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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   12642 thread views

[META] Something Shiny and Two Things Boring

I've got a new feature almost ready to go. I'm pretty stoked about this one because I've been wanting it for quite literally years, but it was never possible on Reddit.

Hey, guess what? We're not on Reddit!

But before I continue, I want to temper expectations. This is a prototype of a first revision of an experimental feature. It is not going to look impressive; it is not going to be impressive. There's a lot of work left to do.

The feature is currently live on our perpetually-running dev site. Log in, click any thread, and go look below the Comment Preview. You'll see a quokka in a suit asking you for help. (His name is Quincy.) Click the cute li'l guy and you'll be asked to rate three comments. Do so, and click Submit. Thank you! Your reward is another picture of Quincy and a sense of satisfaction.

So, uh . . . . what?

Okay, lemme explain.

This is the first part of a feature that I'm calling Volunteering. Once in a while, the site is going to prompt you to help out, and if you volunteer, it'll give you a few minutes of work to do. Right now this is going to be "read some comments and say if they're good or not". Later this might include stuff like "compare two comments and tell me if one of them is better", or "read a comment, then try to come up with a catchy headline for it".

These are intentionally small, and they're entirely optional. You can ignore it altogether if you like.

I'm hoping these can end up being the backbone of a new improved moderation system.

Isn't this just voting, but fancy?

You'd think so! But there are critical differences.

First, you do not choose the things to judge. The system chooses the things it wants you to judge. You are not presented with thousands of comments and asked to vote on the ones you think are important, no, you are given (at the moment) three specific comments and information is requested of you.

This means that I don't need to worry about disproportionate votecount on popular comments. Nor do I need to worry about any kind of vote-brigading, or people deciding to downvote everything that a user has posted. The system gets only the feedback it asks for. This is a pull system; the system pulls information from the userbase in exactly the quantities it wants instead of the userbase shoving possibly-unwanted information at the scoring systems.

Second, you can be only as influential as the system lets you. On the dev site you can volunteer as often as you want for testing purposes, but on the live site, you're going to - for now - be limited to once every 20 hours. I'll probably change this a lot, but nevertheless, if the system decides you've contributed enough, it'll thank you kindly and then cut you off. Do you want to spend all day volunteering in order to influence the community deeply? Too bad! Not allowed.

But this goes deeper than it sounds. Part of having the system prompt you is that not all prompts will be the system attempting to get actionable info from you. Some of the prompts will be the system trying to compare your choices against a reference, and the system will then use this comparison to figure out how much to trust your decisions.

That reference, of course, is the mods.

I've previously referred to this as the Megaphone system or the Amplifier system. One of our devs called it a "force multiplier". I think this gets across the core of what I'm aiming for. The goal here is not majority-rules, it's not fully decentralized moderation. It's finding people who generally agree with the mods and then quietly harnessing them to handle the easy moderation cases.

(We have a lot of easy moderation cases.)

There's another important point here. The mods are only human and we make mistakes. My hope is that we can get enough volunteer help to provide significantly more individual decisions than the mods can, and my hope is that the combined efforts of several people who don't quite agree with the mods in all cases is still going to be more reliable than any single mod. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if there's people out there who are better at judging posts than our mods are! It's just hard to find you; some of you may not even comment, and you're pretty undiscoverable right now, but you will certainly get a chance to volunteer!

Also, this will hopefully improve turnaround time a lot. I'm tired of filtered comments taking hours to get approved! I'm tired of really bad comments sticking around for half a day! There are many people constantly commenting and voting, and if I can get a few minutes of help from people now and then, we can handle those rapidly instead of having to wait for a mod to be around.

Wow! You get all of this, with absolutely no downsides or concerns!

Well, hold on.

The big concern here is that virtually nobody has ever done this before. The closest model I have is Slashdot's metamoderation system. Besides that, I'm flying blind.

I also have to make sure this isn't exploitable. The worst-case scenario is people being able to use this to let specific bad comments through. I really want to avoid that, and I've got ideas on how to avoid it, but it's going to take work on my part to sort out the details.

And there's probably issues that I'm not even thinking of. Again: flying blind. If you think of issues, bring 'em up; if you see issues, definitely bring 'em up.

Oh man! So, all this stuff is going to be running real soon, right?

Nope.

First I need some data to work off. Full disclosure: all the current system does is collect data, then ignore it.

But it is collecting data, and as soon as I've got some data, I'll be working on the next segment.

This is the first step towards having a platform that's actually better-moderated than the current brand of highly-centralized sites. I don't know if it'll work, but I think it will.

Please go test it out on the dev site, report issues, and when it shows up here (probably in a few days) click the button roughly daily and spend a few minutes on it. Your time will not be wasted.

Blocking

Right now this site's block feature works much the same as Reddit's. But I want to change that, because it sucks.

My current proposal is:

  • If you block someone, you will no longer see their comments, receive PMs from them, or be notified if they reply to your comments.

  • This does not stop them from seeing your comments, nor does it stop them from replying to your comments.

  • If they attempt to reply to your comment, it will include the note "This user has blocked you. You are still welcome to reply, but your replies will be held to a stricter standard of civility."

  • This note is accurate and we will do so.

That's the entire proposed feature. Feedback welcome!

User Flair and Usernames

We're going to start cracking down a bit on hyperpartisan or antagonistic user flair. Basically, if we'd hit you with a warning for putting it in a comment, we'll hit you with a warning for putting it in your flair. If anyone has a really good reason for us to not do this, now's the time to mention it!

Same goes for usernames. On this site, you can actually change your display username, and we're just leaving that in place. So we'll tell you to change your name if we have to. Extra for usernames: don't use a misleading or easily-confused username, okay? If it looks like you're masquerading as an existing well-known user, just stop it.

I'm currently assuming that both of these fall under our existing ruleset and don't need new rules applied. If you disagree strongly, let me know.

The Usual Stuff

Give feedback! Tell me how you're doing? Do you have questions? Do you have comments? This is the place for them!

Are you a coder and want to help out? We have a lot of work to do - come join the dev discord.

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Right now this site's block feature works much the same as Reddit's. But I want to change that, because it sucks.

I don't understand how in particular it sucks, although I'm sure there are reasons. But I can't see how allowing someone you've blocked to check your comments really is a better solution, and it seems worse. When I block someone because I feel that they are trollish, arguing in bad faith or for reprehensible views I don't want them building their own conversations on what I post; I blocked them for a reason! To give a concrete example, I've blocked the pedofascist, but if they will be able to read and respond to my posts there are certain topics I just won't post about then.

I don't want them building their own conversations on what I post

And reasonably so, but I really don't want them writing their own posts and creating an illusion of consensus by having already blocked anyone who has the patience to reply and contradict them.

It would be worthwhile to have some annotation that gets displayed on any reply to a comment by someone who's been blocked by the commenter, though.

But I can't see how allowing someone you've blocked to check your comments really is a better solution, and it seems worse.

I think that's a carry-over from the old site. Some people were using blocking as a means of censorship. Let's say BobertaTheBuilderina and PadDBare were in a spat. Boberta blocks Pad. What happens when Boberta posts something or is in the middle of a comment thread that Pad wants to reply to, but not necessarily to Boberta? Now Pad is blocked from responding to anyone in that thread, even if they want to reply to something BillyGoatzGuffy said about "I have no idea how many tarantulas can do the tarantella in a teapot, anyone got a bluesky estimate?"

We had at least a few instances of people asking "Hey, I can't comment here, but I got nothing from the mods about being banned, what's up?" for things like this. So "Just to let you know, you're blocked, but you can still reply to people who didn't block you in this thread" is an improvement, at least in my view.

EDIT: And some people were using blocking not because "BillyGoatz called me a bad name and broke site rules" but "BillyGoatz holds a different political opinion to me" or "BillyGoatz dared to contradict me that nine million witches were genocided". Hence, censorship.

For the first part, that seems like it just needs an exception to the rule: if someone has a reply to a comment, they can always comment even if they are blocked. No need to give permanent commenting power when blocked just to overcome this edge case that is inherently temporary.

For the second part, someone breaking the rules is the lowest on my list of reasons to block someone; the mods are generally good about warning or banning when this occurs, so the person either fixes their behavior or get removed. If that's the reason for the block feature, better just remove it entirely. But:

"BillyGoatz dared to contradict me that nine million witches were genocided". Hence, censorship.

If someone, as an example, brought up how one of their relatives was killed in the Holocaust and another user (civilly!) denied that it happened and tried to argue that their relative must have starved to death or died from some other cause, the first poster might block them. That, to me, feels fair, if they don't want to argue with them about it, or have them denying it if they bring it up again in the future, even in comments they can't see. And they may not want to deal with it at all, or have someone denying it in the comments. But I, personally, don't want to be in the business of judging whether someone's blocking is valid or not, and I don't think that it will be possible to enforce any validating for blocking. And I wouldn't see this as "censorship" as that person can still post anything they want on their own.

The point of the forum is to discuss complex things. If we prevent a blocked user from replying to a blocker's comments, we lose some discussion, some post, some potential understanding. If we allow the blocked user to reply to the blocker's comments - maybe the blocker will be a bit upset that holocaust deniers exist? They can't see the comment, so, who cares?

Even blocking is an unnecessary feature (in a well-moderated community) - if you don't like /u/libertAryanPedonazi, you can just look at a different part of the screen when he shows up, if he isn't spamming or anything.

If we allow the blocked user to reply to the blocker's comments - maybe the blocker will be a bit upset that holocaust deniers exist? They can't see the comment, so, who cares?

Let us consider an example then, A blocks B, A makes a post, B responds to it (hidden to A). Now A is stuck, others see the response but not them and they can't properly defend their post. What if A posts something, then C posts B's shitty argument that A has already dealt with and blocked B over; now they have to do it again? What was the point of the block then?

if you don't like /u/libertAryanPedonazi, you can just look at a different part of the screen when he shows up, if he isn't spamming or anything.

