Thanks for the reply! I see what you’re saying, but here are some considerations on the other side.
Part of what I was trying to point out here is that 179 comments would not be “extraordinary” growth, it would be an “ordinary” return to what used to be the status quo. If you want to talk about startups, Paul Graham says 5-7% a week is a good growth rate during Y Combinator. 5% weekly growth corresponds to 12x annual growth, and I don’t get the sense LW has grown 12x in the past year. Maybe 12x/year is more explosive than ideal, but I think there’s room for more growth even if it’s not explosive. IMO, growth is good partially because it helps you discover product-market fit. You don’t want to overfit to your initial users, or, in the case of an online community, over-adapt to the needs of a small initial userbase. And you don’t want to be one of those people who never ships. Some entrepreneurs say if you’re not embarrassed by your initial product launch, you waited too long.
that metric is obviously very goodhart-able
One could easily goodhart the metric by leaving lots of useless one-line comments, but that’s a little beside the point. The question for me is whether additional audience members are useful on the current margin. I think the answer is yes, if they’re high-quality. The only promo method I suggested which doesn’t filter heavily is the Adwords thing. Honestly I brought it up mostly to point out that we used to do that and it wasn’t terrible, so it’s a data point about how far it’s safe to go.
A second and related reason to be skeptical of focusing on moving comments from 19 to 179 at the current stage (especially if I put on my ‘community manager hat’), is a worry about wasting people’s time. In general, LessWrong is a website where we don’t want many core members of the community to be using it 10 hours per day. Becoming addictive and causing all researchers to be on it all day, could easily be a net negative contribution to the world. While none of your recommendations were about addictiveness, there are related ways of increasing the number of comments such as showing a user’s karma score on every page, like LW 1.0 did.
What if we could make AI alignment research addictive? If you can make work feel like play, that’s a huge win right?
See also Giving Your All. You could argue that I should either be spending 0% of my time on LW or 100% of my time on LW. I don’t think the argument fully works, because time spent on LW is probably a complementary good with time spent reading textbooks and so on, but it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable for me to see the number of upvotes I get as a proxy for the amount of progress I’m making.
I want LW to be more addictive on the current margin. I want to feel motivated to read someone’s post about AI alignment and write some clever comment on it that will get me karma. But my System 1 doesn’t have a sufficient expectation of upvotes & replies for me to experience a lot of intrinsic motivation to do this.
I’d suggest thinking in terms of focus destruction rather than addictiveness. Ideally, I find LW enjoyable to use without it hurting my ability to focus.
I think instead of restricting the audience, a better idea is making discussion dynamics a little less time-driven.
If I leave a comment on LW in the morning, and I’m deep in some equations during the afternoon, I don’t want my brain nagging me to go check if I need to defend my claims on LW while the discussion is still on the frontpage.
Spreading discussions out over time also serves as spaced repetition to reinforce concepts.
I think I heard about research which found that brainstorming 5 minutes on 5 different days, instead of 25 minutes on a single day, is a better way to generate divergent creative insights. This makes sense to me because the effect of being anchored on ideas you’ve already had is lessened.
Re: intro texts, I’d argue having Rohin’s value learning sequence go by without much of an audience to read & comment on it was a big missed opportunity. Paul Christiano’s ideas seem important, and it could’ve been really valuable to have lively discussions of those ideas to see if we could make progress on them, or at least share our objections as they were rerun here on LW.
Ultimately, it’s the idea that matters, not whether it comes in the form of a blog post, journal article, or comment. You mods have talked about the value of people throwing ideas around even when they’re not 100% sure about them. I think comments are a really good format for that. [Say, random idea: what if we had a “you should turn this into a post” button for comments?]
Just wanted to say I agree regarding the problems with conversation being “time driven” (I’ve previously suggested a similar problem with Q&A)
One idea that occurs to me is to personalise Recent Discussion on the homepage. If I’ve read a post and even more if I’ve upvoted it then I’m likely to be interested in comments on that thread. If I’ve upvoted a comment then I’m likely to be interested in replies to that comment.
