I’m pondering the trivial inconvenience of clicking through to the old post and then returning to the new post to comment and discuss, and wondering whether it might not be better to reproduce the whole text of the post in question each time. Perhaps that’s a bad idea, but worthy of consideration?
One reason for not doing that is that we would like to encourage upvotes to the original articles themselves. Can this be solved with software? Yes. Will it? Unlikely.
I put the sentence about Eliezer getting the karma he deserves into our post, and I mostly meant it as a joke. It’s true that the OB posts have gotten less karma because they were posted before the introduction of the karma system, but I don’t think anyone actually feels sorry for Eliezer for not getting that karma or worries about the injustice of it.
The genuine advantage that I see to getting more votes on the old posts is to make it clearer which sequence posts people liked, which is useful for anyone who wants to pick out the best posts from the sequences. I also don’t think it would be good for the new posts to get lots of upvotes based on the quality of the original post that they link to (or reproduce).
Yes, I didn’t think of that. Why exactly do you want to encourage these upvotes? It’s not as though EY is short of karma, so presumably for some reason relating to the posts themselves?
Actually, I misspoke. The reason is not mine, but a perception I’ve gathered from the community. I presume the reason is to restore some sort of feeling of justice, as the sequences have not been upvoted to the level that other posts have (being pre-karma themselves) even though they are more influential.
[rant]
As far as I am concerned, I think the sequences should have been exempt from the Karma system. It makes no sense to start a community and seed it with 2 years worth of posts which can be used to collect karma. It renders the karma system and the ‘Top Contributors’ list in particular meaningless. My scraper says that the sequences have gotten 7585 votes, accounting for 75850 karma points, more than the difference between Eliezer and Yvain (and that’s without counting upvotes on sequences-era comments).
I don’t expect others to agree with me, and having maximum consensus about the sequence reruns is more important to me than trying to rectify my pet peeves about lw, especially this one that will no doubt be an intra-lesswrong mindkiller. So I have just gone with the [perceived] majority on this.
[/rant]
If you would like to set up a poll to see what everyone really thinks about this, that’d be great.
Come to think of it, a reason that would get me to support linking to the original would be that this can help produce community-authored summaries for the discussion posts, which will be a lasting contribution of the sequence reruns. But posting whole-text and producing summaries may not be incompatible if done right.
I generally think it’s bad form to duplicate content, and I’d be worried about confusing readers (especially ones who happened on the new post without being very familiar with Less Wrong) and messing up search results.
But I see your point about the inconvenience, especially with comments back on the new post, so I’d be open to doing it that way if other folks are in favor of it (and it gets the approval from Eliezer, whose posts we’d be reproducing).
I’m not convinced that duplicating content from the same site by linking to it is any better form than duplicating it by copying and pasting (assuming the author’s permission, of course). Which is to say, assuming Eliezer’s agreement and the general community consensus that reruns are cool, both seem to be about equally good form.
I’m pondering the trivial inconvenience of clicking through to the old post and then returning to the new post to comment and discuss, and wondering whether it might not be better to reproduce the whole text of the post in question each time. Perhaps that’s a bad idea, but worthy of consideration?
Con: duplicating content decreases its PageRank.
One reason for not doing that is that we would like to encourage upvotes to the original articles themselves. Can this be solved with software? Yes. Will it? Unlikely.
I put the sentence about Eliezer getting the karma he deserves into our post, and I mostly meant it as a joke. It’s true that the OB posts have gotten less karma because they were posted before the introduction of the karma system, but I don’t think anyone actually feels sorry for Eliezer for not getting that karma or worries about the injustice of it.
The genuine advantage that I see to getting more votes on the old posts is to make it clearer which sequence posts people liked, which is useful for anyone who wants to pick out the best posts from the sequences. I also don’t think it would be good for the new posts to get lots of upvotes based on the quality of the original post that they link to (or reproduce).
Yes, I didn’t think of that. Why exactly do you want to encourage these upvotes? It’s not as though EY is short of karma, so presumably for some reason relating to the posts themselves?
Actually, I misspoke. The reason is not mine, but a perception I’ve gathered from the community. I presume the reason is to restore some sort of feeling of justice, as the sequences have not been upvoted to the level that other posts have (being pre-karma themselves) even though they are more influential.
[rant]
As far as I am concerned, I think the sequences should have been exempt from the Karma system. It makes no sense to start a community and seed it with 2 years worth of posts which can be used to collect karma. It renders the karma system and the ‘Top Contributors’ list in particular meaningless. My scraper says that the sequences have gotten 7585 votes, accounting for 75850 karma points, more than the difference between Eliezer and Yvain (and that’s without counting upvotes on sequences-era comments).
I don’t expect others to agree with me, and having maximum consensus about the sequence reruns is more important to me than trying to rectify my pet peeves about lw, especially this one that will no doubt be an intra-lesswrong mindkiller. So I have just gone with the [perceived] majority on this.
[/rant]
If you would like to set up a poll to see what everyone really thinks about this, that’d be great.
Come to think of it, a reason that would get me to support linking to the original would be that this can help produce community-authored summaries for the discussion posts, which will be a lasting contribution of the sequence reruns. But posting whole-text and producing summaries may not be incompatible if done right.
I think the point about getting summaries written is a good one, provided they’re of a high standard.
Personally I’d agree with your rant, but it doesn’t seem to be a point of too much importance either way really.
I generally think it’s bad form to duplicate content, and I’d be worried about confusing readers (especially ones who happened on the new post without being very familiar with Less Wrong) and messing up search results.
But I see your point about the inconvenience, especially with comments back on the new post, so I’d be open to doing it that way if other folks are in favor of it (and it gets the approval from Eliezer, whose posts we’d be reproducing).
I’m not convinced that duplicating content from the same site by linking to it is any better form than duplicating it by copying and pasting (assuming the author’s permission, of course). Which is to say, assuming Eliezer’s agreement and the general community consensus that reruns are cool, both seem to be about equally good form.