Thanks for articulating why Facebook is a safer and more pleasant place to comment than LW. I tried to post pretty much this on a previous thread but wasn’t able to actually articulate the phenomenon so didn’t say anything.
That being said, I still feel like I’d rather just post on Facebook.
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.
The second problem is that a number of prominent people in the community are ideologically anti-Facebook and we don’t want to exclude them. There’s a partial technical solution for this; a site that mirrored Facebook comments could also let users comment directly and interleave those comments with the Facebook ones. But I don’t think those comments could be made to show up on Facebook, so the conversation would still be fractured. I admit I would probably care more about this if not for my disagreement with the central claim that Facebook is uniquely evil.
Other than that, Facebook seems to have the whole “archipelago” thing pretty much solved.
Meanwhile, if I post on LessWrong I still expect to be heavily nitpicked, because I expect the subset of the community that’s active on this site to be disproportionately prone to nitpicking. Similarly, certain worldviews and approaches to problem-solving are overrepresented here relative to the broader community, and these aren’t necessarily the ones I most want to hear from.
Maybe this just boils down to the problem of my friends not being on here and it’s not worth your time to try to solve. But it still feels like a problem.
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.
Other than that, Facebook seems to have the whole “archipelago” thing pretty much solved.
I actually think there’s a deep sense in which Facebook has not accomplished archipelago, and an additional deep sense in which they have not accomplished public archipelago.
Archipelago doesn’t just mean “you’ve filter-bubbled yourself such that people you only hang out with likeminded people.” It means you’ve filtered yourself and then used that filtering to enforce norms that you wouldn’t be able to enforce otherwise, allowing you to experiment with culture building.
On FB, I’ve seen a small number of people do this on purpose. Mostly I see people sort of halfheartedly complaining about norms, but neither setting explicit norms for people to follow nor following through on kicking people out if they don’t. (An issue is that FB is designed to be a melting pot. Your mom, your college friends, and rationalist friends are all bumping into each other, and have different assumptions about what norms even mean)
And then, re Public Archipelago: Facebook very much works against the ability for good ideas to bubble up into a central conversation that everyone can be aware of. You could attempt to solve this by building around Facebook, but Facebook really doesn’t want you to do that and it’s a pain.
I think Reddit has a better claim to “accomplishing Archipelago”. Subreddits are a thing of beauty. They are bigger than a personal blog though, and don’t interact much, so LW2 is really trying something new. I can’t wait to see how it works out.
I think I agree that if you see that as the development of explicit new norms as the primary point then Facebook doesn’t really work and you need something like this. I guess I got excited because I was hoping that you’d solved the “audience is inclined towards nitpicking” and “the people I most want to hear from will have been prefiltered out” problems, and now it looks more like those aren’t going to change.
I guess I got excited because I was hoping that you’d solved the “audience is inclined towards nitpicking” and “the people I most want to hear from will have been prefiltered out” problems, and now it looks more like those aren’t going to change.
My expectation is that the new rules will result in less nitpicking (since authors will have a number of tools to say ‘sorry this comment doesn’t seem to be pulling its weight’), although you may have to learn which authors enforce which sorts of norms to figure it out.
I’m not 100% which things are prefiltering people you care about out, so am not sure whether this will make a difference.
Similarly, certain worldviews and approaches to problem-solving are overrepresented here relative to the broader community, and these aren’t necessarily the ones I most want to hear from.
I’m curious which worldviews and approaches you saw as over-represented, and which are the ones you most wanted to hear from, and whether anything has changed since you wrote this comment.
Maybe this just boils down to the problem of my friends not being on here and it’s not worth your time to try to solve. But it still feels like a problem.
Thanks for articulating why Facebook is a safer and more pleasant place to comment than LW. I tried to post pretty much this on a previous thread but wasn’t able to actually articulate the phenomenon so didn’t say anything.
That being said, I still feel like I’d rather just post on Facebook.
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.
The second problem is that a number of prominent people in the community are ideologically anti-Facebook and we don’t want to exclude them. There’s a partial technical solution for this; a site that mirrored Facebook comments could also let users comment directly and interleave those comments with the Facebook ones. But I don’t think those comments could be made to show up on Facebook, so the conversation would still be fractured. I admit I would probably care more about this if not for my disagreement with the central claim that Facebook is uniquely evil.
Other than that, Facebook seems to have the whole “archipelago” thing pretty much solved.
Meanwhile, if I post on LessWrong I still expect to be heavily nitpicked, because I expect the subset of the community that’s active on this site to be disproportionately prone to nitpicking. Similarly, certain worldviews and approaches to problem-solving are overrepresented here relative to the broader community, and these aren’t necessarily the ones I most want to hear from.
Maybe this just boils down to the problem of my friends not being on here and it’s not worth your time to try to solve. But it still feels like a problem.
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.
I actually think there’s a deep sense in which Facebook has not accomplished archipelago, and an additional deep sense in which they have not accomplished public archipelago.
Archipelago doesn’t just mean “you’ve filter-bubbled yourself such that people you only hang out with likeminded people.” It means you’ve filtered yourself and then used that filtering to enforce norms that you wouldn’t be able to enforce otherwise, allowing you to experiment with culture building.
On FB, I’ve seen a small number of people do this on purpose. Mostly I see people sort of halfheartedly complaining about norms, but neither setting explicit norms for people to follow nor following through on kicking people out if they don’t. (An issue is that FB is designed to be a melting pot. Your mom, your college friends, and rationalist friends are all bumping into each other, and have different assumptions about what norms even mean)
And then, re Public Archipelago: Facebook very much works against the ability for good ideas to bubble up into a central conversation that everyone can be aware of. You could attempt to solve this by building around Facebook, but Facebook really doesn’t want you to do that and it’s a pain.
I think Reddit has a better claim to “accomplishing Archipelago”. Subreddits are a thing of beauty. They are bigger than a personal blog though, and don’t interact much, so LW2 is really trying something new. I can’t wait to see how it works out.
I think I agree that if you see that as the development of explicit new norms as the primary point then Facebook doesn’t really work and you need something like this. I guess I got excited because I was hoping that you’d solved the “audience is inclined towards nitpicking” and “the people I most want to hear from will have been prefiltered out” problems, and now it looks more like those aren’t going to change.
My expectation is that the new rules will result in less nitpicking (since authors will have a number of tools to say ‘sorry this comment doesn’t seem to be pulling its weight’), although you may have to learn which authors enforce which sorts of norms to figure it out.
I’m not 100% which things are prefiltering people you care about out, so am not sure whether this will make a difference.
I’m curious which worldviews and approaches you saw as over-represented, and which are the ones you most wanted to hear from, and whether anything has changed since you wrote this comment.
Are your friends here now? If not, why?