It’s almost as though the issue were accountability.
And I think this is one of them. Under a Hanson hat, Talk isn’t about Information. That is, for most things most people say on the net, this:
Author: “Hi! I just said a thing!”
is their only genuine content, no matter what words they happen to pick to express it. The fear is that others will hold them accountable for what they said rather than what they meant. They’re playing the “I just said a thing!” game, but on a personal blog they might get accosted by people playing the “let’s have discussions” game, and that would be awkward because one of the conceits of the former is that it pretends to be the latter.
In short, blogs signal the wrong things to non-nerds, they’re the wrong kind of conversation. Our signal is their noise.
For one rather public and hilarious example, witness Scott Alexander’s flight from LessWrong
But I think something different is going on here, and with other diasporists. Scott et al are clearly playing the discussion game, really well. I think the second force driving people from forums to blogs and from blogs to social media is convenience.
Not having direct control of your posting environment is a trivial inconvenience. Having to run your own posting environment is also a trivial inconvenience, once the novelty of owning it wears off. Tumblr and twitter are extremely convenient. Especially twitter; you don’t have to feel bad about emitting opinions without thought if the format makes depth of thought impossible! Both even make it possible to Say A Thing without saying any thing!
Never bet against convenience. Discussion moves from formats that ask more of the discussants to those that ask less. This rule is good when applied to the process of posting, and bad when applied to the content of posting, but in practice applies equally to both.
Never bet against convenience. Discussion moves from formats that ask more of the discussants to those that ask less. This rule is good when applied to the process of posting, and bad when applied to the content of posting, but in practice applies equally to both.
Well, not for everyone on LW, but certainly some, esp. those at CFAR trying to revive it, having an open place for discussion par excellence is a crucial part of learning how to enhance group rationality and coordination in an online environment. If something is a crucial part of reducing x-risk, I can imagine many thinking “convenience be damned! This needs to get done!”
So, I think a key question is: how do we make LW more convenient? Or, rather, since rewriting the codebase will take a while yet, and I imagine people want to move discussion back to LW before several months go by, what can we do to make LW more attractive to overcome the trivial inconveniences of being here rather than on social media, other blogs, etc.? What are some robust incentives we can implement to draw people back? Are there any better/more suggestions than “generate good blog content”, “ask people what they want to read about and then blog it”, and “stop trolls/increase moderation/fix voting system” we can generate for making LW more magnetic?
You can’t have friendly debates on a web forum containing a stalker psycho who will take offense at opinions you expressed and then will keep “punishing” you. It’s simply not fun. And people come here for intelligent debate and fun.
In the “before Eugine” era, we had once in a while also debates on more or less political topics. People expressed their opinions, some agreed, some disagreed, then we moved on. The “politics is the mindkiller” was a reminder to not take this too seriously. Some people complained about these debates, but they had the option of simply avoiding them. And whatever you said during the political debate stopped becoming relevant when you changed the topic.
The karma system was here to allow feedback, and I think everyone understood that it was an imperfect mechanism, but still better than nothing. (That it’s good to have a convenient mechanism for saying “more of this, please” and “less of this, please” without having to write an explanation every time, and potentially derailing the debate by doing so.) The idea of using sockpuppets to win some pissing contest simply wasn’t out there.
Essentially, the karma feedback system is quite fragile, because it assumes being used in good faith. It assumes that people upvote stuff they genuinely like, downvote stuff they genuinely dislike, and that there is only one vote per person. With these assumptions, negative karma means “most readers believe this comment shouldn’t be here”, which is a reason to update or perhaps ask for an explanation. Without these assumptions, negative karma may simply mean “Eugine doesn’t like your face”, and there is nothing useful to learn from that.
(At this moment I notice that I am confused—how does Reddit deal with the same kind of downvote abuse? Do their moderators have better tools, e.g. detecting sockpuppets by IP addresses, or seeing who made the votes? I could try to find out...)
Articles and debates influence each other. People come to debate here, because they want to debate the articles posted here. But people decide to post their articles here, because they expect to see a good discussion here… and I believe this may simply not be true anymore for many potential contributors.
At this moment, the downvoting is stopped, but it exposes us to the complementary risk—drowning in noise, because we have removed the only mechanism we had against it. We yet have to see how that develops.
Some people complained about these debates, but they had the option of simply avoiding them.
Not if we wanted to use the “recent comments” page, and not if we were worried about indirect effects on the site, e.g. through drawing in bad commenters.
Well… that’s a good point… and perhaps also how Eugine got here. :(
On the other hand, I am also surprised that we didn’t attract someone Eugine-like much sooner. For example, LW was openly antireligious from the first days. Why did no religious fanatic start the same kind of crusade against us? Or why any of the crackpots that once in a while appeared on the website and got downvoted didn’t start a sockpuppet war to promote their theory? Uhm, what I am trying to say is that the possibility to get attention of undesired people was always there. Even if we increased it further.
