Mikhail Samin on X: "fyi sadly i won't be at lessonline or summercamp due to being banned as a result of this tweet.(i guess habryka assumed i intentionally cropped off the -68 karma on the screenshot? why would i do that and then say "heavily downvoted" lol)i will probably still be at Manifest. https://t.co/V7NyPskDUp" / X
I don't think the inclination to ban quickly for mild annoyances is serving the rationalist community well.
Claude
Summary. Mikhail Samin recounts being banned from LessOnline and Summer Camp after a tweet screenshotting a heavily-downvoted LessWrong post, disputing moderator Habryka's assumption that he'd deliberately cropped out the -68 karma score. The thread includes back-and-forth with someone close to the moderation decision, who frames the ban as stemming less from that single tweet than from a second instance of "outlier bad-ish" friction during an ongoing policy conversation, compounded by separate concerns about calls for violence and cyberattacks from another user Samin had been in contact with. Samin says he deleted the tweet immediately out of caution, while his interlocutor presses him on whether he's considered apologizing.
On the note. The thread itself undercuts the "quick ban for mild annoyance" framing a little eal about clear: Habryka's counterpart says the ban wasn't really about the screenshot at all but about a second cumulative bad experience plus unrelated calls-for-violence context that got tangled up in the same conversation, which is a very different (and harder to evaluate from outside) situation than a single-tweet overreaction. That's worth sitting with before concluding the community's ban threshold is too twitchy al moderation decisions built on accumulated, half-visible history look exactly like arbitrary snap judgments to everyone who wasn't in the room, which is structurally similar to the asymmetry Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard — LessWrong describes between a persistent insider and an outsider trying to contest a reputation-affecting call after the fact.
Related
- a ban justified by an accumulated pattern of friction rather than one incident ↔ asymmetry between one obsessive editor and many episodic defenders (Reliable Sources: The Story of David Gerard — LessWrong) · Both cases show how a gatekeeper's private, accumulated history with someone can produce a consequential decision that looks disproportionate or arbitrary to anyone who only sees the single triggering incident.
- defaulting to halting activity when a moderator's reaction is confusing but possibly serious ↔ the necessity of an override authority even in trustless systems (Bureaucracy is a world of magic) · Habryka's swift ban is exactly the kind of override authority that trustless systems still need to function, but exercising it on ambiguous evidence is precisely what makes such authority feel arbitrary from the outside.