There are two specific problems with Facebook as a community forum that I’m aware of. The first is that the built-in archiving and discovery tools are abysmal, because that’s not the primary use case for the platform. Fortunately, we know there’s a technical solution to this, because Jeff Kaufman implemented it on his blog.
I don’t understand this response. That there exists a solution doesn’t mean that there exists a solution that 1) is easy to use and 2) that people will actually use. One of the many advantages of hosting a conversation on a blog post instead of on a Facebook status is that it’s easy for random people to link to that blog post years later. Even if people could in principle do this for Facebook statuses with the appropriate tools, the trivial inconveniences are way too high and they won’t.
(I’ve already had one friend explicitly say that he was looking for a Facebook status I wrote because he wanted to show it to someone else but found it too annoying to look for and gave up.)
I’ve been thinking about that, though I am somewhat worried about the legality of that integration (it’s unclear whether you can copy people’s content like that without their direct consent, or what would count as consent), and also think it removes most of the levers to shape the culture of a community.
For example, it seems clear to me that the rationality community could not have formed its culture on Facebook, though it might be able to preserve its culture on Facebook. The forces towards standard online discussion norms on Facebook are quite high (for example, you can’t display the moderation norms easily accessible below a comment, you can’t reduce the attention a comment gets by downvoting it, you can’t collapse a comment by default, etc.)
I guess there’s an inherent tradeoff between archipelago and the ability to shape the culture of the community. The status quo on LW 2.0 leans too far towards the latter for my tastes; the rationalist community is big and diverse and different people want different things, and the culture of LW 2.0 feels optimized for what you and Ben want, which diverges often enough from what I want that I’d rather post on Facebook to avoid dealing with that set of selection effects. Whether you should care about this depends on how many other people are in a similar position and how likely they are to make valuable contributions to the project of intellectual progress, vs. the costs of loss of control. I’m quite confident that there are some people whose contributions are extremely valuable and whose style differs from the prevailing one here—Scott Alexander being one, although he’s not active on Facebook in particular—but unfortunately I have no idea whether the costs are worth it.
I don’t understand this response. That there exists a solution doesn’t mean that there exists a solution that 1) is easy to use and 2) that people will actually use. One of the many advantages of hosting a conversation on a blog post instead of on a Facebook status is that it’s easy for random people to link to that blog post years later. Even if people could in principle do this for Facebook statuses with the appropriate tools, the trivial inconveniences are way too high and they won’t.
(I’ve already had one friend explicitly say that he was looking for a Facebook status I wrote because he wanted to show it to someone else but found it too annoying to look for and gave up.)
This suggests it might be valuable to get a Facebook/LessWrong2.0 integration that works like Kaufman’s solution and is easy to use.
Yes, this was what I was trying to suggest.
I’ve been thinking about that, though I am somewhat worried about the legality of that integration (it’s unclear whether you can copy people’s content like that without their direct consent, or what would count as consent), and also think it removes most of the levers to shape the culture of a community.
For example, it seems clear to me that the rationality community could not have formed its culture on Facebook, though it might be able to preserve its culture on Facebook. The forces towards standard online discussion norms on Facebook are quite high (for example, you can’t display the moderation norms easily accessible below a comment, you can’t reduce the attention a comment gets by downvoting it, you can’t collapse a comment by default, etc.)
I guess there’s an inherent tradeoff between archipelago and the ability to shape the culture of the community. The status quo on LW 2.0 leans too far towards the latter for my tastes; the rationalist community is big and diverse and different people want different things, and the culture of LW 2.0 feels optimized for what you and Ben want, which diverges often enough from what I want that I’d rather post on Facebook to avoid dealing with that set of selection effects. Whether you should care about this depends on how many other people are in a similar position and how likely they are to make valuable contributions to the project of intellectual progress, vs. the costs of loss of control. I’m quite confident that there are some people whose contributions are extremely valuable and whose style differs from the prevailing one here—Scott Alexander being one, although he’s not active on Facebook in particular—but unfortunately I have no idea whether the costs are worth it.
Quick note: this isn’t what I mean by archipelago (see other comment)
Jeff copies those comments by hand. Source: some facebook thread that I can’t find right now.
EDIT: Looks like I am wrong: https://www.jefftk.com/p/external-comment-integration.