I don't work this way and I think most other people do not either. This is a theoretically possible but practically impossible ask. I don't habitually check usernames first, and I have no desire to manually sanitize a thread with perhaps thousands of comments every week. Blocking is a nice QoL feature for this.

Now A is stuck, others see the response but not them and they can't properly defend their post.

Which is fine. If you block someone, you're choosing to not defend or respond to their arguments. There's no need to deny the rest of us the ability to see them!

What if A posts something, then C posts B's shitty argument that A has already dealt with and blocked B over

Then C gained from reading A's argument, and B is free to block C if they want!

I don't work this way and I think most other people do not either

"How people work" in many senses, especially complex intellectual ones, is very contingent on intent and culture. While the presence of disgusting, taboo material that one can't bear to contemplate or look at is universal, the content of said material is not. Which suggests that, in any particular case, a person (or culture) can choose to not care. And if you can't, you're more or less 'in the thrall of your culture', as opposed to 'mechanically not working like that' (not that that's better!). However, most people could not care, by intent, tbh. The purpose of being offended / pissed off, is to be so things that are harmful in some way - but not looking at offensive text on a forum is a great way to not know what it its, and thus act less competently in relation to it in the future - particularly problematic if there is something morally wrong with it, and an individual block doesn't serve any purpose in that case.

If you block someone, you're choosing to not defend or respond to their arguments.

That's a mischaracterization, my intent with a block is to opt out of conversations with someone. They're free to make their arguments with anyone else, to post them anywhere else.

Then C gained from reading A's argument, and B is free to block C if they want!

I'm not exactly looking to deal with someone I've blocked in perpetuity at second hand.

"How people work" in many senses, especially complex intellectual ones, is very contingent on intent and culture.

I'm a little confused with where you went, I meant that, mechanically, ignoring people manually takes some minor effort that only causes annoyance, like being approached on the street for various stupid stuff. Yeah, theoretically I can just ignore everyone who seems like they're trying to con me, but that requires me to observe and process who they are and what they're asking before I refuse them. In the same way, I can't just "look at a different part of the screen" for free, I have to observe and process and then look away.

but not looking at offensive text on a forum is a great way to not know what it its, and thus act less competently in relation to it in the future

Yeah, nah, I don't need to listen to the arguments of xXpuppykickerXx, I'm good in my views on animal cruelty, you are overrating the power of an obscure internet forum. They're free to make their arguments to everyone else though, go right on ahead, but I don't have the inclination to explain that I really do like puppies and don't want them kicked. I wouldn't even block them just for the username, but maybe if they made it their hobby horse here; I think that's a reasonable ask.

That's a mischaracterization, my intent with a block is to opt out of conversations with someone.

You can do it easily by never responding to them.

Even if ShitHead2941 keeps following you and replying to every your post, what exactly is he "winning"?

Are you afraid that other mottizens will see that you never answer him and think that ShitHead2941 completely demolished you with facts and logic?

You can do it easily by never responding to them.

Even if ShitHead2941 keeps following you and replying to every your post, what exactly is he "winning"?

Are you afraid that other mottizens will see that you never answer him and think that ShitHead2941 completely demolished you with facts and logic?

Several people, including the mods, have brought up weaponized blocking being used to get in the last word of an argument, so I don't think I'm going on out on a limb alone here to say it's a real thing that bad actors will try to use to their advantage. Ceding the last word completely wouldn't even require facts and logic then since, of course, there will be no response at all from them.

Some people just can’t see eye to eye and the argument goes on but nowhere. Pre committing not to speak is probably best for all parties involved.

No need to give permanent commenting power when blocked just to overcome this edge case that is inherently temporary.

That wasn't the way it worked on Reddit, especially after they changed how blocking worked, and people didn't know this until it happened to them. Let me try and make it clearer:

A blocks B. B does not know they have been blocked by A. Later on, C posts something in reply to comments in a thread started by A. B tries to reply to C, has no interaction with A, and can't talk to C because they've been blocked by A. They don't realise this, they then have to start a new post about "hey mods, what happened here?"

I mean, it happened to me, it happened to a few other people. If A says "my great-uncle died in the Holocaust" and B replies "There was no Holocaust" and A blocks B, fine, everyone sees that and understands why that happens. If A is raging wokie progressive of the most caricatured kind and B is a conservative, A blocks B by stealth, nobody including B knows that happened. And A then gets to block B from participating in conversations with others, even if B is not directly interacting with A.

That's not how blocking is meant to work. If A blocks B, A can't say that B should also not be able to reply to C and D. But that's how it was weaponised.

That wasn't the way it worked on Reddit, especially after they changed how blocking worked, and people didn't know this until it happened to them.

I will submit to you my proposal that a reply overrides blocking for that thread, which neatly solves this issue.

They don't realise this, they then have to start a new post about "hey mods, what happened here?"

The straightforward solution here seems to be giving improved notification for blocking.

And A then gets to block B from participating in conversations with others, even if B is not directly interacting with A.

B can interact with any other conversation that wasn't originating with A. They can post about any topic, they can reply to anyone else's posts. And I have seen that, where someone gets blocked and posts about something they want to talk about. That's a rather weak weapon.

B can interact with any other conversation that wasn't originating with A. They can post about any topic, they can reply to anyone else's posts

Well yeah, I'd be happy with that if that is how the new blocking will work here. What I'm saying is the old blocking when TheMotte was still over on Reddit and which was being abused. See what Amadan is saying down below. Reddit changed rules about blocking, and then suddenly someone who Had A Little List was able to prevent people from participating in any comment thread they got involved in, and nobody knew why this was since they had no idea Our Little Pal had blocked them. So now suddenly where they were able to have a discussion with OldJoe'sWearyBonez yesterday, now they were getting error messages for no apparent reason when trying to reply to OldJoe today.

B can interact with any other conversation that wasn't originating with A.

This is the non-negotiable as far as I'm concerned. The fact that you have blocked B should not mean that from now on, any thread you start on TheMotte is one that B cannot participate in.

(Back on reddit, we did have a very prolific poster who had also blocked a lot of people over the course of his career. In fairness, before the new rules were implemented. But when he returned after a long hiatus, it caused considerable disruption because suddenly he was starting a bunch of new threads and a lot of people were asking "Why can't I post in these threads?")

This is the non-negotiable as far as I'm concerned. The fact that you have blocked B should not mean that from now on, any thread you start on TheMotte is one that B cannot participate in.

The situation I see is that e.g. TracingWoodgrains brings up Mormonism and someone comes by to, within the bounds of the rules, semi-harass them about it; they brought up their own personal experiences there a lot, so someone would have many opportunities to bring out the soap box. Someone could get tired of rehashing arguments or always dealing with one abrasive person, and blocking them neatly cuts them out. But allowing someone acting badly to get a permanent last-word feature, no chance of a rebuttal, is not an appealing solution. It's like a troll's dream option.

I think there are better options to overcome some of the worst features of the Reddit blocking system. Options like making it clear when someone is blocking you, letting an existing reply override a block to avoid any last-word gambits, allowing a blocked person to see a blocker's posts, and allowing them to make replies some level removed from a blocker's post would solve the great majority of the issues people have brought up. It still wouldn't be perfect, but I don't know of any perfect solution.

Blocking should act as an "Ignore" feature. If I block you, I will no longer see your posts, and you cannot DM me. But you can still see my posts and respond to them. As Zorba said, if blocking inconveniences anyone, it should be the blocker, not the blockee. That's the cost of deciding you want to block someone.

The above model works fine for the case where "You are such an aggravating individual that reading your posts elevates my blood pressure." Blocking so I no longer have to read your posts solves that - anything else would be allowing me to "punish" you. A non-mod should have zero power to affect how another poster interacts with the forum. If you think they should have their posting privileges restricted, you need to report them and let the mods decide if action is warranted.

A non-mod should have zero power to affect how another poster interacts with the forum.

The proposal already concedes that this isn't the case, it's in the text:

If they attempt to reply to your comment, it will include the note "This user has blocked you. You are still welcome to reply, but your replies will be held to a stricter standard of civility." This note is accurate and we will do so.

And it may be even stricter, from Zorba:

We might just need to write that to be even stricter; "if you want to reply, respond to their points in a way that doesn't directly address them". Or "that doesn't demand a response from them".

How will you police all this? But:

anything else would be allowing me to "punish" you.

Nobody has a monopoly on posts here, nobody is "punished" by not responding to something directly.

If you think they should have their posting privileges restricted, you need to report them and let the mods decide if action is warranted.

I don't think that people I block should have their posting restricted site-wide, I know where the report button is for that, I just want a way to figuratively walk away from them. Giving them a permanent platform to breath down my neck and directly reply to everything scot-free is the opposite. Are you going to step up your modding to compensate?

More comments

I thought about writing in more detail about that, but didn't end up doing so.

The biggest part, in my opinion, is that blocking someone shouldn't inconvenience the person who's being blocked. If it does, then it'll be weaponized; it'll turn into a tool used against people who are disliked, not a tool used to shape your own experience.

If it's going to inconvenience anyone, it needs to inconvenience the blocker; it needs to be something where they say "eh, it's worth it so I don't have to see that guy anymore".

If someone is *actually rule-breaking" then that's a problem for the mods to deal with. In all other cases, we shouldn't allow random people to gain pseudomod powers at the click of a mouse.

To give a concrete example, I've blocked the pedofascist, but if they will be able to read and respond to my posts there are certain topics I just won't post about then.

If they're breaking the rules then report them.

If they're not, then putting that burden on you instead of on them seems like the right solution here.

The biggest part, in my opinion, is that blocking someone shouldn't inconvenience the person who's being blocked.