I think there’s two forces involved here.
And I think this is one of them. Under a Hanson hat, Talk isn’t about Information. That is, for most things most people say on the net, this:
is their only genuine content, no matter what words they happen to pick to express it. The fear is that others will hold them accountable for what they said rather than what they meant. They’re playing the “I just said a thing!” game, but on a personal blog they might get accosted by people playing the “let’s have discussions” game, and that would be awkward because one of the conceits of the former is that it pretends to be the latter.
In short, blogs signal the wrong things to non-nerds, they’re the wrong kind of conversation. Our signal is their noise.
But I think something different is going on here, and with other diasporists. Scott et al are clearly playing the discussion game, really well. I think the second force driving people from forums to blogs and from blogs to social media is convenience.
Not having direct control of your posting environment is a trivial inconvenience. Having to run your own posting environment is also a trivial inconvenience, once the novelty of owning it wears off. Tumblr and twitter are extremely convenient. Especially twitter; you don’t have to feel bad about emitting opinions without thought if the format makes depth of thought impossible! Both even make it possible to Say A Thing without saying any thing!
Never bet against convenience. Discussion moves from formats that ask more of the discussants to those that ask less. This rule is good when applied to the process of posting, and bad when applied to the content of posting, but in practice applies equally to both.
Well, not for everyone on LW, but certainly some, esp. those at CFAR trying to revive it, having an open place for discussion par excellence is a crucial part of learning how to enhance group rationality and coordination in an online environment. If something is a crucial part of reducing x-risk, I can imagine many thinking “convenience be damned! This needs to get done!”
So, I think a key question is: how do we make LW more convenient? Or, rather, since rewriting the codebase will take a while yet, and I imagine people want to move discussion back to LW before several months go by, what can we do to make LW more attractive to overcome the trivial inconveniences of being here rather than on social media, other blogs, etc.? What are some robust incentives we can implement to draw people back? Are there any better/more suggestions than “generate good blog content”, “ask people what they want to read about and then blog it”, and “stop trolls/increase moderation/fix voting system” we can generate for making LW more magnetic?
You can’t have friendly debates on a web forum containing a stalker psycho who will take offense at opinions you expressed and then will keep “punishing” you. It’s simply not fun. And people come here for intelligent debate and fun.
In the “before Eugine” era, we had once in a while also debates on more or less political topics. People expressed their opinions, some agreed, some disagreed, then we moved on. The “politics is the mindkiller” was a reminder to not take this too seriously. Some people complained about these debates, but they had the option of simply avoiding them. And whatever you said during the political debate stopped becoming relevant when you changed the topic.
The karma system was here to allow feedback, and I think everyone understood that it was an imperfect mechanism, but still better than nothing. (That it’s good to have a convenient mechanism for saying “more of this, please” and “less of this, please” without having to write an explanation every time, and potentially derailing the debate by doing so.) The idea of using sockpuppets to win some pissing contest simply wasn’t out there.
Essentially, the karma feedback system is quite fragile, because it assumes being used in good faith. It assumes that people upvote stuff they genuinely like, downvote stuff they genuinely dislike, and that there is only one vote per person. With these assumptions, negative karma means “most readers believe this comment shouldn’t be here”, which is a reason to update or perhaps ask for an explanation. Without these assumptions, negative karma may simply mean “Eugine doesn’t like your face”, and there is nothing useful to learn from that.
(At this moment I notice that I am confused—how does Reddit deal with the same kind of downvote abuse? Do their moderators have better tools, e.g. detecting sockpuppets by IP addresses, or seeing who made the votes? I could try to find out...)
Articles and debates influence each other. People come to debate here, because they want to debate the articles posted here. But people decide to post their articles here, because they expect to see a good discussion here… and I believe this may simply not be true anymore for many potential contributors.
At this moment, the downvoting is stopped, but it exposes us to the complementary risk—drowning in noise, because we have removed the only mechanism we had against it. We yet have to see how that develops.
Not if we wanted to use the “recent comments” page, and not if we were worried about indirect effects on the site, e.g. through drawing in bad commenters.
Well… that’s a good point… and perhaps also how Eugine got here. :(
On the other hand, I am also surprised that we didn’t attract someone Eugine-like much sooner. For example, LW was openly antireligious from the first days. Why did no religious fanatic start the same kind of crusade against us? Or why any of the crackpots that once in a while appeared on the website and got downvoted didn’t start a sockpuppet war to promote their theory? Uhm, what I am trying to say is that the possibility to get attention of undesired people was always there. Even if we increased it further.