I’m confused about what sort of content belongs on LW 2.0, even in the Archipelago model.
I’ve been a lurker on LW and many of the diaspora rational blogs for years, and I’ve only recently started commenting after being nudged to do so by certain life events, certain blog posts, and the hopeful breath of life slightly reanimating LessWrong.
Sometimes I write on a personal blog elsewhere, but my standards are below what I’d want to see on LW. Then again, I’ve seen things on LW that are below my standards of what I expect on LW.
I’ve seen it said multiple times that people can now put whatever they want on their personal LW spaces/blogposts, and that’s stressed again here. But I still feel unsettled and like I don’t really understand what this means. Does it mean that anyone on the internet talking about random stuff is welcome to have a blog on LW? Does it mean well known members are encouraged to stick around and can be off the rationality topic in their personal blogposts? How about the unknown members? How tangential can the topic be from rationality before it’s not welcome?
Could a personal post about MealSquares and trading money for time flip my modest amount of Karma into the negative and make it harder for me to participate in conversations in the future? Is part of the intent behind the Archipelago model to bring in this kind of content in addition to the well known names? I can’t tell.
The idea is indeed that you are welcome to post about whatever you want on LW, and as we get more and more content, we will make people’s personal blogs less visible from the frontpage, and instead add subscription mechanisms that allow people to subscribe to the specific people they want to follow (which they will see in addition to the frontpage discussion).
We are planning to turn off the ability to lose and gain global-karma for personal blogposts in the near future, though we are still planning to allow people to upvote and downvote content (though we might put a lower bound of something like −4 or 0 on the negative score a post can get). So as soon as that happens, you will no longer be able to lose karma from writing a post on your personal blog that people didn’t like.
We are still optimizing the site for the people who are trying to make progress on rationality and various related topics, and so while it’s possible to use LessWrong as a fashion blog, you will probably find the feature set of the site not super useful to do that, and you won’t benefit super much from doing that on LessWrong over something like Medium (unless you want to analyze fashion using the rationalist paradigm, in which case I would actually be interested in reading that, and would welcome that content).
The only stuff that’s off-limit for personal blogs is stuff that might transform all of LessWrong into a political battleground via spillover effects (i.e. very strongly politicized discussion, direct personal attacks on people, etc.). And if you somehow build a culture on your personal blog that the moderators perceive to be actively harmful to the culture of the broader site, then we might also take action (though that action would more look like reducing the spillover from your blog to the rest of the site, as opposed to outright deleting your content).
An issue I currently notice with Personal Blogposts is that they serve two purposes, which are getting conflated:
1) blogposts that don’t meet the frontpage guidelines (i.e. touching upon politics, or certain kinds of ingroupy stuff), but which you expect to be worth the time and attention of people who are heavily involved with the community.
2) blogposts that you aren’t making a claim are worth everyone’s attention.
Right now there’s a fair amount of posts of type #1, which means if you want to stay up to date on them, you need to viewing all posts. But that means seeing a lot of posts in type #2, that the author may well have preferred not to force into your attention unless you already know the author and subscribing to them. But they don’t have a choice.
I predict we’ll ultimately solve that by splitting those two use cases up.
Being worthy of everyone’s attention is quite the bar! I certainly wouldn’t want to only publish things that rise to the level of ‘everyone or at least a large percentage of rationalists should read this post.’ The majority of my posts do not rise to that level, and by math almost no posts in the world can rise to that level.
The global justification is, if you don’t let me put my third-tier posts on my personal blog here, then I’ll be creating content that doesn’t end up on LW2.0, which means that to read all my stuff they have to check my blog itself at DWATV, which means they get into the habit of reading me there and LW2.0 fails as a central hub. You want to make it possible for people to just not check other sources, at all.
They might be worth the attention of some subset of people. For example, I write rationalist-influenced posts about transness. These are no doubt very uninteresting to the vast majority of the cisgender population, but people who have specifically chosen to subscribe to my blog are probably going to be interested in the subject.
Example: Interesting discussion of technical issues around AI safety, requiring a graduate-level math background. Seems very important to happen, I think a good chunk of people are interested in it, but it’s clear that not everyone should see that discussion given that most wouldn’t be able to understand it.
Yeah, the keyword was “everyone.” Other posts include “Zvi is visiting San Francisco” (useful for rationalists to know if they follow Zvi, not important otherwise), or many forms of “explore a new idea that isn’t ready for primetime yet.”
Hum. This is the sort of thing I’d want something like subreddits for.
One thing I’m currently confused about is what both the current and planned future visibility of personal blog posts is; are they currently visible from Community? Will they be in the future?
Hum. This is the sort of thing I’d want something like subreddits for.
Subreddits are one way to do handle that sort of thing, but it depends on the critical mass of of people caring about a specific topic.
Like, the “Zvi is in San Francisco – do you want to hang out with him?” thing is something that’d never make sense for a subreddit, but does make sense for people who follow Zvi in particular to pay attention to.