Can you explain more what burden or inconvenience is being put upon anyone here? How is it a burden if they can't see it? If I type up something and don't post it, have I burdened everyone here with... not seeing it?

How is it a burden if they can't see it?

They're restricted from joining the conversation. With the Reddit implementation, it also let people get the last word in, by replying and then blocking.

You shouldn't be able to unilaterally exclude people from the community unless you're one of the people who has that specific power.

Let's not conflate blocking during a conversation with blocking against future conversations. There are ways to de-weaponize the former without affecting the latter; I suggested elsewhere that if someone has a reply to a post or comment, they can be effectively unblocked for that branch, which eliminates this last word effect.

exclude people from the community

I think this overstates what is happening, and substitutes "my comments" for "the community." A block doesn't restrict any conversations but one branch of a tree, one that is ultimately always going to be small in relation to the total community (I don't think anyone dominates conversations enough to subvert that). I see blocking as analogous to walking away from someone at a party. I haven't restricted their conversations with anyone else. Having them reply to me, extra scrutiny or not, undermines my opt out. A conversation should be snipped at my comment, or theirs, when blocked.

I see blocking as analogous to walking away from someone at a party. I haven't restricted their conversations with anyone else. Having them reply to me, extra scrutiny or not, undermines my opt out.

I think that's a good analogy, and I disagree with your conclusion. If you walk away from me at a party after a discussion got heated, I still get to look at everyone else and say "PR's parting comment was wrong though, right?" If you walk away, you don't get to enforce having the last word - the people left still get to discuss what you said, you just won't hear it anymore.

Blocking should mirror that, so people don't get to make a flawed argument and prevent counterarguments by blocking interlocutors.

If you walk away, you don't get to enforce having the last word - the people left still get to discuss what you said, you just won't hear it anymore.

I will bring up my proposed solution of having a reply override the block feature to prevent any sort of last-word effect. This neatly solves that issue.

As for blocking any counterarguments, I can just point to my arguments elsewhere. Let's see the evidence of actual effect and some cost-benefit analysis.

Why are you putting the onus on others? You have as much ability as the users you have said that to to get the evidence you require. I'm sure this isn't what you mean, but it feels a bit like you are trying to use the lack of provided evidence to positively weight your argument, instead of as an opportunity to discover facts.

Generally the onus is on people who present an argument to present their reasoning and evidence for it, right? If I make an argument it's not your job to convince yourself that I'm right, but my job to present the evidence for my position. I can't link to future posts or the future state of the site, but it would be nice to see some existing set of posts pointed out that shows there is a serious problem. We know that there are flaws with the current blocking system, but there doesn't seem to be a perfect solution, and the current one has not led to any catastrophe, plus there are ways to fix some of the worst problems with it. But I'm under no illusion that Zorba or the other mods have to convince me, personally, of anything; I hold no veto power here.

More comments

I will bring up my proposed solution of having a reply override the block feature to prevent any sort of last-word effect.

That helps, but it's still blocking people from participating in the discussion if the blocker posts something else that needs counterspeech (or worse, repeats their arguments in an another branch without acknowledging the counterarguments.

Let's see the evidence of actual effect and some cost-benefit analysis.

This is just a natural consequence of human behavior. People will get pissed at interlocutors and want to stop them from interlocuting, people will want to get the last word, and people will repeat arguments when they didn't find counterarguments convincing. Bad faith isn't even necessary, but using tools at your disposal to get an unfair advantage is, sadly, also human nature.

The cost is negligible: People who leave the discussion don't get to demand other people stop discussing, so preventing them isn't very valuable.

The cost is negligible: People who leave the discussion don't get to demand other people stop discussing, so preventing them isn't very valuable.

I think the cost will come in who participates on the site. I really don't have the inclination to go into discussions with xXpuppykickerXx, and blocking supports that. They can post anything they want anywhere else on the site. But this change seems like a troll's dream, they can always (civilly) harass someone and blocking them just cedes all discussions to them entirely and in perpetuity. Bad actors will weaponize anything.

I see blocking as analogous to walking away from someone at a party. I haven't restricted their conversations with anyone else. Having them reply to me, extra scrutiny or not, undermines my opt out.

You are restricting their conversations with anyone else. Here's a pattern I've seen quite frequently:

Party A: "schools with poor kids are underfunded that's why NAMs do badly in school."

Party B: "False <link to data on funding levels by family income/percentage NAM>"

Party A then blocks B, possibly after making some argument why they are right.

In the reddit implementation it prevents me - party C - from engaging with B in the current conversation. Perhaps I want to know more about his data source or reasoning, but I can't do that except by starting a new thread.

But the real weaponization comes from repeat interactions. A few days later in a different thread:

Party A: "schools with poor kids are underfunded that's why NAMs do badly in school."

Me: "that sounds reasonable and no one is refuting it."

I suspect this is a pattern that at least one person was using this on reddit, though I have no way to prove it.

In the reddit implementation it prevents me - party C - from engaging with B in the current conversation.

As I have brought up in the quoted post, a logically straightforward workaround is to have blocking only prevent new replies in the future; the existence of a reply can override the blocking feature, so there is no possibility of getting in the last word. I agree that the Reddit implementation has flaws, but there are better ways to correct those flaws, IMO.

As for this weaponization, I will first say that although several people have brought it up I have yet to see any evidence that it has occurred, or that it has had a deleterious effect on the forum. And then, trollish behavior should be treated accordingly, no matter what form it takes, and someone blocking anyone who disagrees with them is surely leaving evidence in e.g. the number of blocked users. And even if this weaponization occurs, I don't see it worthwhile to bring in a new, worse block feature; a little intellectual hygiene goes a long way here. There are numerous ways for bad actors to influence conversation. Should we implement a ID verification system to prevent using alt accounts to prop up a bad argument? No, even if that is a failure mode the cost is not worth it. Let's see the cost-benefit analysis here.

As I have brought up in the quoted post, a logically straightforward workaround is to have blocking only prevent new replies in the future; the existence of a reply can override the blocking feature,

This really doesn't solve the problem I described at all. The conversation I'd like to have:

Party A: "blah blah lies"

Party B: "A is lying "

Party C: "B, can you clarify that a bit? I'm uncertain about X."

Party B: "Clarifying statement"

You've now prevented this from happening.

And then, trollish behavior should be treated accordingly, no matter what form it takes, and someone blocking anyone who disagrees with them is surely leaving evidence in e.g. the number of blocked users.

This is only accessible to someone with programmatic access to the DB and the time to run a statistical analysis to identify such things.

Let's see the cost-benefit analysis here.

The only cost I see is that when you bail on a conversation, others are allowed to continue it which might make you feel (self-)excluded. That seems like a negligible cost in my view.

This really doesn't solve the problem I described at all. The conversation I'd like to have: [] You've now prevented this from happening.

I think there's a misunderstanding, that would absolutely work fine with the workaround I described. If B makes a reply to A, B would be unblocked for that entire thread from A. C replies to B, B can reply to C, or A, or D, anywhere in that thread.

This is only accessible to someone with programmatic access to the DB and the time to run a statistical analysis to identify such things.

I'm not much of a programmer, and I don't know how the site is built. I assume that the mods can get access to who has blocked whom, as they would need that anyway to know to apply the extra-civility rule. And I doubt if someone is seriously abusing the blocking that they would need a whole "statistical analysis" to find out, someone blocking everyone will show up with many more blocks than a normal user right?

The only cost I see is that when you bail on a conversation, others are allowed to continue it which might make you feel (self-)excluded. That seems like a negligible cost in my view.

The workaround just solves that completely. Everyone can continue the conversation. They can post about it too elsewhere.

More comments

As for this weaponization, I will first say that although several people have brought it up I have yet to see any evidence that it has occurred, or that it has had a deleterious effect on the forum.

Hasn't happened on here. Did happen over at the old place, in the last days of the dying republic when the old institutions were crumbling and chaos and anarchy threatened with the prescriptions of the Second Triumvirate - hang on a sec, got my declines and falls mixed up there. But yeah, blocking was being used as a weapon.

I don't doubt that it was used as a weapon, I do remember some posts and discussion about it, this is not the first time Zorba has mentioned that they would like to change the blocking system. But the new system can be weaponized too, as an example, harassing someone (within the bounds of the rules) with the intent to drive them off or get blocked, which would cede any and all future discussions to them, a permanent "last word."

More comments

Hey mods. My discussion with @Amadan seems to have ended without a resolution. Could I get some clarification on how our rules permit insulting public officials when it isn't explicitly necessary to make your point? It seems to contradict several of them:

Be Kind… To a lesser but non-zero extent, this also applies to third parties. You shouldn't just go and attack people that you think are bad, you should be kind to them, even if you think they're mean, even if you think they're bad.

Or

Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.

Or

To have a discussion on some point of disagreement it is necessary that both parties be willing to say what they believe and why, not merely that they disagree with the other party. Sarcasm and mockery make it very easy to express that you disagree with someone without explaining why, or what contrary claim you actually endorse, and you can't grow a discussion from those grounds.

Or

Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

"Trump is a venal, fascist clown" seem like really clear cases of prioritizing heat over light, vilifying your outgroup, arguing to win, and treating the thread as territory to be won. Just completely counterproductive and the anthesis to the goals of this place.

If you decide you're going to allow them, could you explain how my interpretation of these rules is wrong and/or rewrite the rules to be more clear?

I wrote up a reply in respond to the original thread before I saw that, but here, pastin' it in:

Alright, I went looking for a post I had in mind, possibly written by Scott, and totally couldn't find it. Sorry. You're getting a crappy cliff-notes version of it.

The cliff-notes version is that you shouldn't always need to prefix things with "I think". That it is, sometimes, pretty obvious that you're referring to an opinion. If I say "anchovies are tasty" then I am probably not suggesting that anchovies are objectively tasty; it's a phrase that maps to "I think anchovies are tasty".

