Awesome! This strikes me as a very good thing, especially with your suggested social norms. I have 3 additional suggestions, though:
Add a social norm where commenters make short summaries, or quote a couple sentences of new info, without the fluff. The title of the link serves much the same purpose, and gives readers enough info to decide whether or not to click through. This is standard practice on the more intellectual subreddit, since they already have the background context and knowledge that 90% of the article is spent explaining.
Add a social norm where the best comments get linked to. I enjoy Yvain’s SSC posts, and the comments section often contains some gems, but digging through all of them to find the gems is tedious. I intend to quote or rephrase gems when I find them, and link to them in comments here.
Maybe we should have subreddits on LW. I’m not sure about this one. Tags serve some of the same purposes, so perhaps what would be ideal would be to subscribe and unsubscribe from tags you’re interested in. However, just copying the Reddit code for subreddits would be simpler. It would divide up the community though, so probably not desirable while we’re still small.
Add a social norm where commenters make short summaries, or quote a couple sentences of new info, without the fluff.
Posting links should be low-friction, and so it should be fine to post links without comment. That said, writing summaries in comments is very useful, and you should feel willing to do that even on links you didn’t post.
Maybe we should have subreddits on LW. I’m not sure about this one. Tags serve some of the same purposes, so perhaps what would be ideal would be to subscribe and unsubscribe from tags you’re interested in. However, just copying the Reddit code for subreddits would be simpler. It would divide up the community though, so probably not desirable while we’re still small.
Different subreddits seem best when used to separate norms / rules of discussion rather than topics. (Topics are often overlapping, and thus best dealt with using tags.) I think something like ‘cold’ and ‘warm’ subreddits, where the first has a more academic style and the second has a more friendly / improvisational style, might be sensible, but this remains to be seen.
“Posting links should be low-friction, and so it should be fine to post links without comment”—I would like to encourage you to examine this assumption. It depends heavily on the exact context. When few people have links to post, link posting should be low friction in order to encourage more posts. When there are more people posting links, having link posting be low friction is of much less value as quality becomes more important than quantity—indeed quantity can interfere with quality by reducing the chance that these links are seen.
Add a social norm where the best comments get linked to. I enjoy Yvain’s SSC posts, and the comments section often contains some gems, but digging through all of them to find the gems is tedious.
The biggest problem with SSC is there is no voting. Lesswrong allows the best comments to rise to the top, in principle at least. Still I think it’s a good idea, interesting discussion can be buried in nested comments, or be better than the main post.
Maybe we should have subreddits on LW. I’m not sure about this one.
I really don’t like this idea. I think the best model for lesswrong is something like Hacker News. Hacker news has no sections for different topics and it’s just vague “things of interest to hackers” which includes almost everything. I’d like to see lesswrong become “things of interest to rationalists”, which could be everything from SSC posts to genetics research to AI research. I think it would work out well.
Whereas reddit excludes a lot of things that don’t neatly fit into the limited topic of any specific large subreddit, and most people don’t’ subscribe to non default subreddits even if some of the content there might interest them.
Awesome! This strikes me as a very good thing, especially with your suggested social norms. I have 3 additional suggestions, though:
Add a social norm where commenters make short summaries, or quote a couple sentences of new info, without the fluff. The title of the link serves much the same purpose, and gives readers enough info to decide whether or not to click through. This is standard practice on the more intellectual subreddit, since they already have the background context and knowledge that 90% of the article is spent explaining.
Add a social norm where the best comments get linked to. I enjoy Yvain’s SSC posts, and the comments section often contains some gems, but digging through all of them to find the gems is tedious. I intend to quote or rephrase gems when I find them, and link to them in comments here.
Maybe we should have subreddits on LW. I’m not sure about this one. Tags serve some of the same purposes, so perhaps what would be ideal would be to subscribe and unsubscribe from tags you’re interested in. However, just copying the Reddit code for subreddits would be simpler. It would divide up the community though, so probably not desirable while we’re still small.
Another reason not to do this is that there aren’t nearly enough daily posts on LW to further subdivide them.
Posting links should be low-friction, and so it should be fine to post links without comment. That said, writing summaries in comments is very useful, and you should feel willing to do that even on links you didn’t post.
Different subreddits seem best when used to separate norms / rules of discussion rather than topics. (Topics are often overlapping, and thus best dealt with using tags.) I think something like ‘cold’ and ‘warm’ subreddits, where the first has a more academic style and the second has a more friendly / improvisational style, might be sensible, but this remains to be seen.
“Posting links should be low-friction, and so it should be fine to post links without comment”—I would like to encourage you to examine this assumption. It depends heavily on the exact context. When few people have links to post, link posting should be low friction in order to encourage more posts. When there are more people posting links, having link posting be low friction is of much less value as quality becomes more important than quantity—indeed quantity can interfere with quality by reducing the chance that these links are seen.
Maybe there could be an optional “summary” field, as a nudge for the link posters.
The biggest problem with SSC is there is no voting. Lesswrong allows the best comments to rise to the top, in principle at least. Still I think it’s a good idea, interesting discussion can be buried in nested comments, or be better than the main post.
I really don’t like this idea. I think the best model for lesswrong is something like Hacker News. Hacker news has no sections for different topics and it’s just vague “things of interest to hackers” which includes almost everything. I’d like to see lesswrong become “things of interest to rationalists”, which could be everything from SSC posts to genetics research to AI research. I think it would work out well.
Whereas reddit excludes a lot of things that don’t neatly fit into the limited topic of any specific large subreddit, and most people don’t’ subscribe to non default subreddits even if some of the content there might interest them.