Soft-censorship on the Effective Altruism forum

The EA forum karma system generates soft-censorship, self-censorship and groupthink. If you write a critique on a post with high-karma authors, they can just downvote it and delete it from the frontpage, which just leaves you with less karma and voting power in the future (and other people can see your low comment-to-karma ratio, or the little icon indicating it, and dismiss you).

People with more voting power can downvote people they disagree with, giving them less voting power (and thereby less voting power they can distribute to other people of similar sentiment... ad infinitum) while conversely upvote things they agree with giving those people more voting power (and thereby more voting power they can distribute to people they agree with... ad infinitum).

This not only leads to soft-censorship, but also to self-censorship. I mostly avoided critiquing EA orthodoxy because I knew it would take away my voting power. I recently created an alt account for my (polite) critiques of EA after years of writing pro-EA things on the forum. Immediately after my second comment of my alt-account, the comment got deleted as spam, something that hadn’t happened in years of posting pro-EA things.

The team behind the EA forum and Less Wrong are basically the same, and I know a similar thing happened to Ruby Thelot after writing a (polite) critique of a rationalist belief on LW. His post and his account got deleted. Now, as in my case, it later got reinstated, but by that time it was long gone from the frontpage, ensuring no-one saw it.

I did a test of the EA/LW team by posting the same post about worker coops on the EA forum and LW, with one difference, in the EA post I called them worker coops and in the LW post I called them socialist firms (something that clearly signals divergence from EA/LW orthodoxy). Guess which one was immediately allowed on the frontpage and which one was kept off the frontpage long enough to make it sink to the bottom?

With my new alt-account I started commenting (polite) critiques of EA, and guess what, they don’t show up on the frontpage.

So I (politely) message the mods about this on the intercom, saying that while I understand that some of my comments on community posts are not showing up, even ones on non-community posts don’t show up. I get a reply that sometimes comments on community posts don’t show up. I (politely) reiterate that it’s not just comments on community posts. Silence. I send (polite) followup messages. Nothing.

The intercom states that the mods will answer you in hours, which matches with my experience from when I was posting pro EA things on my main account. However, for my account of (polite) critiques of EA, it’s been days (I first signaled this September 1st).

EDIT: I got a reply that they’re looking into it

EDIT 2: They asked me to try again, and now my non-community comments are showing up on the frontpage, but all of my community comments still aren’t.