This is, to some extent, how I think about statements like "Kamala is an air-head".

At the same time, I don't think we want to go full force on that. The bigger your claim is, the more wide-reaching, the more antagonistic, the more it's aimed at a person in the community, the more I want people to couch things carefully. In this case it's a single target who isn't in the community. Is that good? No, not really, I wish they'd stop. But it's maybe not lethal to the community we're trying to build.

I don't really know how to phrase this in the rules, and I'll admit that a perfectly strict reading of the rules probably wouldn't allow that. We've always allowed a bit of flex, and part of me has always been unsatisfied by this just because it makes moderation a lot more subjective. But the alternative is, I think, worse, and the flex will continue until I figure out a way to formalize it.

tl;dr:

The rule technically doesn't allow it, practically we kinda allow it as one of many ways that people can flex the rules a little if they've built up cred, I'm not totally happy with this, I'm not convinced there's a better alternative, it is definitely not true that "insulting public figures is tolerated, full stop" because I don't want people to just start flaming public figures; the rules, as always, cannot be fully complete because humans are kinda dicks.

(if anyone can find the post i'm thinking of, it would be appreciated, I'm not having any luck)

I don't think the "opinion/fact" axis is the right way to think about this.

The problem with "Kamala is an air-head" isn't that people might mistake it for a fact and get misinformed. It's that the goal is to be insulting (i.e. waging culture war, demonstrably showing you couldn't care less about Kamala Harris supporters, etc.).

I take your argument as roughly

Right now the rules have false negatives, but if we change them to fix those false negatives, we'll end up having false positives

And true/false positive debates are ultimately quantitative and we can't even express the tradeoffs we believe in, let alone actually argue whether we're on one side or another (i.e. what does "every 1% increase in censorship" even mean?).

That said, I think there's a pretty clear alternative which is the Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite policy: if you're going to say something mean about somebody, it should be necessary and true.

This has always been my preferred philosophy for moderation, and it's also puzzled me why it's never been part of TheMotte moderation (given our ancestry). After these discussions I'm guessing the moderators here agree it's too restrictive for discussion.

I take you argument as roughly

Right now the rules have false negatives, but if we change them to fix those false negatives, we'll end up having false positives

Yeah, that's a reasonable paraphrase.

And true/false positive debates are ultimately quantitative and we can't even express the tradeoffs we believe in, let alone actually argue whether we're on one side or another (i.e. what does "every 1% increase in censorship" even mean?).

Oh yeah, you are absolutely right there. I don't have even remotely the tools I need to formalize any of this, I'm workin' in the dark.

That said, I think there's a pretty clear alternative which is the Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite policy: if you're going to say something mean about somebody, it should be necessary and true.

This has always been my preferred philosophy for moderation, and it's also puzzled me why it's never been part of TheMotte moderation (given our ancestry). After these discussions I'm guessing the moderators here agree it's too restrictive for discussion.

If anything, the problem isn't that it's too restrictive, it's that it's too lax. How do you judge "necessary"? If the poster judges it, then the site turns into a flamewar because everyone thinks it's absolutely necessary to flame their opponents. If the mods judge it, then we're right back to Maximally Subjective Moderation, and I admit we're close to that anyway but we at least try to avoid that when possible.

I feel like Amadan answered most of your questions in that thread. But I'll re-answer with my own thoughts.

Something like "Trump is a venal, fascist clown" as an isolated comment is bad because it is low effort. If it is buried in an otherwise effortful comment, it seems fine to me to ignore.

Something like "Trump is a venal, fascist clown, and the people that support him are idiots" is bad because it is boo outgroup and antagonistic. Even if it is buried in an otherwise decent comment it might get some mod action.

In general, I interpret the rules against insults to apply to people that might be on this forum. The more likely it is that the person is using this forum, the worse it is from a rules standpoint. Insulting a specific user being a clearcut case of 'that is bad'. And insulting a public figure with zero chance of using the forum being something I don't care about at all.

Also as election season slowly starts to ramp up, I do not think the moderators should be in a position where we need to defend politicians from insults. People need to be able to have a civil discussion with the other people on this forum, that is the most important thing.

Something like this is generally ok, but not a great start to a discussion:

user_A: "Trump is a fascist clown"

user_B: "I think he is playing 4d chess and is a genius"

user_A: "He made mistakes X, Y, and Z, how is that 4d chess?"

user_B: "Well [longer discussion about those items]"

Something like this is not ok:

user_A: "Trump is a fascist clown"

user_B: "I think he is playing 4d chess and is a genius"

user_A: "You think that because you are an idiot and a racist"

user_B: "get out of here with your woke bullshit!"

feel like Amadan answered most of your questions in that thread

Frankly I disagree. There was no argument at all for why "Kamala Harris is an airhead" offers anything positive at all to the community, nor for how it doesn't break the rules. Just "we're not gonna do it", "it's not part of The Norms", etc.

The purpose of enforcing "don't call Kamala Harris an airhead" isn't to protect Kamala Harris' feelings, is to prevent people who do support her from seeing red and manning the battle-stations or, alternatively, from doing so until it's blatantly clear how lopsided this place is against her and they all decide to leave.

The argument of "but it can trigger good discussion" proves way too much (it justifies nearly anything), and is particularly unpersuasive when you can trigger the exact same discussion with far less heat by saying (e.g.) "I disagree with Trump's political goals, and his decisions have repeatedly backfired". "Trump is a facist clown" is clearly intended to fire a shot in Culture War (do you disagree?) and should be modded as such.

Somebody (not sure if ZorbaTHut, TracingWoordgrains, Scott, or someone else) once wrote a great post on how "free speech" is decidedly not the same thing as maximizing good discussion, and insulting Trump or Harris seems like a pretty clear case of prioritizing free speech for it's own sake. I'm really skeptical there are people that (1) we want hear from and (2) who couldn't maintain elementary civility standards if they actually cared to.

Are you responding to things I wrote, or to things Amadan wrote? I can't tell.

There are things that are bad but also not worth moderating. Insulting politicians falls into this category. I never said it was good for triggering discussion, I didn't say it was good at all. I specifically said it was bad.

There are two failure modes of moderation. One failure mode is not moderating enough and the place descends into a hell hole. The other failure mode is moderating too much, and the place goes silent (or turns into an echo-chamber of moderator-approved content).

Protecting politicians from insults feels like it would tend towards too much moderation.

As a practical matter, there are multiple problems with this proposal:

  1. I'm not even convinced we'd gain more Kamala Harris supporters in the discussion. After all, we'd be enforcing the rule accross the political spectrum. So there would be 'no insulting Trump' rules as well.

  2. Politicians insult each other all the time. There is a problem in the news where repeating someone else's slanderous remarks isn't slander. We would have the same problem here. Users that wanted to insult a politician, would just have to share some story of their favored politician insulting their unfavored politician. To stop that we'd have to get into content moderation, which has always been a line we have tried to avoid crossing.

  3. Insults vs opinions are a thin line. "I hate Trump" vs "I hate how Trump looks like a fascist clown and has ruined the image of the presidency" vs "Trump is a fascist clown". All these statements are sort of expressing a similar thing. And I imagine that anyone that is seeing red from one statement would probably be seeing red from all the statements, even if the 2nd statement should be allowable under our rules. So we'd have to go through a moderation crack down just to get people to be slightly more careful with their language ... and in the end we'd gain zero additional users. Because if someone can't stand another person not liking the same politicians as them, then they probably won't fit in here in the first place, and a slightly more careful phrasing of that dislike isn't going to appease them.

The first paragraph is an explanation of why I disagree with your claim that Amadan answered my questions. Everything else is a response to the rest of what you wrote.

There are things that are bad but also not worth moderating. Insulting politicians falls into this category. I never said it was good for triggering discussion, I didn't say it was good at all. I specifically said it was bad.

I didn't say you loved the first comment, but you're defending it by appealing to the discussion that follows it, which I think is fairly summarized as "it can trigger good discussion".

There are two failure modes of moderation. One failure mode is not moderating enough and the place descends into a hell hole. The other failure mode is moderating too much, and the place goes silent (or turns into an echo-chamber of moderator-approved content).

You and @ZorbaTHut are both going to the "true positives / false positives" argument. I can't say I can complain, since that does ultimately seem like the disagreement. It also makes further discussion seem mostly moot -- any false/true positive discussion is ultimately quantitative and it's unlikely any of us can come up with meaningful data.

I can only say that "don't say mean things" was the default civility norms while I was growing up, it's second nature to me, it's what I expect from my friends, it's what my elementary school teachers expected of me, and I struggle to put myself in the shoes of somebody who would rather be silent than have to talk about politics without insulting their enemies. I think people do it because they can get away with it. If you think we risk losing valuable discussion then I guess further discussion isn't likely to be fruitful.

I'm not even convinced we'd gain more Kamala Harris supporters in the discussion. After all, we'd be enforcing the rule accross the political spectrum. So there would be 'no insulting Trump' rules as well.

I sort of agree. There are lots of forces that drive out Kamala Harris supporters, and drive-by insults are basically the lowest hanging fruit that doesn't endanger good discussion. Probably more significant are anti-woke dogpiles, but barring absolutely crazy ideas it's much harder to moderate that. But low hanging fruit is still low hanging fruit, it's a continuum not a binary, etc.

Politicians insult each other all the time. There is a problem in the news where repeating someone else's slanderous remarks isn't slander. We would have the same problem here.

I would literally prefer "[Trump says Kamala Harris is an airhead](https://foo.bar) " over the current state. I'm not trying to solve all civility problems here. I think this is one particular problem with an easy solution, and the more inconvenient it is to wage drive-by culture war the better.

Insults vs opinions are a thin line. "I hate Trump" vs "I hate how Trump looks like a fascist clown and has ruined the image of the presidency" vs "Trump is a fascist clown". All these statements are sort of expressing a similar thing...

