I realize this was an important post that deserved to be promoted in any objective sense, but am not sure promoting things is the best way to do that by this point.
Promoting posts gets them into the RSS feed. Making it possible to promote Discussion posts, or having promoted posts appear in Discussion also, or some other similar approach seems worthwhile.
(Feedly is probably not the only place I should be checking to compare those two, but the effect size seems pretty huge. The main problem is missing people who actually check the website every day, but go to discussion/new instead of all/new.)
Hmm. Maybe for short term solutions (until we figure out a way to get promote individual discussion posts while keeping them in discussion), maybe for posts like this:
a) create a stub post on Main, which mostly says “we have an important thing to say, check it out in discussion”
b) maybe also make a post on Main saying “Main is now deprecated. Apart from major announcements, all stuff will be in Discussion now. Consider updating your RSS. We’re also seeing a lot of old timers return to post these days, check it out”. etc.
I don’t think this will happen with a sufficiently large number of people to make that a good option. I think my current best plan is to keep the sitewide RSS as having only promoted posts, but including promoted posts in Discussion. We can also advertise the Discussion RSS a bit more heavily, but I don’t know how many people will want to do that relative to just checking LW.
Do you have any sense of how big a change that is?
I haven’t looked at the code that generates the subreddit pages, so not really. It seems like it’d likely be a one-line change in an eligibility function somewhere, but finding that line seems rough.
Promoting posts gets them into the RSS feed. Making it possible to promote Discussion posts, or having promoted posts appear in Discussion also, or some other similar approach seems worthwhile.
I follow the DIscussion RSS feed but stopped following the Main RSS feed after Main shut down.
According to Feedly, 96 users are following the discussion RSS and 11k are following the Main RSS.
(Feedly is probably not the only place I should be checking to compare those two, but the effect size seems pretty huge. The main problem is missing people who actually check the website every day, but go to discussion/new instead of all/new.)
Hmm. Maybe for short term solutions (until we figure out a way to get promote individual discussion posts while keeping them in discussion), maybe for posts like this:
a) create a stub post on Main, which mostly says “we have an important thing to say, check it out in discussion”
b) maybe also make a post on Main saying “Main is now deprecated. Apart from major announcements, all stuff will be in Discussion now. Consider updating your RSS. We’re also seeing a lot of old timers return to post these days, check it out”. etc.
I don’t think this will happen with a sufficiently large number of people to make that a good option. I think my current best plan is to keep the sitewide RSS as having only promoted posts, but including promoted posts in Discussion. We can also advertise the Discussion RSS a bit more heavily, but I don’t know how many people will want to do that relative to just checking LW.
I don’t use Feedly.
Gotcha. Agreed. Do you have any sense of how big a change that is?
Sometime after Solstice I can hopefully dedicate more time to hacking on Less Wrong.
I haven’t looked at the code that generates the subreddit pages, so not really. It seems like it’d likely be a one-line change in an eligibility function somewhere, but finding that line seems rough.