A thought I want to leave for posterity and because I just linked this conversation to someone: I really would like the comment hiding to also hide agree/disagree votes. I'm nervous about people feeling more pressure to disagree-vote in this world.

Also while I'm at it I should note that, as evidence of the feature being under-baked: someone reported it to me as a bug 😅

Ah, I see. I don't hate that at all.

If I were defending my past decision, I'd say that you'd probably hover over the usernames after reading and before you reply.

Again without defending past!me's decision, we deliberate thought it would be a bad idea to have some of the participants able to see karma and some unable to. Karma is an important part of the social landscape that some people would be missing.

I'll write down the request. I tried previewing what it would look like and it's not perfect

so we'd probably need OWID to make a dedicated preview page.

Hiding karma would be specially relevant for people with low karma, who are new to the forum?

At the time we wrote the feature, we wanted to experiment with it for only some posts, and generally we often roll(ed) out features to power users first. Rather than having someone new to the site who just happened to discover it but wouldn't be able to model the costs/benefits of turning on the feature.

I assume it can be disabled later one (in the post editor moderation options)?

No, actually. On the basis that karma does actually contribute a lot to the way people interact with comments, we wanted to avoid changing the system midway through a thread.

(TBC this really was a long time ago and I don't necessarily endorse the decisions that past!me made here.)

We do actually have a way to hide the karma for everyone on the comments of your own posts. It's an experiment we decided to create to see if it would help certain discussions feel less like a gladiatorial arena. It's intentionally pretty hidden right now, and might not work well after multiple years of not being used. To enable it:

1. You must have 2,000 karma
2. You first need to opt in to the feature on your account settings
3. Then you need to enable it on a new post

If you do this, consider reaching out to us to ensure it isn't completely broken.

I want to throw in a bit of my philosophy here.

Status note: This comment is written by me and reflects my views. I ran it past the other moderators, but they might have major disagreements with it.

I agree with a lot of Jason’s view here. The EA community is indeed much bigger than the EA Forum, and the Forum would serve its role as an online locus much less well if we used moderation action to police the epistemic practices of its participants.

I don’t actually think this that bad. I think it is a strength of the EA community that it is large enough and has sufficiently many worldviews that any central discussion space is going to be a bit of a mishmash of epistemologies.^[1]

Some corresponding ways this viewpoint causes me to be reluctant to apply Habryka’s philosophy:^[2]

Something like a judicial process is much more important to me. We try much harder than my read of LessWrong to apply rules consistently. We have the Forum Norms doc and our public history of cases forms something much closer to a legal code + case law than LW has. Obviously we’re far away from what would meet a judicial standard, but I view much of my work through that lens. Also notable is that all nontrivial moderation decisions get one or two moderators to second the proposal.

Related both to the epistemic diversity, and the above, I am much more reluctant to rely on my personal judgement about whether someone is a positive contributor to the discussion. I still do have those opinions, but am much more likely to use my power as a regular user to karma-vote on the content.

Some points of agreement: 

Old users are owed explanations, new users are (mostly) not

Agreed. We are much more likely to make judgement calls in cases of new users. And much less likely to invest time in explaining the decision. We are still much less likely to ban new users than LessWrong. (Which, to be clear, I don’t think would have been tenable on LessWrong when they instituted their current policies, which was after the launch of GPT-4 and a giant influx of low quality content.)

I try really hard to not build an ideological echo chamber

Most of the work I do as a moderator is reading reports and recommending no official action. I have the internal experience of mostly fighting others to keep the Forum an open platform. Obviously that is a compatible experience with overmoderating the Forum into an echo chamber, but I will at least bring this up as a strong point of philosophical agreement.

Final points:

I do think we could potentially give more “near-ban” rate limits, such as the 1 comment/3 days. The main benefit of this I see is as allowing the user to write content disagreeing with their ban.

1. ^{^}

   Controversial point! Maybe if everyone adopted my own epistemic practices the community would be better off. It would certainly gain in the ability to communicate smoothly with itself, and would probably spend less effort pulling in opposite directions as a result, but I think the size constraints and/or deference to authority that would be required would not be worth it.

2. ^{^}

   Note that Habryka has been a huge influence on me. These disagreements are what remains after his large influence on me.

With the US presidential election coming up this year, some of y’all will probably want to discuss it.^[1] I think it’s a good time to restate our politics policy. tl;dr Partisan politics content is allowed, but will be restricted to the Personal Blog category. On-topic policy discussions are still eligible as frontpage material.

1. ^{^}

   Or the expected UK elections.

I believe what you're looking for is the personal blog distinction. Authors can decide that they want to post their writing on the Forum, but not submit it to the frontpage. Examples might be a post that is political, or if someone is dumping a larger number of posts. Devin actually did this, so you'll notice that the posts you mentioned are in the personal blog category. If you're seeing them on the frontpage, then my guess is you've customized your feed.