There was a post up some time last week I wanted to read called Women and Effective Altruism. Later last week I noticed the page seemed down and now I just get "Sorry, you don't have access to this page." I was wondering why that was. My 60 second glance at the two top comments gave me the impression that the post stimulated healthy discourse among EA women on their experiences in EA.
So just FYI:
I've had members in my community point out concern that the post being taken down is evidence of censorship in EA.
The message "Sorry, you don't have access to this page" should probably read something like "Sorry, this post has been removed by the author." This is not even "only about optics". This is just updating a message so that it says something true rather than false.
Thanks for flagging! Added a feature request in the feature request thread
Just to clarify, I don't work on the forum, I only help out with moderation, so I'm only speculating here.
If you want to contact the people that run the forum, you can use these channels (but keep in mind they're currently probably a bit overloaded)
The forum codebase seems to be public, you can see that the text was changed in November https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/6143 https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/6153/files#diff-5dc494c8af9a70df8c13a716cab8cd560735eb4e5638e21d2735f87a39f96ad8: approximately one day after I posted the feature request.
Maybe the person in your community had concerns even with the new text? Or maybe they were not logged in? I think having a detailed report/request for change could help the developers (e.g. including a screenshot of what you saw, and a mention of what you would have preferred to see).
As for:
As a software developer (not working on the forum), I have to admit I sighed a bit while reading this.
These kinds of things are sadly often more tricky than they seem (as you just found out, the solution didn't... (read more)
Hi I'm really sorry. I wrote that late last night very tired and frustrated after thinking about this or gender EA stuff all day. I thought about deleting or retracting my comment a few minutes after I wrote it, but I just left it in what I hoped was decent form. But unfortunately it was so not decent form nor correct. So now I've retracted it.
It seems that when I revisited the link back in November, it was before the page was changed (probably before this post was made), so I didn't see the update in November. And when I and others visited 2 weeks ago I guess we all just missed that second sentence "This is usually due to the user deleting the post" because it isn't as obvious on mobile? I do struggle to see how we could have missed the sentence about it, so perhaps I'm the only one who missed it, and others saw it but still felt the language implied foul play.
As you suggest, I'll message the people in my community about how it looked to them. And if that does yield good feedback or I think of some better language I'll message mods.
And yeah, my latter sentences you quote where I speak about it not being treated immediately aren't valid. It does look like the issue was ... (read more)
This seems like generally a bad precedent to set - lots of people put a bunch of time into writing thoughtful comments; those comments are now gone. Even leaving the post up with the body blanked out would be preferable. I’m not sure the author of a post should have the power to erase all the discussion of it unless they have a very good reason.
I think it's a somewhat hard tradeoff to set in terms of visibility and streisand-effect like things. I am currently happy with the equilibrium where you can still find the comments on the greaterwrong mirror:
https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/NacFjEJGoFFWRqsc8/women-and-effective-altruism
My understanding is that the author ultimately decided to take it down when someone called them a bigot in the comments (for their points related to polyamory). I think both the comment and reaction to it were a bit much personally, but I can understand not wanting the comments visible if that was the key worry for the author.
To clarify, authors have always been able to make a post private by clicking "Move to Draft" on their posts.
Moderators can do so as well (like has been done in this case) if, for example, the author does not know about that possibility.
The author has a note at the top of the saying this was “a heavily downvoted post in [the EA] community” when it was posted here. The archive link Dawn provided, however, shows that it received 64 upvotes on net. Is there a reason for this significant discrepancy between her claim and what the archive link shows?
If you mouseover the score, you can see that there were more than 200 total votes. I assume it meant that it had lots of downvotes even if the final score was positive.
That seems like a misleading framing. When I hear heavily downvoted post, I think of something that’s well in the negatives on net. Otherwise, the post could also be described as “heavily upvoted” even though it only got 64 karma on net.
Interesting! I had missed that post. There’s a backup of the discussion on archive.org. If it was removed to sort of close the discussion, it’s probably okay to link it because that copy can’t be commented on? But I’ll remove my comment if someone feels that it’s uncooperative to link the copy.