And people may have lots of topics they care about that are niche, but not yet have anyone else who cares enough to write about similar things to support subreddit.
One thing I’m currently confused about is what both the current and planned future visibility of personal blog posts is; are they currently visible from Community? Will they be in the future?
They’re currently visible from the community tag. In the future we may rearrange the UI hierarchy on the frontpage in some fashion.
Like, the “Zvi is in San Francisco – do you want to hang out with him?” thing is something that’d never make sense for a subreddit, but does make sense for people who follow Zvi in particular to pay attention to.
Obviously this post should have the Bay Area tag, and be made by Zvi, and show up in the feeds of people who have given karma boosts to the Bay Area tag and Zvi as an author.
This sentiment seems opposed to what others have expressed. Mixed messaging is part of why I’ve been confused.
Aspiring rationalists could benefit from a central place to make friends with and interact with other rationalists (that isn’t Facebook) and welcoming 2) seems like it would be a way to incentivize community, while hopefully the Archipelago model limits how much this could lower LW’s main posts’ standards.
I notice that when I write about rationality adjacent things, it most often comes out as a story about my personal experiences. It isn’t advice or world changing info for others, but it is an account of someone who is thinking about and trying to apply rationality in their life. I predict these stories aren’t totally useless but that they may not be liked or seen as typical LW fair.
I’ll admit the link I see between my last two paragraphs. I would like to be less of a silent watcher and make friends in the community, but my natural style of writing is experiential and mostly doesn’t feel like LessWrong has felt in the past.
It seems like my sense of what “worth everyone’s attention” means is pretty different from others and that’s part of the miscommunication. I take as given that people are already mostly reading garbage most of the time, on Facebook or LW or Reddit or wherever else. So my bar for “worth everyone’s attention” is relative, not absolute: not whether this thing I’m writing is worth everyone’s attention in some absolute sense, but whether it’s better than the garbage it’s displacing. This is not a very high bar!
Also, for what it’s worth, I think stories about personal experiences are great and we should have more of them.
In this case, it’s replacing other stuff on Lesswrong which is a much higher bar. There’s already more stuff on LessWrong than I actually have time to look at, and having to filter through more stuff as more people join and start posting personal stuff will rapidly move this from “I could physically do it if I wanted to” to “I definitely literally could not.”
I want to hear stories about personal experiences from people that I know moderately well and/or who are good writers, but not everyone.
(The whole point is that there are two different reasons one might want to make something a personal blogpost, or that an admin might-or-might-not want not promote it to everyone’s attention, and it’s causing some issues that these two things are getting conflated)
I’m confused about what sort of content belongs on LW 2.0, even in the Archipelago model.
I’ve been a lurker on LW and many of the diaspora rational blogs for years, and I’ve only recently started commenting after being nudged to do so by certain life events, certain blog posts, and the hopeful breath of life slightly reanimating LessWrong.
Sometimes I write on a personal blog elsewhere, but my standards are below what I’d want to see on LW. Then again, I’ve seen things on LW that are below my standards of what I expect on LW.
I’ve seen it said multiple times that people can now put whatever they want on their personal LW spaces/blogposts, and that’s stressed again here. But I still feel unsettled and like I don’t really understand what this means. Does it mean that anyone on the internet talking about random stuff is welcome to have a blog on LW? Does it mean well known members are encouraged to stick around and can be off the rationality topic in their personal blogposts? How about the unknown members? How tangential can the topic be from rationality before it’s not welcome?
Could a personal post about MealSquares and trading money for time flip my modest amount of Karma into the negative and make it harder for me to participate in conversations in the future? Is part of the intent behind the Archipelago model to bring in this kind of content in addition to the well known names? I can’t tell.
The idea is indeed that you are welcome to post about whatever you want on LW, and as we get more and more content, we will make people’s personal blogs less visible from the frontpage, and instead add subscription mechanisms that allow people to subscribe to the specific people they want to follow (which they will see in addition to the frontpage discussion).
We are planning to turn off the ability to lose and gain global-karma for personal blogposts in the near future, though we are still planning to allow people to upvote and downvote content (though we might put a lower bound of something like −4 or 0 on the negative score a post can get). So as soon as that happens, you will no longer be able to lose karma from writing a post on your personal blog that people didn’t like.
We are still optimizing the site for the people who are trying to make progress on rationality and various related topics, and so while it’s possible to use LessWrong as a fashion blog, you will probably find the feature set of the site not super useful to do that, and you won’t benefit super much from doing that on LessWrong over something like Medium (unless you want to analyze fashion using the rationalist paradigm, in which case I would actually be interested in reading that, and would welcome that content).
The only stuff that’s off-limit for personal blogs is stuff that might transform all of LessWrong into a political battleground via spillover effects (i.e. very strongly politicized discussion, direct personal attacks on people, etc.). And if you somehow build a culture on your personal blog that the moderators perceive to be actively harmful to the culture of the broader site, then we might also take action (though that action would more look like reducing the spillover from your blog to the rest of the site, as opposed to outright deleting your content).
