I suspect in practice the epistemic status of a post is signaled less by what it says under “epistemic status” and more by facts about where it’s posted, who will see it, and how long it will remain accessible.
Sites acquire entrenched cultures. “The medium is the message” and the message of a LessWrong post is “behold my eternal contribution to the ivory halls of knowledge”.
A chat message will be seen only by people in the chat room, a tweet will be seen mostly by people who chose to follow you, but it’s much harder to characterize the audience of a LessWrong post or comment, so these will feel like they’re aimed at convincing or explaining to a general audience, even if they say they’re not.
In my experience, playing with ideas requires frequent low-stakes high-context back-and-forths, and this is in tension with each comment appearing in various feeds and remaining visible forever to everyone reading the original post, which might have become the standard reference for a concept. So I think LessWrong has always been much better for polished work than playing with ideas, and changing this would require a lot of tradeoffs that might not be worth it.
Periodically people post open threads (generally as a personal post) but they haven’t gotten much traction. (They seem to get less traction that other personal blogposts so I don’t think it’s just about that)
Someone posted an open thread two weeks ago and my subjective impression is that it disappeared from view almost immediately, other than generating a few comments I saw in Recent Comments that seemed to be, if you’ll pardon the bluntness, two people making basic mistakes. Starting from Community, right now, and repeatedly clicking “Load More,” I got to something that was posted three months ago and still can’t see this open thread. (I forgot to count how many times I clicked “Load More” but it’s enough times that I got bored and stopped, twice.) I’m not even sure if it’s visible from Community at all. If it is, the magical algorithm that sorts Community hates it.
If we want open threads to work they might need to be stickied, at least at first.
This is tangential, but re: clicking “Load More” a bunch of times: GreaterWrong has an archive browser where you can view posts by year, by month, and by day, as far back as you like.
FYI, my current (unofficial) thought process re: this is to move towards Personal Feeds being more established as a dominant way to engage with the site. (i.e. if you’re a new user, the structure of the site is such that most new content you create will probably be a personal feed comment, and only when you think you’ve got a moderately polished thing to say would you write a post)
I suspect in practice the epistemic status of a post is signaled less by what it says under “epistemic status” and more by facts about where it’s posted, who will see it, and how long it will remain accessible.
Sites acquire entrenched cultures. “The medium is the message” and the message of a LessWrong post is “behold my eternal contribution to the ivory halls of knowledge”.
A chat message will be seen only by people in the chat room, a tweet will be seen mostly by people who chose to follow you, but it’s much harder to characterize the audience of a LessWrong post or comment, so these will feel like they’re aimed at convincing or explaining to a general audience, even if they say they’re not.
In my experience, playing with ideas requires frequent low-stakes high-context back-and-forths, and this is in tension with each comment appearing in various feeds and remaining visible forever to everyone reading the original post, which might have become the standard reference for a concept. So I think LessWrong has always been much better for polished work than playing with ideas, and changing this would require a lot of tradeoffs that might not be worth it.
Open threads on old LW were good for this, I wonder why we don’t have them here?
Periodically people post open threads (generally as a personal post) but they haven’t gotten much traction. (They seem to get less traction that other personal blogposts so I don’t think it’s just about that)
Someone posted an open thread two weeks ago and my subjective impression is that it disappeared from view almost immediately, other than generating a few comments I saw in Recent Comments that seemed to be, if you’ll pardon the bluntness, two people making basic mistakes. Starting from Community, right now, and repeatedly clicking “Load More,” I got to something that was posted three months ago and still can’t see this open thread. (I forgot to count how many times I clicked “Load More” but it’s enough times that I got bored and stopped, twice.) I’m not even sure if it’s visible from Community at all. If it is, the magical algorithm that sorts Community hates it.
If we want open threads to work they might need to be stickied, at least at first.
This is tangential, but re: clicking “Load More” a bunch of times: GreaterWrong has an archive browser where you can view posts by year, by month, and by day, as far back as you like.
FYI, my current (unofficial) thought process re: this is to move towards Personal Feeds being more established as a dominant way to engage with the site. (i.e. if you’re a new user, the structure of the site is such that most new content you create will probably be a personal feed comment, and only when you think you’ve got a moderately polished thing to say would you write a post)
However, this is all still very up in the air.