The mods (i.e. the three that have discussed it publicly) seem pretty united on the stance that "it's just my opinion" is a sensible defense.

For me, this is just "one man's modus ponens" and I'll easily bite the bullet: if you're insulting somebody, it's relevant to your point or you're booing outgroup. That's true if it's a factual claim and it's true if it's your opinion.

I've lost track of whatever specific post we are talking about. I'm probably going to say something that might make you think "why the heck didn't you moderate the post I'm talking about!" And the answer is pretty straightforward: I think I'm one of the strictest mods on the payroll right now, and also one of the least active. Former honor for strictest used to go to Hylynka. Anytime there is a mod discussion of 'should we do something about this' I usually say yes. Anytime there is a mod discussion of 'should we perma-ban this user' I usually ask why we haven't done so already. Having said that I still support the other mods and the decisions they make. They are more lenient, but I find it is often a few degrees of each other. We agree on who needs a perma-ban, I just arrive at that conclusion a temp-ban sooner than them. We agree on the posts that need moderation, we just disagree on what level of punishment/warning to hand out.

I didn't say you loved the first comment, but you're defending it by appealing to the discussion that follows it, which I think is fairly summarized as "it can trigger good discussion".

I don't feel like that summarization fits. I'm fully willing to moderate low effort top level comments, even when they spawn good discussion. If I saw a low effort "kamala is an airhead" top level comment, with no other substance, it absolutely would be a ban from me. And it would be a ban much faster than a low effort comment that just said something like "kamala is a bad presidential candidate".

We want to encourage good discussion and discourage bad discussion. And specifically we want to make good discussion visible, and bad discussion either less visible, or at least shown to be punished if it is highly visible. There is of course a huge middle ground of mediocre discussion. I think me and the rest of the mods generally don't want to get in the way of mediocre discussion.

Visible bad discussion is something I try and moderate. "Kamalla is an airhead" within a few posts of a top level comment, and nothing else in the comment would have gotten some amount of mod sanction from me. If it is buried within a discussion like 5 or 6 levels down, or buried within a comment that has other useful things to contribute I'm gonna leave it alone. Cuz at that point I've mentally catalogued that downstream thread or that whole comment as "mediocre" discussion, and I'm not gonna get in the way.

It also makes further discussion seem mostly moot -- any false/true positive discussion is ultimately quantitative and it's unlikely any of us can come up with meaningful data.

Zorba does have some data based on the reporting functionallity, and the mod helper thing.

I can only say that "don't say mean things" was the default civility norms while I was growing up, it's second nature to me, it's what I expect from my friends, it's what my elementary school teachers expected of me, and I struggle to put myself in the shoes of somebody who would rather be silent than have to talk about politics without insulting their enemies. I think people do it because they can get away with it. If you think we risk losing valuable discussion then I guess further discussion isn't likely to be fruitful.

Politics confused me for a long time growing up. Don't say mean things seemed to be the "real life" civil behavior. But then those same adults trying to teach me that lesson would make mean comments about George Bush being an idiot, or John Kerry being a coward. And it was only a few years later when I realized that same vitriol could be turned on me if I spoke up as a libertarian. I guess I grew up in a very different environment than you. Politics has always been contentious in my mind, and aside from some early interactions when I didn't understand the game its never really felt personal. To me its looked like two sports teams yelling at each other and hurling insults. I think a lot of people like me sort of expect that norm, and they get confused when someone is upset about the ra-ra-ing. I guess its a cultural difference.

The mods (i.e. the three that have discussed it publicly) seem pretty united on the stance that "it's just my opinion" is a sensible defense. For me, this is just "one man's modus ponens" and I'll easily bite the bullet: if you're insulting somebody, it's relevant to your point or you're booing outgroup. That's true if it's a factual claim and it's true if it's your opinion.

There are some opinions we don't allow. But we usually want to have good justifiable reasons for banning the expression of an opinion. My distinction about personal insults in the previous post applies here. If your opinion of another poster is that they are an asshole, then keep that to yourself. However, we definitely don't want to ban opinions on policy. That is a road that all the other social media platforms have gone down, and we think it easily strays into the mistake of "too much moderation". Opinions on politicians are pretty close to opinions on policy.

Its understandable to have your stance. IDK I feel like I've modded things like this before within the past 5ish years of being a moderator. And those mod decisions are often highly controversial with other users. It triggers a lot of their fears of "oh no they are going to start moderating more of our opinions", and we work hard to not break that trust.

There are lots of forces that drive out Kamala Harris supporters, and drive-by insults are basically the lowest hanging fruit that doesn't endanger good discussion.

I think some of those fruit might as well be on the Moon. The biggest thing "driving out" Harris supporters compared to Trump supporters is simply that Reddit/Facebook (and a ton of smaller-but-still-massive forums like SpaceBattles) allow the former and not the latter while we allow both, and so the Harris supporters have less reason to bother coming here in the first place. Allow any form of witchcraft that the mainstream doesn't and you'll be disproportionately showered in that kind of witch. Hell, I personally am an example; I don't think I'd have come here if I hadn't been forced off SpaceBattles for SJ-heresy (I left before actually getting permabanned, but it was obvious I was headed in that direction).

You could theoretically avoid a large anisotropy in this regard by allowing all the witches (since if you allow e.g. stalkers you will get showered in both pro-SJ stalkers and anti-SJ stalkers, and if you do this on enough distinct points then the signal on any one point will be mitigated by the noise from the others). But "good discussion" would indeed be totally abdicated by such a move.

I've just signed up after lurking for a good while, please forgive me if I'm a little out of the loop and this has already been addressed or explained. Is there a reason why I'm automatically upvoting my own comments? It seems like kind of an odd feature for the community (if anything I would think you should, by default, upvote the comment or top level post you're responding to) plus I feel a little self conscious looking at the little highlight showing the implied numerical value of how proud I am of myself(1). I'd be very curious to see if anyone else has/had any feelings whatsoever about it.

I agree that 0 as the initial state would be preferable. I've always thought this to be inspired by mechanics for hiding downvoted posts: if you get yourself an unprincipled hater and he goes around downvoting all your fresh comments, they instantly go below 0 and may become collapsed by default, which would prevent them from being seen (or gaining upvotes), so there's an extra 1 to start with.

Of course this is silly, you can get 2 haters, and anyway there are better solutions.

P.S. it was exciting to think you are the Ratboy Genius, but surely we cannot be so lucky, can we?

Of course this is silly, you can get 2 haters, and anyway there are better solutions.

Or a downvote-maximizing AI

As valuable as it would be for the simulation narrative if I were the original article, no, I am not Ryan. Just a long time fan of his work, before he became a staple on /f/

The default is always 1. Same for reddit or HackerNews.

Reddit has the same feature.

My interpretation of this feature is that, if you find yourself embarrassed at being forced to upvote a comment that you made, then you shouldn't have made the comment in the first place.

Thank you, and greyenlightenment too! I have never and would never make an account on reddit and probably not hn either, so I guess this is one of those little shibboleths that you wouldn't even think about if you were familiar with those kinds of message boards. It still seems odd to me like laughing at your own joke before anyone else does, but if that's the industry standard I'm not complaining. Learn something new every day.

Just curious: how did you end up here? When we moved offsite a lot of people worried about being cut off from the pipeline of new users. But, if you never even had a reddit account, then you're a proper newcomer.

I stumbled across Scott with Meditations on Moloch back in 2014, slithered down the rabbit hole, lurked the CW thread in its different iterations ever since, following this particular group of people (as opposed to the various branches and offshoots ie. schism, CWR). I've never been on board with Rationality™, but I found Scott's writing sometimes excellent and often thought provoking and I enjoyed reading the kinds of discussions that happen here. As I mentioned above but could've made more clear, I wouldn't want to participate in discussions like these on any type of social media that obviously and consistently works an behalf of the assorted intelligence agencies. Not making an account here immediately after the off-site move was a function of my personal laziness and also not really wanting to participate. I happen to have a large amount of free time at the moment however, and have been meaning to practice my ability to write well.

I don't know that I could be considered the modal new user for the site.

When we moved offsite a lot of people worried about being cut off from the pipeline of new users. But, if you never even had a reddit account, then you're a proper newcomer.

As RBG has personally attested to but I can confirm is a non-unique case, there exists a set of people who wanted to participate but didn't want a Reddit account. I, for instance, have a "no big platforms" rule, and /r/ssc and /r/themotte are the only things that even tempted me. So obviously, you move off Reddit and you get all of us, but that's not an ongoing thing.

I too would pretty regularly lurk, but didn't have a reddit account, because that would lead to even more endless timewasting than already goes on. This may be similarly unhealthy, but should be more manageable.

I'd also say that this removes the incentive to upvote your own comment, which is an incentive I'm happy to eliminate.

I never thought I'd say this - and this is 100% earnest - but the main thing this place suffers from is insufficient bullying.

I can shove you in a locker, if that's what makes you happy.

If there's somewhere better I should be commenting things like this let me know, but I think the + and - composition of the vote counts were not showing up in the child comments of the parent comments to which I was replying when I had added a comment but not yet refreshed the page.

Probably worth verifying before trying to fix.

I will admit I'm actually not sure what you mean here. Sorry. Can you rephrase?

I meant that if I try to do the following process, it doesn't work, so far as I can tell:

  1. Go to a thread that's been around for long enough for vote counts to appear.

  2. Reply to a comment that already has child comments with vote counts showing.

  3. Don't reload the page or anything.

  4. Hover over the vote count of a child comment of the one I replied to to see the values of + vs - votes. (this doesn't happen).

I can still see the vote counts of the other comments, just not ones that are descendants of the ones that I replied to since I last loaded the page.

