@MattP Yeah, I think it's important to note that the ban decision here was driven by the comments, and about the market the admins already acknowledged that unlisting the market would have been better than deleting. So I don't really see much disagreement here about moderation policies in this instance.

@jack yeah, and I suspect if there's any policy articulated it's going to be something along the lines of "we aren't going to draw clear lines, but if we think you're in violation we will give you three warnings before a ban" or something like that.

I'm currently undecided on whether I think that'd actually solve the problem.

(I still find the fantasy football and CA proposition markets to be far worse "spam" than anything EHarding did, even though the creators of those markets are objectively not doing anything wrong and in fact doing exactly what Manifold wants them to do. Though maybe that's a false equivalence, it seems EHarding was banned for spamming in comments rather than market creation - though I'm not clear on if that's the case or not.)

I think that would help some but I don't actually think it's sufficient. Most users would not know about or be bothered to click a block button, especially new users and users who haven't even signed up yet. And it makes discussion threads problematic if different people see different things. There will still be users responding to the messages I've blocked myself.

@jack

> This is a pretty understandable justification to me because the spam on several markets was very bad.

Whenever I saw a notification from E. Harding I'd just think the block user feature could not come soon enough

@jack note that there in principle could be a set of systems to upvote and downvote users/comments/markets and thereby hide spam without admin action, but such features tend to be very complex to implement and you need to do something in the early stages of building a platform. I think this was the correct decision

From the admin comments posted on discord, what actually ended up causing the ban was their refusal to stop spamming. This is a pretty understandable justification to me because the spam on several markets was very bad.

https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/will-we-have-a-clear-policy-by-the

@IsaacKing I would strongly prefer something "pay manifold points to downrank that market" or shared private moderation or similar.

@IsaacKing Thank you for putting so elegantly in words what I feel is wrong with this decision and why this crystalizes a departure of what brought me to manifold in the first place for me

This decision makes me less likely to invest significant time/effort into Manifold. The whole point of Manifold was to offload the burden of truth arbitration onto individual users, and let them build or destroy their own reputations. The Manifold team stepping in and deleting markets they find "obviously false" defeats the purpose of that.

@MattP that is why I wanted them banned and I am happy that this happened

@MattP

I'm always baffled by the idea some people have that if people hear lunatic ideas from someone on the internet it'll infect their minds and turn them crazy. That's not how it works. People end up in extremist ideologies because they are alienated and/or have mental health issues, it doesn't just happen.

not exactly

for start there are moderately crazy/broken down people: and for them exposure makes things worse

and personally I am happy that this putinist troll got banned from this site

@MattP https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-gardens-die-by-pacifism

@MattP It does happen though, memetics normalize what we think.

> The solution to bad ideas is better ideas

Completely agree with this. Not really about the ridicule part (isn't that useful a tool), but yes, I don't think we should guard ourselves against individual actors (though people may want to shadowban others just because it's not interesting to talk to them.)

I still feel torn on the ban. On one hand, I get that there is reputation concern for manifold. On the other, it goes against a lot of what I liked about Manifold and does not signal the right self-commitment lever of actions that manifold is not going to actively monitor and modify markets, market resolutions, or participation in general

@TukP I'm always baffled by the idea some people have that if people hear lunatic ideas from someone on the internet it'll infect their minds and turn them crazy. That's not how it works. People end up in extremist ideologies because they are alienated and/or have mental health issues, it doesn't just happen. The solution to bad ideas is better ideas and (when on the extreme side) ridicule - not censorship.

None of this is to say I'm arguing against this ban, specifically - I don't have enough info about what led to it to form an opinion, so I don't have one. I'm more militating against the implied idea that the mere presence in a forum of someone with bad ideas is going to cause more people to fall to them.

@MartinRandall sorry, missing stair in the broad sense.
I am told he's still in the Manifold discord, which means he's still able to recruit from the Manifold community. That's a problem, if you uh, don't want to see more white supremacy &c in the world.

@TukP If he's a rapist I would prefer to know about that, yes.

@MattP To you he is an "internet rando" to us he is a predator in the rationalist community, a known "missing stair" who must be guarded against.

@MattP lol

@JoyVoid Did not mean to @ you specifically, just reply to this thread.

@JoyVoid Keep in mind that the user in question also DMed me on Discord and insisted that he was banned. Manifold people ALSO consider this to be a ban as confirmed in the Discord.

@MattP I would agree with the current resolution personally. For me the real question was whether the admin would intervene against an account unilatterally, and against whom.

@MartinRandall Yeah, that would've been slightly better.

@MattP Could have resolved 50% both answers.

@MattP Yeah ok. Guess he's banned from everything except betting. It's a little fuzzy but I can see the argument for just calling it a ban. If this were a binary market maybe it should resolve to 80% or something, but it's not so this seems like the best thing Sly could do.