An issue I currently notice with Personal Blogposts is that they serve two purposes, which are getting conflated:
1) blogposts that don’t meet the frontpage guidelines (i.e. touching upon politics, or certain kinds of ingroupy stuff), but which you expect to be worth the time and attention of people who are heavily involved with the community.
2) blogposts that you aren’t making a claim are worth everyone’s attention.
Right now there’s a fair amount of posts of type #1, which means if you want to stay up to date on them, you need to viewing all posts. But that means seeing a lot of posts in type #2, that the author may well have preferred not to force into your attention unless you already know the author and subscribing to them. But they don’t have a choice.
I predict we’ll ultimately solve that by splitting those two use cases up.
My immediate reaction is that 2) should not be happening on LW at all. What’s your rationale for wanting it?
Being worthy of everyone’s attention is quite the bar! I certainly wouldn’t want to only publish things that rise to the level of ‘everyone or at least a large percentage of rationalists should read this post.’ The majority of my posts do not rise to that level, and by math almost no posts in the world can rise to that level.
The global justification is, if you don’t let me put my third-tier posts on my personal blog here, then I’ll be creating content that doesn’t end up on LW2.0, which means that to read all my stuff they have to check my blog itself at DWATV, which means they get into the habit of reading me there and LW2.0 fails as a central hub. You want to make it possible for people to just not check other sources, at all.
Okay, I’m sold.
They might be worth the attention of some subset of people. For example, I write rationalist-influenced posts about transness. These are no doubt very uninteresting to the vast majority of the cisgender population, but people who have specifically chosen to subscribe to my blog are probably going to be interested in the subject.
Example: Interesting discussion of technical issues around AI safety, requiring a graduate-level math background. Seems very important to happen, I think a good chunk of people are interested in it, but it’s clear that not everyone should see that discussion given that most wouldn’t be able to understand it.
Yeah, the keyword was “everyone.” Other posts include “Zvi is visiting San Francisco” (useful for rationalists to know if they follow Zvi, not important otherwise), or many forms of “explore a new idea that isn’t ready for primetime yet.”
Hum. This is the sort of thing I’d want something like subreddits for.
One thing I’m currently confused about is what both the current and planned future visibility of personal blog posts is; are they currently visible from Community? Will they be in the future?
Subreddits are one way to do handle that sort of thing, but it depends on the critical mass of of people caring about a specific topic.
Like, the “Zvi is in San Francisco – do you want to hang out with him?” thing is something that’d never make sense for a subreddit, but does make sense for people who follow Zvi in particular to pay attention to.
And people may have lots of topics they care about that are niche, but not yet have anyone else who cares enough to write about similar things to support subreddit.
They’re currently visible from the community tag. In the future we may rearrange the UI hierarchy on the frontpage in some fashion.
Obviously this post should have the Bay Area tag, and be made by Zvi, and show up in the feeds of people who have given karma boosts to the Bay Area tag and Zvi as an author.
This sentiment seems opposed to what others have expressed. Mixed messaging is part of why I’ve been confused.
Aspiring rationalists could benefit from a central place to make friends with and interact with other rationalists (that isn’t Facebook) and welcoming 2) seems like it would be a way to incentivize community, while hopefully the Archipelago model limits how much this could lower LW’s main posts’ standards.
I notice that when I write about rationality adjacent things, it most often comes out as a story about my personal experiences. It isn’t advice or world changing info for others, but it is an account of someone who is thinking about and trying to apply rationality in their life. I predict these stories aren’t totally useless but that they may not be liked or seen as typical LW fair.
I’ll admit the link I see between my last two paragraphs. I would like to be less of a silent watcher and make friends in the community, but my natural style of writing is experiential and mostly doesn’t feel like LessWrong has felt in the past.
It seems like my sense of what “worth everyone’s attention” means is pretty different from others and that’s part of the miscommunication. I take as given that people are already mostly reading garbage most of the time, on Facebook or LW or Reddit or wherever else. So my bar for “worth everyone’s attention” is relative, not absolute: not whether this thing I’m writing is worth everyone’s attention in some absolute sense, but whether it’s better than the garbage it’s displacing. This is not a very high bar!
Also, for what it’s worth, I think stories about personal experiences are great and we should have more of them.
In this case, it’s replacing other stuff on Lesswrong which is a much higher bar. There’s already more stuff on LessWrong than I actually have time to look at, and having to filter through more stuff as more people join and start posting personal stuff will rapidly move this from “I could physically do it if I wanted to” to “I definitely literally could not.”
I want to hear stories about personal experiences from people that I know moderately well and/or who are good writers, but not everyone.
(The whole point is that there are two different reasons one might want to make something a personal blogpost, or that an admin might-or-might-not want not promote it to everyone’s attention, and it’s causing some issues that these two things are getting conflated)
It’s curious and surprising how rapidly LW grew in the last two months; My System 1 is still expecting 1 post a day on here instead of ten.