I’d be interested in a dedicated version of Shortform Feeds.
The blogosphere equivalent of this was the main/sideblog setup—think SSC and Scott’s Tumblr. This seemed to work well for a lot of people, myself included: if you have something that isn’t quite substantial enough for a ‘main’ post, a quote from a book that you might want to link to later, or something like that, you just put it on your sideblog.
This might have been what Main vs. Discussion was intended to be on old LW, but it obviously didn’t work out like that: insofar as something like the setup existed on LW, it was Discussion vs. Open Thread.
These feeds wouldn’t be places for fun casual conversation, but that’s what the asteroid belt of largely invite-only chatrooms and satellite forums are for, at least if the Age of Forums is any guide. (These days it’d probably be social media instead of satellite forums.) Communities tend to grow their own places for fun casual conversation—I don’t think this has to be engineered, unless the point is to ensure that at least some of it happens on lesswrong.com. If they’re set up right, I think they’d be a lot like what existing sideblogs are like, which would IMO be a Good Thing.
I’m not a UI guy, so take this with a Dead Sea or two of salt, but my guess is that you’d need sideblog feeds to only be reachable from a link on someone’s userpage for this to work. If there’s a firehose, people might worry about polluting it; if sideblog posts are directly visible from userpages, people might worry about keeping their userpages looking pretty and respectable and so on. (In the traditional setup, main blogs are easily discoverable from sideblogs but not vice versa. That’s trivial if you’re on Tumblr or wordpress.com, but it probably wouldn’t mesh well with how things work here, and I doubt it’s strictly necessary. But some degree of distance from the agora probably is.)
I’d be interested in a dedicated version of Shortform Feeds.
The blogosphere equivalent of this was the main/sideblog setup—think SSC and Scott’s Tumblr. This seemed to work well for a lot of people, myself included: if you have something that isn’t quite substantial enough for a ‘main’ post, a quote from a book that you might want to link to later, or something like that, you just put it on your sideblog.
This might have been what Main vs. Discussion was intended to be on old LW, but it obviously didn’t work out like that: insofar as something like the setup existed on LW, it was Discussion vs. Open Thread.
These feeds wouldn’t be places for fun casual conversation, but that’s what the asteroid belt of largely invite-only chatrooms and satellite forums are for, at least if the Age of Forums is any guide. (These days it’d probably be social media instead of satellite forums.) Communities tend to grow their own places for fun casual conversation—I don’t think this has to be engineered, unless the point is to ensure that at least some of it happens on lesswrong.com. If they’re set up right, I think they’d be a lot like what existing sideblogs are like, which would IMO be a Good Thing.
I’m not a UI guy, so take this with a Dead Sea or two of salt, but my guess is that you’d need sideblog feeds to only be reachable from a link on someone’s userpage for this to work. If there’s a firehose, people might worry about polluting it; if sideblog posts are directly visible from userpages, people might worry about keeping their userpages looking pretty and respectable and so on. (In the traditional setup, main blogs are easily discoverable from sideblogs but not vice versa. That’s trivial if you’re on Tumblr or wordpress.com, but it probably wouldn’t mesh well with how things work here, and I doubt it’s strictly necessary. But some degree of distance from the agora probably is.)