LW sounds pretty bad. Very poor/disrespectful administrator behaviour.
From the admin notes in the article:
Those three things in combination, a propensity for long unproductive discussions, a history of threats against people who engage with him, and being the historically most downvoted account in LessWrong history, make me overall think it’s better for curi to find other places as potential discussion venues.
Long? Not surprised, you are persistent, I don’t know why it’s a problem. Unproductive? I guess I’d have to look into that a lot on LW to know what they consider unproductive. Threats? No, that’s inaccurate. Karma?
Karma is a very bad way of judging how good a user someone is. Based on what I’ve seen of your writing, I’d guess that negatives came from disagreeing with people and posting unconventional ideas. The fact the admins mention it implies they think that the user base should vote on what are acceptable opinions to express, even when there is no explicit complaint or rules breaking involved. The fact that the negatives are mostly in the pretty distant past makes this argument seem spurious and they’re making up equally spurious reasons to dismiss what they freely admit as recent improvement. Not to mention that, as someone with a known stalker/harasser, it’s reasonable to think that could be a cause of negative karma as part of the sustained harassment.
Guessing at a reason they’re not stating (because it’s really really morally bad and consciously or not they wouldn’t want to admit it - though this might be a pretty uncharitable interpretation), they don’t want someone who’s got a harasser because they might expect the harassment will continue and will result in more problems. They also seem to be avoiding taking a position on who’s the wrongdoer (referring to him someone you have “been in conflict with”) which contributes to this guess.
I’m sorry about the harassment. It mega sucks and the perpetrator is a vile person.
Yes that’s what I’m doing. I’m not planning to jump into multiple new forums in a very short time, I’ll get overwhelmed.
I guess if I were to look at LW I’d look at some of your threads to think about the “unproductive” criticism and see what I think of them and look for patterns in the downvoting to see if I can work out what the user base think is bad about them to inform whether to leave or, if not leaving, how to engage.
EA seems less bad than LW. I’d broadly agree with your assessment of their subjects. But I might find it interesting to read about their ideas (such as AI alignment) to understand the current ideas on the subject better. My interest in AGI is currently somewhat casual but I expect it to reach the top of my que some time this year.