Sometimes people do say cool interesting valuable-to-me things under my posts. But it’s pretty rare, and I’m always surprised when this happens. Mostly my posts get not much engagement, and the engagement they do get feels a whole lot to me like people attempting to use my post as an opportunity to score points in one way or another, often by (apparently) trying to demonstrate that they’re ahead of me in some way while also accidentally demonstrating that have probably not even tried to hear me.
My perception is very likely skewed here, but my impression is that the median comment on LW is along the lines of “This is wrong/implausible/inadequate because X.” The comments I *want* are more like, “When I thought about/tried this for five minutes, here is what happened, and here is how I’m thinking about that, and I wonder x y and z.”
I also have the sense that most posts don’t get enough / any high-quality engagement, and my bar for such engagement is likely lower than yours.
I suspect though that the main culprit here is not the site culture, but instead a bunch of related reasons: the sheer amount of words on the site and in each essay, which cause the readership to spread out over a gigantic corpus of work; standard Internet engagement patterns (only a small fraction of readers write comments, and only a small fraction of those are high-quality); median LW essays receive too few views to produce healthy discussions; high-average-quality commenters are rare on the Internet, and their comments are spread out over everything they read; imperfect karma incentives; etc.
Are there ways for individuals to reliably get a number of comments sufficiently large to produce the occasional high-quality engagement? The only ways I’ve seen are for them to either already be famous essayists (e.g. the comments sections on ACX or Slow Boring are sufficiently big to contain the occasional gem), or to post in their own Facebook community or something. Feed-like sites like Facebook suffer from their recency bias, however, which is kind of antithetical to the goal of writing truth-seeking and timeless essays.
I also have the sense that most posts don’t get enough / any high-quality engagement, and my bar for such engagement is likely lower than yours.
I suspect though that the main culprit here is not the site culture, but instead a bunch of related reasons: the sheer amount of words on the site and in each essay, which cause the readership to spread out over a gigantic corpus of work; standard Internet engagement patterns (only a small fraction of readers write comments, and only a small fraction of those are high-quality); median LW essays receive too few views to produce healthy discussions; high-average-quality commenters are rare on the Internet, and their comments are spread out over everything they read; imperfect karma incentives; etc.
Are there ways for individuals to reliably get a number of comments sufficiently large to produce the occasional high-quality engagement? The only ways I’ve seen are for them to either already be famous essayists (e.g. the comments sections on ACX or Slow Boring are sufficiently big to contain the occasional gem), or to post in their own Facebook community or something. Feed-like sites like Facebook suffer from their recency bias, however, which is kind of antithetical to the goal of writing truth-seeking and timeless essays.