If Recent Discussion worked more like a personal recommendation section than a rough summary section then I think I’d get more out of it and probably be more motivated to post comments, knowing that people may well read them even if I’m replying to an old post.
Thanks for the reply! I see what you’re saying, but here are some considerations on the other side.
Part of what I was trying to point out here is that 179 comments would not be “extraordinary” growth, it would be an “ordinary” return to what used to be the status quo. If you want to talk about startups, Paul Graham says 5-7% a week is a good growth rate during Y Combinator. 5% weekly growth corresponds to 12x annual growth, and I don’t get the sense LW has grown 12x in the past year. Maybe 12x/year is more explosive than ideal, but I think there’s room for more growth even if it’s not explosive. IMO, growth is good partially because it helps you discover product-market fit. You don’t want to overfit to your initial users, or, in the case of an online community, over-adapt to the needs of a small initial userbase. And you don’t want to be one of those people who never ships. Some entrepreneurs say if you’re not embarrassed by your initial product launch, you waited too long.
One could easily goodhart the metric by leaving lots of useless one-line comments, but that’s a little beside the point. The question for me is whether additional audience members are useful on the current margin. I think the answer is yes, if they’re high-quality. The only promo method I suggested which doesn’t filter heavily is the Adwords thing. Honestly I brought it up mostly to point out that we used to do that and it wasn’t terrible, so it’s a data point about how far it’s safe to go.
What if we could make AI alignment research addictive? If you can make work feel like play, that’s a huge win right?
See also Giving Your All. You could argue that I should either be spending 0% of my time on LW or 100% of my time on LW. I don’t think the argument fully works, because time spent on LW is probably a complementary good with time spent reading textbooks and so on, but it doesn’t seem totally unreasonable for me to see the number of upvotes I get as a proxy for the amount of progress I’m making.
I want LW to be more addictive on the current margin. I want to feel motivated to read someone’s post about AI alignment and write some clever comment on it that will get me karma. But my System 1 doesn’t have a sufficient expectation of upvotes & replies for me to experience a lot of intrinsic motivation to do this.
I’d suggest thinking in terms of focus destruction rather than addictiveness. Ideally, I find LW enjoyable to use without it hurting my ability to focus.
I think instead of restricting the audience, a better idea is making discussion dynamics a little less time-driven.
If I leave a comment on LW in the morning, and I’m deep in some equations during the afternoon, I don’t want my brain nagging me to go check if I need to defend my claims on LW while the discussion is still on the frontpage.
Spreading discussions out over time also serves as spaced repetition to reinforce concepts.
I think I heard about research which found that brainstorming 5 minutes on 5 different days, instead of 25 minutes on a single day, is a better way to generate divergent creative insights. This makes sense to me because the effect of being anchored on ideas you’ve already had is lessened.
See also the CNN effect.
Re: intro texts, I’d argue having Rohin’s value learning sequence go by without much of an audience to read & comment on it was a big missed opportunity. Paul Christiano’s ideas seem important, and it could’ve been really valuable to have lively discussions of those ideas to see if we could make progress on them, or at least share our objections as they were rerun here on LW.
Ultimately, it’s the idea that matters, not whether it comes in the form of a blog post, journal article, or comment. You mods have talked about the value of people throwing ideas around even when they’re not 100% sure about them. I think comments are a really good format for that. [Say, random idea: what if we had a “you should turn this into a post” button for comments?]
Just wanted to say I agree regarding the problems with conversation being “time driven” (I’ve previously suggested a similar problem with Q&A)
One idea that occurs to me is to personalise Recent Discussion on the homepage. If I’ve read a post and even more if I’ve upvoted it then I’m likely to be interested in comments on that thread. If I’ve upvoted a comment then I’m likely to be interested in replies to that comment.
If Recent Discussion worked more like a personal recommendation section than a rough summary section then I think I’d get more out of it and probably be more motivated to post comments, knowing that people may well read them even if I’m replying to an old post.