Sorry about not saying that more clearly, that was a little obscure.

i'm having a hard time reproducing this bug but i also may just be misunderstanding what you mean here so just necroing here to try to see and if i can get a better description

in order to reproduce this bug, where should i create the comment given this example thread

A (+1 | -0)

B (+1 | -0)

C (+1 | -0)

D (+1 | -0)

and what steps should I take after I've made the comment?

Hah, probably just isn't decorating that mouseover properly.

I'll put that in the bug list, thanks!

If I run across more bugs, where is the proper place to put them?

If you feel up to writing a developer-friendly bug description and either have or don't mind getting a Github account, put it straight on the Git page.

If you want to talk to developers and either have or don't mind getting a Discord account, come hang out in the dev discord (and if you know Python we can always use help :V).

Otherwise, honestly, here is fine, I don't mind getting bug reports!

This does not stop them from seeing your comments, nor does it stop them from replying to your comments.

The second one defeats the point of blocking someone. When you block someone it means you don't that person to engage with you anymore.

If we rephrase that to "you don't want to have interactions with that person anymore", then this doesn't defeat the point, it still accomplishes that. It's a subtle difference, I acknowledge, and this isn't a strict Pareto improvement. But the alternative had some pretty nasty consequences that this version avoids.

What exactly does the following feature do? Anything besides just adding them to a list?

Whenever a user whom you follow makes a new post (not a comment), you receive a notification.

Honestly. This is a great innovation.

I'm feeling evil today, so here's a fun idea: disincentivize downvoting for disagreement. How?

  • Automatically add heavily downvoted comments to the volunjanny queue

  • Anyone downvoting a comment that doesn't get an average negative score at the volunjanny gets a tempban

But won't that cause people to negatively score comments at the volunjanny? If so:

  • Mods are the final arbiters. Anyone negatively scoring a comment that is ruled neutral or above by the mods gets banned even longer than the downvoters.

I ain't gonna ban people for downvoting incorrectly :V

I am thinking of eventually typing the vote system to the same sort of scoring system that the volunteer stuff already does. I don't quite know how this is going to work yet, but I do like the idea of scoring people who are historically accurate voters higher than people who aren't.

(Though there's problems here due to people being able to cherrypick their votes.)

If voting power is going to be weighted by voting the way the mods want, why not just make it so only the mods can vote? It's the same thing with fewer steps.

Because we don't have the ridiculous amount of time required to vote on everything, and even if we did, there's an accuracy cap imposed by being individual people.

I actually used to call this the Megaphone Project, in that the goal is to amplify the mods' approximate desires beyond the reach of the mods' actual abilities. The ideal goal is to rate every post in the way that a committee of people-with-the-rough-intentions-and-understanding-of-the-mods would agree upon after discussion. But using far far fewer resources than that.

I do want to note that there's a lot of value in wisdom of crowds. I suspect that, when it's built, this system can be more accurate than even a hypothetical where I personally go through and rate every comment. I fuck up sometimes, I'm just human, while a committee of three people is going to fuck up less often than that; if that committee is picked by "people who generally agree with the mods" then it's entirely possible that committee will do a better job than any individual mod could.

Possible bug report: under yesterday's comment by Stefferi that starts: "More of a personal opinion:" I can't see any responding comments, whether logged in or not. But I know there is at least one, by MeekestOfAllTime , since I commented in the subtree. I can still see it if I go through my comment, but if I just view the megathread, or click on stefferi's comment, the response and subtree isn't there. Maybe he's isn't approved? but then why did we see it in first place.

edit: ignore, it's visible now.

I also had this problem for a while, for some reason, for what it's worth. I managed to find the replies through the latest comments function.

Bug report: Without being logged in, this post of mine does not show up in the current CWR thread while sorting by new. It does show up when sorting by old, though. I can reproduce the error on Firefox mobile, Brave mobile, and TOR(firefox) on Desktop.

Hmm. It's working now, but I did have to click the "load more comments" button. I assume you tried that?

If so, there might be an issue where posts can sneak through the load-more-comments threshold, and there just happen to be enough new replies now that it's passed that window.

Hmm. It's working now, but I did have to click the "load more comments" button. I assume you tried that?

Yes, I had to click the "load more comments" button first. Afterwards, it did not show up (when sorting by new). It does now. Thanks for looking into this. It was more of a curiosity.

Bug in the sign-up page using Firefox on Android.

Text editing in the Username field behaves erratically. eg. I typed "solved" and then pressed backspace 5 times. Here are the actual results:


solve

solve 

sole

sole

soe

Expected results:


solve

solv

sol

so

s

Notes

  • A few other erratic behaviours, but backspace was the most consistently wrong.

  • Fairly easy to work around. Just takes a bit more time to get it saying what you want it to say. I went ahead and created this account with no other problems.

  • Presumably the JavaScript that validates what I'm typing is somehow responsible.

  • Encountered both before and after a reboot of my phone.

  • Not reproducible in Chrome.

  • New phone, latest Android, Firefox up to date.

  • I didn't experiment with the other fields on the sign up page.

Welp. Issue added.

Another bug. In the formatting of code blocks.


10 PRINT "Hello World"

20 GOTO 10

In the preview, these 2 lines show up 'together', but when I submit this comment and it appears on the main page, there is a whole empty line between them. (Enough space for another line of BASIC!)

for those looking at this (cc @zobrathut), sanitize.py does some things to make single linebreaks as paragraph breaks

Added another entry to the Great Preview Problem :V Thanks!

Is there a feature (or working on one) to skip to new posts like the old ~new system on SSC?

I'm honestly not familiar with that system; can you explain how it worked?

New posts (to you) were displayed with the word ~new at the top (much like how new posts here have a bluish hue).

This meant you could ctrl-F and jump to things you had not read.

Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, that'd be really easy to do - in fact, you could probably do it yourself in a custom CSS stylesheet, but it sounds useful enough that I'd rather just add it to the site.

Thanks for the suggestion!

That sounds great.

As an alternative that would be very useful to me but maybe not everyone would be some kind of internal comment content collapse and a button somewhere at the top of the thread to "collapse" all read comments.

/images/16746070202280202.webp

EDIT:

https://www.themotte.org/search/comments/?q=banned

I'm glad we're still doing sensible moderation, and not the permaban on the slightest misstep that is now common on /r/SSC, sadly.

Are you planning to use deep learning here, or explicit algorithms?

Explicit algorithms. I don't think we have enough sample data to train something up from scratch.

Okay, good.

Is it intended that the 'janitor duty' link only seems to appear when you view threads directly and not when browsing other pages like the comments view (https://www.themotte.org/comments )?

Yeah, I just sorta didn't add it to those yet. I think stuff like that is on the table once the whole system is set up and functioning. Right now, it's vertical slice time, not polish.

Bug report: thread view counts not showing for submitted links , posts

Oops! I bet that got missed in the performance revamp. Will get that working again, though it won't be able to record old stats.

ok another problem: I got assigned janitor duty. When I clicked context, which is important when determining quality, I was unable to get back to the original page. https://www.themotte.org/volunteer is blank.

Yeah, at the moment you can't go back. There's supposed to be a popup warning you about this but it may be disabled on some browsers.

If you want to look at context, right now you'll have to do so in another window.

I'd like to improve this also.

I like the idea of crowdsourced moderation, although I'm a bit apprehensive since I haven't seen it used anywhere else before.

By the way, do we have anything that does automated moderation reports? I think a specific user used to do it back on Reddit now and then, but it would be good to have that automated.

There's a Moderation Log. I don't vouch for this being complete, I haven't put any effort into maintaining it, but it should be kinda complete at least.

Log in

Heads up that I couldn't log in with my normal username and password.

The dev site is completely separate--including user accounts. So to use the dev site, you have to make an account on the dev site.

Ooh is this meta general now?

I want to set up a recurring meta post of some kind but I'm not sure what that looks like.

So, kinda, yeah.

Monthly Motte Meta-post? Write up some site news and updates, pose a specific question or two, and have an opening for general comments?

Monthly may be too quick, but I'd hate to give up the alliteration.

The problem ends up being time; writing a good meta post turns out to be a surprisingly large slice of the time I have available :/ Which is why I don't do it as often as I wish I did.

I think, in order to do as much stuff as I wish I did, I'd need to be two or three people.

One thing I find mildly irritating about the janny thing is that the prompt only shows up on thread/comment views. If it wants me to janny, I don't know it until I click into a thread I was interested in reading. Now it wants me to go off and rate posts, and when I'm done, it sends me back to the front page, and I have to go to the thread that I actually wanted to read again. Not a huge deal, but it could be solved by having a prompt show up on the site front page too.

I've actually wanted to do that - part of my end plan for this is to provide some kind of a meter on how much the system wants your contribution, and let people contribute multiple times a day if there's stuff for them to do (with "stuff for them to do" heavily tempered by not letting any one person get too much of the work.) And at that point, yeah, I'd also put something on the front page.

Work in progress, but for what it's worth, I agree :)

I've just been asked to janny a comment that was in fact a mod explaining their moderation of another user. I was suitably entertained that the system reached enlightenment and asked "Who moderators the moderators?" so concisely, but it probably shouldn't do that.

I am intentionally leaving this in :)

The answer to "who moderates the moderators" is "I do", but another answer is "the moderators do", and a large part of "the moderators do" will be "the users asked to help with moderation do". If a moderator's causing serious problems, I want to know about that; we are not immune from moderation and I have in fact banned a moderator before.

(Not often, thankfully.)

In that case, it should definitely include as default context the comment to which the moderator is responding - it's necessary to meta-moderate the moderator.

I've wanted to set something up like this, but it's surprisingly hard to do - this codebase is a mess. (Although it's better than it was before!)

Right now the official answer on how to do that is to open the "context" link on a post of your choice, although I recommend open-in-new-window.

