy voices is not useful." Why not? I was making the point
that it's often not easy to tell the difference.

~~~
jamesaguilar
I mean, the body of the blog post you're responding to is claiming a) that it
is, and b) that even when it isn't, you can just leave a poorly modded
community. In the face of that, I don't find "replace-the-word" rhetoric very
compelling.

~~~
stcredzero
What are the factors that would make it compelling?

~~~
jamesaguilar
If it were shown that even in good communities with solid mods, a primary use
of moderating power was to silence dissent.

For example, in this community, anti-startup articles get posted occasionally.
I'd expect to see far more dead comments from people who post agreement with
such articles. But I browse with showdead on, and I see no such thing.

Basically, the rhetoric needs to line up with the evidence at hand. If it
doesn't, it's unsound.

~~~
stcredzero
Speaking of moderating power, it appears I've been down-modded for asking a
clarifying question out of genuine curiosity.

~~~
jamesaguilar
'twasn't me. That being said, whoever downmodded you probably felt it should
be obvious.

~~~
stcredzero
It was more obvious, re-reading the parent post and noting the phrase, "In the
face of that." My reading of your comment without absorbing the phrase's
implications prompted the question.

------
laughinghan
Is it just me, or does this _reek_ of elitism?

 _...into this garden comes a fool...Then another fool joins, and the two
fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members,
those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere,
leave..._

It reads to me like the fool is somehow intrinsically, immutably subhuman
compared to the "knowledgeable and interested folk". It's as if we weren't all
once not knowledgeable, as if the non-knowledgeable fool can never become
knowledgeable. I'd say that compared to a disinterested fool, a non-
knowledgeable fool who's interested and is attracted to this garden of "high
quality speech" is easier to fix.

The conclusion seems to go against everything Less Wrong is about. It reads to
me like, "biases? Nah, I bet nine times out of ten you're not biased at all.
Downvote away!"

~~~
tomjen3
So what if it is elitism?

Elitism is a great thing provided that the elites become elites not by reason
of birth, but because they are the most skilled or knowledgeable.

You don't have an issue with elitism when it comes to doctors, do you?

No forum I know of has lasted long enough to a second generation of users.

------
nohat
The large number of people willing to take Brian Hamacheck's word (without
response or evidence) on the "who's here" versus "who's near me" dispute seems
relevant to me. The number of people offering to donate is even more
disturbing.

~~~
Alex3917
What's even more disturbing is reading the comments of the arrest section on
local newspapers. 95% of the people commenting seem to make up these elaborate
fantasy scenarios of what happened in their heads and then decide people's
guilt or innocence based on that.

~~~
stcredzero
Welcome to the human condition. Evidently, the human imagination predicts well
in the context of small family groups in the wilderness. Have a society with
enough complexity to merit laws, and the imagination isn't so finely tuned.

~~~
Eliezer
What makes you think it works on small family groups? All we can conclude from
ev-psych is that making stuff up didn't cost the imaginers much reproductive
success personally - we have no idea what it did to the actual victims having
stories made up about them.

~~~
stcredzero
I suspect that in small family groups in the wilderness, much more of our
imaginings concern the environment and non-human agency, and fewer concern the
actions of the group.

------
ralfd
That is also the reason why /r/askscience is one of the better subreddits:

<http://imgur.com/JGqhf.png>

~~~
dfc
For those of us unfamiliar with reddit and /r/askscience in particular can you
elaborate?

~~~
repsilat
Posts in reddit are partitioned into "subreddits". Each submission is made to
one subreddit, though multiple submissions can be made to spread items to
different communities. Each subreddit is essentially like Hacker News, a list
of ranked links with comments all flavoured by some common theme. The front
page of reddit aggregates posts from your preferred subreddits (or a default
list of popular subs for users who aren't logged in).

/r/askscience is a subreddit in which users can ask real scientists questions
about science. It's a less-structured StackOverflow, essentially. Submissions
are somewhat moderated, comments are more heavily moderated. Top-level
comments are not allowed to be jokes, and offending comments are removed. On-
topic jokes in other places are allowed, but too much joking around in a
thread will often lead to all of the comments in the thread being removed.
Deleted comments are replaced by "Comment removed" tombstones, and seeing
whole trees of these tombstones is a decent reminder to stay on-topic.

The CSS of the subreddit also encourages the community to maintain their
standards. When upvoting, downvoting, commenting etc, users are reminded what
those actions represent in the community. There is also an informal hierarchy
of posters, with experts' comments being identified with short descriptions of
their specialisations. The posts of these users are given more weight by the
community, but the posters are held to somewhat higher standards.

------
stcredzero
This is a two-edged sword. Also keep in mind, "Who watches the Watchmen?" The
power to ban can also be used to turn a group into a personal fief. As in many
things, the optimum path is a middle one. Checks and balances are needed.

Sometimes the ban hammer is wielded by those with troll ethics.

