Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Automatic Rate Limiting on LessWrong, published by Raemon on June 23, 2023 on LessWrong.

The LessWrong team recently began rolling out automatic rate limits. The general idea is if a user gets heavily downvoted, the site automatically restricts their posting and commenting privileges. (See Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism for some background on LessWrong's overall moderation philosophy)

After thinking awhile about various side-effects (see previous discussion), I designed some rate limits based on the following user metadata:

Total karma. i.e. all net upvotes/downvotes the user has ever received

Recent karma: The net karma the user received from their last 20 comments and/or posts.

Last month's karma: The karma the user received for their last 20 comments/posts within the last month (i.e. a strict subset of the "recent karma.")

Unique downvoter count: The number of individuals who've downvoted the user's recent content. This ensures that a single angry individual or small clique can't wreck your day.

The exact karma thresholds and rate-limit-strengths chosen are based on the LW team's experience with daily moderation maintenance. Every day, moderators look over ~20 posts and comments from new-ish users. We've built up some intuitions for what user-karma and comment/post-karma tends to correspond with stuff we want to see more of on LessWrong. And for the past month or so I've been checking how these four metrics apply to the current distribution of LW users.

The karma system isn't perfect. Sometimes you'll get randomly downvoted by someone for idiosyncratic or petty reasons. Sometimes it's hard for newer user's content to get noticed and upvoted. But people tend to be pretty hesitant to downvote stuff – most comments just don't get voted on. Downvoted content from new users tends to be some combination of poorly argued, difficult to read, rude-without-actually-saying-much, or rehashing topics that have been discussed extensively on LessWrong without introducing new considerations.

I suspect we'll iterate and fine-tune these rules over time.

Later in this post I have advice on writing posts/comments that tend to be well received on LessWrong. If you've been downvoted and/or rate-limited, don't take it too hard. LessWrong has fairly particular standards. My recommendation is to read some of the advice at the end here and try again.

Current AutoRateLimits (as of June 22)

We'll probably experiment with these a bit. The exact implementation here involves a lot of different numbers, but here's a rough overview of the current rate limit philosophy:

Default rate limits for users with less than 5 karma (aimed at new users).

Moderately strong (but non-escalating) rate limits for users with negative karma.

Escalating rate limits for users with negative recent karma.

Stronger rate limits require more unique downvoters, so that a single angry voter or small clique can't have too large an impact.

The hope is for users to mostly show up, get recognized if they write good content, and then get full posting permissions. If a user is getting net-downvoted, then when they go to post they'd they get a message looking something like:

Default Rate Limits

Users whose total karma is < 5 are limited to 3 comments a day, and 2 posts per week.

The hope here is that these numbers are: a) high enough that most users can get started commenting/posting without having to deal with a rate limit, and b) low enough that a user writing low-quality content can't go on too big a commenting spree, before having to slow down a bit and learn some site norms.

The default commenting rate limits apply to writing comments on your own posts.

Negative Karma Rate Limits

If a user has -1 or less total karma, they can only write one comment per day and one post per two-weeks.

This doesn't require multiple downvoter...