If I view comments by some user (https://www.themotte.org/@ZorbaTHut/comments) or recent ones (https://www.themotte.org/comments), since yesterday name of every thread in which the comment is made, is duplicated, first in regular, then in bold. For example:

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023 Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

ZorbaTHut 12hr ago

....

Hah, yep, part of the refactor fallout. Will get that fixed too :)

Thank you for feedback.

Should now be fixed!

Thank you, it also appears so on my end.

What classifier architectures are you looking at? And in the supervised case, how are you planning to establish ground truth (correct label is comment deserves a ban)?

What classifier architectures are you looking at?

I hacked something up that seems to work OK. I need something that can function on very low amounts of data without access to high-end hardware, and this seems to be vaguely doing the job. I'm sure this can be improved, it's a first revision.

And in the supervised case, how are you planning to establish ground truth (correct label is comment deserves a ban)?

Comparing against actual past mod decisions, as well as mod decisions via the volunteer system, basically. It's not ideal because it's noisy, but it's not like we have a non-noisy source of data; that's the problem, fundamentally :)

LLMs tend to do fairly well at this type of small dataset classification problem, has there been any investigation into GPT-3's API for this?

There's a built-in sentiment analyzer, and it's fairly straightforward once you've munged your dataset to get a rudimentary (or not!) classifier, outputting logprobs.

Some documentation is available here, if you're curious.

Do the "deserves a warning" and "deserves a ban" (and "actually a quality contribution") options on janitor duty generate reports for the mods? I was asked to review a bad comment earlier, and I think that would streamline it a bit.

On a similar note, since bans vary pretty greatly in severity here, should there be some way to distinguish between a comment deserving a short ban and a long ban? A one-day ban is more similar to a warning than to a long ban, I think.

Maybe.

A large part of the distinction between a large ban and a short ban comes from how often they've been banned. But not all of it.

I do want to avoid having too many checkboxes, though - honestly I think we may already have too many.

Balancing act :/

If you were going for a shorter list, I'd omit "good," "bad," and collapse "deserves a warning/ban" into one option and have a mod consider the appropriate response. The current list might be superior if you're looking at calibration of the user input, though.

Quality contribution speaks for itself. For egregiously bad comments, I'll usually tag them "deserves a warning," since I'm hoping that will flag mod attention, which will escalate to a ban if reasonable under the circumstances. If my opinion is good/bad/neutral, I'll usually tag "neutral" because that correctly signals my view of "no mod action needed" and my subjective opinion of the comment isn't really important past that point.

At the moment, no; in fact, the janitor-duty messages are chosen from reports.

The current next-step is to rig things up so the mods get Warning/Ban May Be Justified confidence feedback from the janitor system. This has not happened because I'm going through Fun Employment Adventures (tm) but it's in process :)

Is there really no random stuff in there? Even aside from the obvious quality contribution reports, 70+% of the posts are totally unobjectionable

There is absolutely no random stuff in there. Every single comment you see has been reported at least once.

This is a large part of the mod workload, and is why I'm trying to solve that :V

But this goes deeper than it sounds. Part of having the system prompt you is that not all prompts will be the system attempting to get actionable info from you. Some of the prompts will be the system trying to compare your choices against a reference, and the system will then use this comparison to figure out how much to trust your decisions.

I thought for sure that this meant some of the comments in the volunteer set were not chosen due to a user-initiated report, but were system-chosen, and I've been confidently wrong about that assumption. Mea culpa.

I agree with @Bernd, though--that means the report button is being massively overused. I assign "neutral" a lot.

So there's a gap between "as originally planned", "as implemented", and "as currently planned" :)

The original plan is that it would in fact use some well-established comments as references now and then. The current implementation was me saying "eh, you know what, this doesn't matter, I'm just not going to worry about it for now, let's just base it off reports".

The current plan is that maybe I just don't need to worry about introducing reference comments because I'm honestly getting tons of good calibration data off reported comments.

But once this gets hooked up to making actual decisions, that might not work anymore. It might be that I then have to introduce comments that have already been decided on in some way. This is still up-in-the-air.

Your assumption was right about my original plans and may be right later on as well, it's just not right at the moment because I wanted to get something working. This is a completely reasonable assumption to make.

I think there should be a report option for "inflammatory" claims without sufficient supporting evidence.

There is a growing issue of conspiracy and agenda driving posts and there should be some way to push back against this other than getting into endless discussions with insane people.

This could be anything from discussions around covid, the war, the cathedral or "the Jews", Trump etc. There are things to say about all these subjects (both agreeing and disagreeing with the mainstream narrative) but that doesn't mean that inflammatory posts without evidence don't degrade the quality of discussion and scares of reasonable contributors. This is even more of a concern when the pipeline for getting new users is so limited since the transition off-site.

If someone wants to make a well-reasoned and supported argument for contraintuitive positions on these subjects then I'm all ears, and I expect most of the rest of the forum. I don't even mind the rightward drift of the forum that much despite being politically leftwing, its interesting to read posts by conservatives, i don't get that much anywhere else. What isn't interesting is reading aggressive, poorly supported and often barely coherent conspiracy tinged ramblings.

Why do I get a notification if someone blocks me? Someone with a really cool username just blocked me and that's bringing me down a little.

We should probably change that, yeah.

I disagree, better to know. Also provides an additional justification for moderating comments like "blocked".

"you can be only as influential as the system lets you"

A small step toward a AI ruled world. So far so good!

I've started getting posts old enough to have vote counts visible, I think it'd be a good idea to at least hide these on the screen even if it'd be trivial to find them. I'm sure it slightly biased me.

what s wrong with vote counts visible?

Maybe it pings your social approval bias and you think if you shouldn't go against the possibly better informed crowd. Or it triggers contrarianism and makes you prefer the underdog. In any case I don't think it helps you soberly compare it to the fair rules.

Whoops, didn't think of that. This is also hard to do right now but I've tossed it into the list.

Any updates on the volunteer data? "Who knows" is perfectly acceptable, but I'm just very curious about it. I think it's a neat experiment and would like to see this on other websites.

The holidays were busy and I'm finishing up another task before I get to it. No updates beyond that, sorry. Soon, I'm hoping!

Too many people I think seem to be using the flag button for disagreement instead of the post breaking a rule

Yeah, I think we generally end up ignoring something like 90% of reports.

Although note that you get Quality Contributions in the mix as well.

I keep getting slates of comments that are all good or all quality. It reminds me of those multiple choice tests where the answers are all the same letter, and you start to wonder if the examiner is messing with you.

I admit I'm slightly tempted to put that weighting into the system intentionally, entirely because it's funny.

But nope, just pure luck right no w:)

Not the biggest deal but probably need at least some button to deal with this situation

/images/1672327478115631.webp

I'm actually just going to filter those out from the possible chosen comments, they won't show up at all.

Numbered lists don't seem to work in quotes:

  1. We
  1. Love
  1. Zorba

Strangely, it works in the preview when editing or first posting, but not when it's actually posted.

Edit:

  • We
  • Love
  • Zorba

Same with bulleted lists. It works in the preview when editing or first posting, but not when it's actually posted.

In general, the preview not matching reality is a known bug, though more examples are always helpful. Added this one to the pile; I'm hoping I get some time to start dealing with smaller stuff soon.

A question; it is possible to know the statistics of the motte? Regarding user growth, number of users and comments and excetera.

Number of comments: Comments are currently numbered sequentially, so just look at the comment ID of the most recent comment you can find. Your comment is #44284, so, 44,284 comments as of that writing.

Number of posts: Same deal, 240 posts as of this week's Culture War thread.

Number of users: Also numbered sequentially but no good way to see the most recent user, though the user ID is on your profile page. Anyway, 1997 so far. Note that this is registered accounts, not "users"; presumably some of them are spambots and some of them are alts. Also, a lot of them are probably dormant/abandoned.

User growth: I'd need to do some database work to get info on this and I'm not likely to spend the time on it right now :)

RE: He Really Does it for Free? Volunteer Janitor Duty.

There's something frustrating about the multiple choice format. An "other" box with text defeats the purpose of efficiency, but mayhaps we could send additional context into the abyss and you can pretend to read them? Mods get the chance to write their reasoning down in a modded comment.

Perhaps I'm just not cut out for the high stakes decision making required for internet discussion moderation.

Can we define "neutral"? In this context I consider a neutral comment as not the best comment, but it doesn't break the rules. It's not a bad comment in that it provides some value to the forum's mission, but to be a good comment it would have benefited from more evidence, information, or clarity. Is this the general intent or is it meant to be a cop out option?

Maybe even a second section. Leave the first options as is, good, bad, neutral, aaqc. Then a yes/no to a "does this break the rules." Would complicate how the rating is done. Definitely a fan of the distributed janny work though. Great idea!

but mayhaps we could send additional context into the abyss and you can pretend to read them?

Understandable!

But I explicitly don't want to do this because we won't be reading them, and I don't want people to waste their time on it. Yes, this can be complicated, but I'm intentionally asking people to boil it down to a simple decision so I can do math to it. The individual results are going to be rarely looked at, the gestalt is what I care about, and the amount of noise created by people making hard decisions is absolutely irrelevant compared to the noise intrinsic in this sort of thing.

Can we define "neutral"? In this context I consider a neutral comment as not the best comment, but it doesn't break the rules. It's not a bad comment in that it provides some value to the forum's mission, but to be a good comment it would have benefited from more evidence, information, or clarity. Is this the general intent or is it meant to be a cop out option?

That's basically the intent, yeah. Where if you saw it in the wild, you'd neither upvote it nor downvote it.

Maybe even a second section. Leave the first options as is, good, bad, neutral, aaqc. Then a yes/no to a "does this break the rules." Would complicate how the rating is done.

One of the things I'll be looking for is also "ratings with high variance", i.e. "we got a bunch of trusted people to review this comment and half of them think it should be a ban and half of them think it should be a quality contribution". I think I can pull the signal I need out of that instead of needing to complicate the voting system; I'd much rather load that complexity into the algorithm than shove it back onto people.