~~~
Zakharov
The article addresses this. Basically, it's better to risk the small chance of
an abusive mod than the large chance of a gradual decay.

------
n-ion
That's one way to look at it... Another is just the phenomena of fads. No
matter how well-kept the garden of slashdot/digg/reddit/HN they all have a
time horizon. Just enjoy it while it lasts.

~~~
stinkytaco
We all have the desire to analyze the things in our life (groups of friends,
clubs, companies, communities) that have died. I do it all the time. I wonder
what happened to community "x" that I was a part of and really enjoyed and
miss. You look around at your neighborhood or city and see permanence and
figure your community must have had something wrong with it.

Of course, the barriers to entry and exit for an online community are very
low. People change, the time they have available changes, their interests
change, whatever. They exit the community as easily as they entered it. Soon
the community dies. Your town or neighborhood isn't so easily left or entered
so the stakes are much higher.

Sometimes communities just get old and people leave. Pretty soon they're gone.

------
thebooktocome
Ironically LessWrong is going through a phase of struggling with increasingly
meddlesome trolls, without terribly much moderation in evidence.

~~~
nohat
A community is going through exactly what he was warning about? That's not
irony.

~~~
thebooktocome
Not just any community; the community the author was trying to establish by
writing this essay (along with the others). That's tragic irony.

~~~
drostie
It perhaps also fulfills that story-role, yes. Nonetheless, it shouldn't be
contrary to your expectations, if you apply a little wisdom.

I find in my own case that the things which bug me about others are things
which deeply bug me about myself. Whenever I find my heart beating a little
harder and my brow a little furrowed, I try to relax, and take a deep breath,
and see what it is within _me_ which _resonates_ so strongly against the error
that I have seen. I am normally quite patient with error, and this usually
causes my impatience.

Personally, I feel this "what is wrong with _me_ " redirection is a much
deeper lesson than the fact that harsh moderation can help keep a community
together. First off, it is a discipline which can help keep _us_ together, as
opposed to the communities we moderate. And second, because the original
lesson comes embedded in a much deeper truth, which Eliezer doesn't seem to
acknowledge. I would like to spend a moment on this:

The deeper truth is that _love is transformative_ , that to love is to change
both yourself and your beloved. The original post just notes that if a
moderator isn't moderating, they aren't loving their community. True enough.
It is important, however, to understand that transformation is not
_sufficient_ for love: that we all know people who do use their authority too
far.

Well-kept gardens don't die due to pacifism. That's stupid -- if they did,
then they weren't "well-kept". But they die because they don't get the love
that they need. It doesn't matter how much you pull the weeds if you forget to
water the roots and fertilise the soil.

To any of you who wish to know whether they love their job, I will simply add
the poignant questions: when did you last transform it? And when did it last
transform you?

------
itsnotlupus
The tension between maintaining the original quality and growing the size of
the community by several orders of magnitude is, in my opinion, an unsolvable
problem.

No amount of arrow-clicking, ignore list or banning can solve this.

The easiest way to control the quality of the community is to control its
growth. Pay-wall, invites, etc. will all be vastly more useful than after-the-
fact approaches.

When the barbarians are in the walls, you've already lost.

------
mmanfrin
Things just haven't been the same since September '93.

------
MrVitaliy
Interestingly, the story strikes as a completely opposite of 4chan.org/sci/
where among army of trolls many intellectuals for many years discuss
interesting ideas.

Maybe it's the community size, maybe it's new technology (comment voting, bans
and such) but I have a hunch that fools are not a problem.

~~~
hollerith
Does 4chan.org/sci/ have comment voting? If not, I cannot make sense out of
your comment.

EDIT: replaced period with question mark in my first sentence.

~~~
MrVitaliy
Maybe it's due to 4chan's huge community size that fools are not a problem as
they seem in smaller communities. Additionally, there is a whole slew of tools
to identify (and punish) fools such as karma, comment voting, etc which
perhaps weren't as widely available in the past.

4chan has mods who routinely remove child-porn and other questionable, non-
related material. <http://www.4chan.org/faq#whomod>

------
mischov
> It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion .... But into this
> garden comes a fool [quoted from the original article]

Assuming this isn't a community of those who come out of the womb enlightened,
aren't most of us living in some state of foolishness?

I suppose it might be possible to sustain a community by continuously
attracting new enlightened individuals, but wouldn't it be more practical to
do what most societies do and teach (at least some of) the fools until they
aren't fools any longer?

------
j1o1h1n
These little localised gardens, their upvotes and downvotes have lost the
ancient pure glory of USENET and the killfile.

"This means all your question, comments, or pleas for help will go unheard...
or, even worse, answered by idiots."

------
1123581321
I think he meant that unkempt gardens die. Well-kept gardens are curated or
moderated.

------
dfc
The only online community I can think of that this does not apply to is
advogato.

------
batista
Clay Shirky's "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" is also a very good read on the
matter:

<http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html>

