Yep, crossposting creates a more natural shelling point for discussion on LessWrong, and a lot of people really dislike the context switch of link posts (I almost never click on them because they tend to violate my expectations, and are then also much less natural to quote from in the discussion).
It also makes the content of the post indexable in our search, and makes it possible for other users and the moderators to create sequences that include this post. And generally makes it easier for us to curate the post as part of the LessWrong canon.
Um, I think one or both of us is confused, so let me clarify what I meant:
I’m asking why this isn’t a link post while also still containing the full text of the post, just as it does now. (Like this post, for instance.) That would satisfy the “makes the content of the post indexable in our search” and the “makes it possible for other users and the moderators to create sequences that include this post” and the “easier to curate” desiderata.
The matter of the context switch is a UI issue; the way GW handles this issue is one solution, though there are others, no doubt.
As for the “natural Schelling point”, well, empirically… no, it really doesn’t, does it? Look at how many comments there are, here, and now look how many there are on SSC… perhaps you might consider adding a feature that allows you to transclude comments from certain sites, such as SSC and possibly other hand-picked blogs, into the LW comment sections of posts from said blogs that are cross-posted here—as I have done on my blog and on Naval Gazing (scroll down)?
Ah, yes. Looks like I misunderstood you. I agree that we should have some additional link to the original blogpost. I think it should be formatted slightly differently than a normal link post, since having “Link” in the title signals to users that they will have to leave the site to read the content, and that the content in the post is separate from the original article (i.e. has commentary on the linked article, instead of being an exact copy). We just haven’t gotten around to making the UI for that. For now crossposting is indicated by the “SSC” tag visible on the frontpage.
(Re schelling point: I do think I was a bit unclear here. What I meant was “a natural schelling point for discussion of the SSC post, for people on LW, separate from SSC”. I’ve generally found that there are just too many comments on SSC, with not enough tools to sort and filter them, with the average quality not being high enough, and with people being less familiar with the other material on LessWrong, so that it seems good to have a separate place to discuss the same posts with a different set of people and with different technology applied to them.)
(There isn’t really much of a difference between the GW and LW2 implementation from the context switch perspective. Both require you to go to a different site to read the content, which seems quite hard to avoid, and is really the primary issue I am concerned with here. I like GWs implementation of making the link accessible from the frontpage, though that doesn’t really have much to do with my worries about context-switching.)
I think it should be formatted slightly differently than a normal link post, since having “Link” in the title signals to users that they will have to leave the site to read the content.
Not that I necessarily disagree with this, but just want to note that there are already many posts on LW which are linkposts with text in them (in fact, I think this may actually be the majority of all linkposts; of the last 11 frontpage linkposts, for example, 6 contain text, while 5 are link-only posts); so what we take a “normal link post” to be—and consequently, what is the appropriate UI design for linkposts—should probably take that into account.
Yeah, I think the important distinction is “here is text that is commentary on the provided link” and “here is the text of the link”. I think these two are the most important to distinguish from one another.
Meta question: is there a reason this isn’t a link post to the SSC version of this post?
Yep, crossposting creates a more natural shelling point for discussion on LessWrong, and a lot of people really dislike the context switch of link posts (I almost never click on them because they tend to violate my expectations, and are then also much less natural to quote from in the discussion).
It also makes the content of the post indexable in our search, and makes it possible for other users and the moderators to create sequences that include this post. And generally makes it easier for us to curate the post as part of the LessWrong canon.
Um, I think one or both of us is confused, so let me clarify what I meant:
I’m asking why this isn’t a link post while also still containing the full text of the post, just as it does now. (Like this post, for instance.) That would satisfy the “makes the content of the post indexable in our search” and the “makes it possible for other users and the moderators to create sequences that include this post” and the “easier to curate” desiderata.
The matter of the context switch is a UI issue; the way GW handles this issue is one solution, though there are others, no doubt.
As for the “natural Schelling point”, well, empirically… no, it really doesn’t, does it? Look at how many comments there are, here, and now look how many there are on SSC… perhaps you might consider adding a feature that allows you to transclude comments from certain sites, such as SSC and possibly other hand-picked blogs, into the LW comment sections of posts from said blogs that are cross-posted here—as I have done on my blog and on Naval Gazing (scroll down)?
Ah, yes. Looks like I misunderstood you. I agree that we should have some additional link to the original blogpost. I think it should be formatted slightly differently than a normal link post, since having “Link” in the title signals to users that they will have to leave the site to read the content, and that the content in the post is separate from the original article (i.e. has commentary on the linked article, instead of being an exact copy). We just haven’t gotten around to making the UI for that. For now crossposting is indicated by the “SSC” tag visible on the frontpage.
(Re schelling point: I do think I was a bit unclear here. What I meant was “a natural schelling point for discussion of the SSC post, for people on LW, separate from SSC”. I’ve generally found that there are just too many comments on SSC, with not enough tools to sort and filter them, with the average quality not being high enough, and with people being less familiar with the other material on LessWrong, so that it seems good to have a separate place to discuss the same posts with a different set of people and with different technology applied to them.)
(There isn’t really much of a difference between the GW and LW2 implementation from the context switch perspective. Both require you to go to a different site to read the content, which seems quite hard to avoid, and is really the primary issue I am concerned with here. I like GWs implementation of making the link accessible from the frontpage, though that doesn’t really have much to do with my worries about context-switching.)
Not that I necessarily disagree with this, but just want to note that there are already many posts on LW which are linkposts with text in them (in fact, I think this may actually be the majority of all linkposts; of the last 11 frontpage linkposts, for example, 6 contain text, while 5 are link-only posts); so what we take a “normal link post” to be—and consequently, what is the appropriate UI design for linkposts—should probably take that into account.
Yeah, I think the important distinction is “here is text that is commentary on the provided link” and “here is the text of the link”. I think these two are the most important to distinguish from one another.
Agreed. Note, though, that even with that caveat, linkposts seem to be at least one-third text-containing.