Definitely a fan of the distributed janny work though. Great idea!

Thanks! Here's hoping it works well :D

A bit off topic, but in the spirit of wishful thinking as we near Christmas, could the admins comment on if there are any low hanging fruits on improving the site's loading speed?

I was going to post as supporting evidence the results from the top sites that rank a website's loading speed, except when compared against a large Reddit thread, the Motte's culture war thread came up about equal in one, better in a second, and worse in a third. So perhaps these sites aren't very rigorous, and are ultimately marketing tools for whatever SaaS and consulting they are selling.

Still, I'm curious what might shave say 1-2 seconds off the loading time. Is it principally about having to shell out more money for a higher tier on AWS? Or is it code? And if the latter, is it something doable in the foreseeable future by the site's volunteers, or would it require refactoring by paid professionals into a different backend language and so pretty much is unlikely to materialize barring a windfall injection of cash from SBF 2.0?

This actually may be improved now!

It feels faster! Thanks Santa!

The code fuckin' sucks :V

Loading the Culture War thread is doing literally thousands of sequential database queries. This is a known issue and one of our coders is actually working on it. It's kind of on hold right now, partly due to their own lack of time and partly because I'm trying to solve the intermittent crash issue (which itself is on hold because I've been busy).

But it is a known issue and we do have a path to solving it and it is a high priority, it's just a matter of putting the time in.

tl;dr: code, difficult to fix, not impossible to fix, near the top of the priority list but not at the top.

Gotcha thanks for the update!

I notice loading the cw thread really hangs by the end of the week. Is that just my shitty browser, or is it all the accumulated comments?

Probably the accumulated comments, but if you're curious, open up dev mode in your browser, look at the performance tab, and see how much of it is the network traffic and how much of it is stuff like parsing and scripts.

I like the proposed changes for the blocking system. You're absolutely right about the Reddit version. Giving users the ability to exclude others from the conversation was a foolish design choice which has already been weaponized and I think will only get worse once more people figure out how it works.

Cannot believe I won't own the monopoly on quokka images on the motte! Unacceptable

I really like the volunteer modding. Ive been hoping that kind of thing would come around here. I don't have the time commitment to become a mod but sometimes I feel motivated to warn other people when their posts are really, really bad. I noticed a few users criticizing wanna-be moderation so I hope this pans out well.

Why include a short note or title about the post? Is the idea to collect data for either quality vault or AAQC? Is the reason secret? The vault repo hasn't been updated in a long time, is that basically dead and no longer being updated?

Why include a short note or title about the post? Is the idea to collect data for either quality vault or AAQC? Is the reason secret? The vault repo hasn't been updated in a long time, is that basically dead and no longer being updated?

The "title" idea is for the vault, yeah.

The big problem with the Vault right now is that it takes volunteer effort to edit posts for uploading, and I've been aiming volunteers at the main codebase here instead. Coming up with good titles is part of the issue here.

The other big problem with the Vault is that a lot of posts are high-quality in context but don't really work as standalone posts. This is what the whole "compare these two posts" thing is for; I actually would intentionally not give context, basically presenting them as blog posts. This would let me take the AAQC results and boil out the absolute best for the context of a blog.

Maybe we should bring back the BLR.

As an example - I think themotte might find some articles from this blog very interesting, for instance (title 42, maybe mifepristone ii/iii). I'm not sure they fit a full toplevel post though, and don't have multiple paragraphs of interesting commentary on any of them, as IANAL.

Just because I don't have anything interesting to say doesn't mean other mottizens don't! A good link can be the start of an extended conversation about something related, just like a subthread that goes off on a tangent.

The big problem we had with the BLR is that people used it heavily to post attacks-on-the-outgroup, and often they didn't get interesting commentary, it just turned into "look how bad these people are". I'm not convinced any of that has changed.

I do think it would be nice if we had a way of making this work but I haven't come up with one I'm happy with.

I entirely agree, and said "BLR bad" a lot in the past.

Wouldn't just 'aggressively moderate, delete boo outgroup posts, or ones that even lean towards that, in a single click without spending time worrying about fairness' be enough? It's not very nice to the people who post "boo outgroup" stuff, especially since the poster (who, of course, isn't me or anyone on my side, we never do that) thinks it's a good post. But if that's a blocker, it seems dumb to let 'seeming unfair' or 'people are mad because their stuff gets deleted' get in the way of something useful.

Traditionally the issue has come down to mod bandwidth; we simply aren't able to get to stuff reliably that quickly, and if it stays up for long, well, that's a problem. I guess we could set it up to filter everything in the BLR, so that it isn't displayed until it's approved - this wasn't practically possible on Reddit but we could totally do it here - but I don't want to put that much more weight on the mods' shoulders.

It's possible that once I get the volunteer system working (which I'm literally doing right now!) we'll be able to have much more rapid turnaround and that will solve the problems.

The vote pos/neg breakdown view is broken.

The breakdown shows up as;

Total -> (+Total | -Total)

Instead of;

Total -> (+Upvotes | -Downvotes)

Also keep this thread pinned.

Oops, fallout from a refactor. Will get that solved soon.

I'd rather cut down a bit on the pinned-thread spam; four is too many! (three is probably also too many but it's better)

Edit: Fixed!

Would it be possible in the profile view to add a feature where I could sort comments by most children/responses rather than by upvotes?

Sometimes there are prolific comments that don't actually get very many votes, I'd like to be able to find them more easily.

Should now be done! It's under "comments", it should probably be renamed, but I'm not doing that right now.

Actually, that'd be really easy now, we're caching that info. Request filed, this is the kind of thing we could get to soon :)

Do I understand the database structure correctly, and this site supports sub-"reddits"? If yes, why would you encourage absolutely disgusting demonic behavior like this:

come join the dev discord.

In theory, yes.

In practice we've put absolutely zero effort into making sure they still work properly. They probably don't.

Also, my experience is that realtime chat is a lot more useful for the necessary sort of discussion than Reddit-style posting.

Also, the dev discord predates this site by quite a bit.

Two problems:

  • The place is a ghost town, whatever conversations are happening there, I wouldn't call them "real time".

  • Might be easier to get feedback from other users on how to implement features and fix bugs, if it's all happening on the same site.

But if it doesn't work then meh....

There's realtime conversations pretty often when there's actual dev stuff to talk about. We have limited dev time because it's all volunteer; however, the realtime conversations that do happen are pretty important.

There's also the issue tracker that's available for everyone.

The Motte isn't designed for this kind of communication and the dev time required to make it work just isn't worth it. Better to specialize given our limited resources.

Not getting notifications for responses to many of my comments. Some recent update probably fucked that up.

Argh, that's going to be a pain to track down.

Any idea when it started? Do you happen to have a lot of people blocked?

Edit: Also, do you mind if I trawl around in the database to look at your notifications? Technically this means I'll probably see your private messages, if you have any, but I don't care about that I just want to look at the database stuff.

Started 2-3 days ago. Didn't block anyone. Blocked by 1 user, but that user is nowhere near any of the posts. I think there is some public/private profile tomfoolery going on here, I am not sure about that but one of the users notifications I did not get has a private profile.

Hrm. Maaaaybe?

Do you mind if I trawl around in the database to look at your notifications? Technically this means I'll probably see your private messages, if you have any, but I don't care about that I just want to look at the database stuff.

Go ahead

We currently have no idea what's going on. It looks like you're receiving notifications for all replies to your comments and the database says they're being "read", which mostly means that it generated a page with the notification included, but it does mean it isn't just being skipped by the notification-page code.

It's possible they ended up buried deep in your notification page somehow and they didn't get bubbled to the top, but we tried some stuff and couldn't reproduce that.

I know this might be tough, but is there any way you can find a comment that you didn't get notified for, give me the link, and search in your notifications page to see if you can find it in an unexpected place?

Alright, I'll summarise it for you within a day.

After noticing this issue, I went back to my profile and reopened some of my comments to make sure I didn't miss any replies, this could explain them being "read".

I'm not discounting the chance that I missed something, I'll work backward and let you know tomorrow.

So the way "read" works, as I understand it, is that it just marks things as "read" once they're displayed on your notifications page. It doesn't matter if you open them or not, it matters once you open the page. It's there mostly as a check to ensure that they're being displayed at all - there's some theoretical ways they could be hidden, but the "read" bit is set after all those checks are applied.

My vague theory is that there's a problem with sorting, not with actual display, so they were there, just possibly deeply buried in an unintuitive place. But this is conjecture.

Anything you can find out is appreciated; in a day or two we're also going to be putting some more code in to help diagnose this and/or solve the sorting problem, if we can unearth it. So keep me posted, regardless of what you figure out - if it keeps happening, we'll keep messing with it until we figure out what's going on.

All the responses to my comments are there on my notification page. I think the ordering is correct.

However, to be more specific, In this specific comment. I only got the notification when 'SomethingMusic' responded to me, notification as in the red bell icon. The other two responses are there in the /notifications page, but I don't recall seeing the red bell icon for them.

More comments

FWIW, I've noticed something kind of related - if you make a post that gets a lot of direct replies, you do get notified for all of them, but the newest ones are at the bottom of the comment responses on the notifications page, so you have to scroll past all of the older replies and their full subthreads to see them, which is kind of easy to miss. It might help to sort the replies on the notification page as newest-first.

The weird part is that I've had this reported, and seen this personally, and I cannot reproduce it.

Ugh. Will go file a bug for it and pester our devs.

+1. Same problem, same timeframe, did not block anyone, my interlocutor does not have a private profile though.

Just a theory: you don't have like a million tabs open with one of them including your notification page, do you? Just asking because the same thing happened to... uh, my girlfriend... in canada.


What is this place?

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