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: LW moderation: my current thoughts and questions, 2023-04-12, published by Ruby on April 20, 2023 on LessWrong.

As can be inferred from the title, it's been a bit more than a week when I wrote most of this. I've had many more thoughts in that time, but seems very much still worth sharing this.

The LessWrong team is currently in the midst of rethinking/redesigning/upgrading our moderation policies and principles (announcement). In order to get feedback throughout this process rather than just at the end, here's a dump of things currently on my mind. Many of these are hypotheses and open questions, so feedback is very welcome.

This is a bit of a jumble of thoughts, questions, frames, etc, vaguely ordered.

The enforced standard is a function of how many new people are showing up

With the large influx of new users recently, we realized that we have to enforce a higher standard or risk having the site's quality greatly diluted: Latest Posts filled with poorly written posts about trivial points, comment threads full of incoherent or very 101 questions, etc.

The question then is "how much are we raising it?" where I do think there's quite a range. Here's a suggestive scale I didn't put a tonne of thought into, not every reasonable level is included:

Level 7: The contributions made by the very top researchers

Level 6: The contributions made by aspiring researchers and the seriously engaged

Level 5: Contributions that seem novel and interesting.

Level 4: Contributions not asking 101-level stuff

Level 3: Contributions that don't seem that wrong or confused

Level 2: Contributions that are largely well-written-enough and/or earnest

Level 1: Contributions written by humans

Level 0: Spam

To date, I'd say the LessWrong moderators have approved content that's Level 2 or above, even if we thought it was meh or even bad ("approve and downvote" was a common move). Fearing that this would be adequate with a large influx of low-quality users, it seemed that the LessWrong mod team should outright reject a lot more content. But if so, where are we raising the bar to?

I've felt that any of Levels 3-5 are plausible, with different tradeoffs. What I'm realizing is the standard that makes sense to enforce depends on how many new people you're getting.

Moderation: a game of tradeoffs

Let's pretend moderation is just binary classification task where the moderator just has to make an "accept" or "reject" calls on posts/comments/users. For a fixed level of discernment (you can get better over time, but approach any decision, you're only so good), you can alter your thresholds for acceptance/rejection, and thereby trade false positives against false negatives. See RoC/AUC for binary classifiers.

Moderation is that. I both don't want to accidentally reject good stuff but also don't want to accept bad stuff that'll erode site quality.

My judgment is only so good, so I am going to make mistakes. For sure. I've made them so far and fortunately others caught them (though I must guess I've made some that have not been caught). That seems unavoidable.

But given I'm going to make mistakes, should I err on the side of too many acceptances or too many rejections?

Depends on the volume

My feeling, as above, is the answer depends on volume. If we don't get that many new users, there's not a risk of them swarming the site and destroying good conversation. I think this has been the situation until recently so it's been okay having a lower standard. In a hypothetical world where we get 10x as many new users as we currently do, we might need to risk having many false negatives to avoid getting too many false positives, because the site couldn't absorb that many bad new users.

My current thinking

My feeling is we will be requiring new contributions to be between Level 2.5 and Level 4 right now, but keeping an eye o...