Moreover, why should there be discussion? If a post is authoritative, well researched and obviously correct, then the only thing to do is upvote it and move on. A lengthy discussion thread is a sign that either the post is either unclear, incorrect, or has mindkilled its readers.
Uh.
A lengthy discussion thread is progress.
An authoritative post is one person doing all the work.
A discussion thread is getting help with your initial thoughts.
That is the reason I use Facebook as little as possible, and I would stop interacting with LessWrong entirely if it moved to this format.
I don’t appreciate the participation-threat here and I don’t think it’s reasonable to decide what’s good based on what current users would respond to by abandoning—don’t negotiate with terrorists, etc. I also think you’re conflating things with the endless discussion thing—endless scrolling is super addictive, I agree, but I didn’t mean that, I mean how posts are short form/partially-finished-thoughts by default. I think crap like zvi and ben hoffman post make the bar too high and things need to be shorter and less of a Big Deal. I’d prefer if everything was on one page by default but you had to do explicit paging to prevent severe addictiveness.
Facebook uses a number of nasty evil tricks, such as carefully timing when you get notifications, outright lying about the number of new posts there are to read (on mobile, it always says 9+ EVEN WHEN THERE ARE EXACTLY ZERO BECAUSE YOU UNSUBSCRIBED FROM EVERYTHING), infinite scroll, not showing you all the things your friends post at once so you can only see everything by going back repeatedly, not propagating notification counts between different clients, showing new notification *counts* without refresh but not showing the new notifications themselves without refresh, etc etc. it’s not hard to be less addictive than facebook—it’s the default.
I don’t want high pageviews. I don’t want upvotes. I want discussion. I want a place where people can exchange ideas. I want to take what already exists on rationalist’s facebook walls and move it to lesswrong.
fwiw, I had the context to understand what you meant in the first place, but without that context I don’t think the OP is very clear about what you want and why you want it.
Why should LessWrong be that, as opposed to having it be in-person or on various slacks/IRCs/discord servers? Seems like the thing you want is people developing thoughts in ways that don’t need the whole ’community’s eyes.
I share the model that shorter content would attract more readers, and that we should build something more short-form shaped, but also that it seems very unlikely that we want to give up the more traditional post-format as the primary way of engagement with LessWrong.
One thing I’ll point out is the “recent discussion” feels less accessible than on old LW (requires scrolling), and the lack of a “top users, 30 days” section probably decreases my engagement a bit as well—both because of the lack of a “leaderboard effect” and because it can be useful to look at that to see who’s been posting interesting content that I might otherwise have missed.
Interesting – on old LW I basically never read the recent discussion because it was small and off to the side and didn’t display much of the comments.
I do think not having the leaderboard thing decreases engagement, and have mixed feelings about that, since the way it increased engagement was the sort of facebook-like-thing that’s kinda hijacking your monkey brain in skinner-boxy-ways.
Same. The recent discussion section feels a lot more prominent to me than on old LW. I also practically never used the recent discussion section on the old site.
it’s literally the only thing I use. I basically never click on the post list because they’re all collapsed and on a different page. give me a feeeeeeed
Both, but the sidebar widget is the main thing I miss. I notice that I still use it on the EA Forum, for instance, which has much of old-LW’s structure. On current LW I have to scroll down a lot on the front page to see recent comments and they don’t appear while reading posts, which IMO quite reduces my engagement.
my metric of success: “get rationalists off of facebook”. to do this you need to replace facebook. discord replaces part of it with a much healthier thing, but lesswrong like stuff is needed for the other part.
Uh.
A lengthy discussion thread is progress.
An authoritative post is one person doing all the work.
A discussion thread is getting help with your initial thoughts.
I don’t appreciate the participation-threat here and I don’t think it’s reasonable to decide what’s good based on what current users would respond to by abandoning—don’t negotiate with terrorists, etc. I also think you’re conflating things with the endless discussion thing—endless scrolling is super addictive, I agree, but I didn’t mean that, I mean how posts are short form/partially-finished-thoughts by default. I think crap like zvi and ben hoffman post make the bar too high and things need to be shorter and less of a Big Deal. I’d prefer if everything was on one page by default but you had to do explicit paging to prevent severe addictiveness.
Facebook uses a number of nasty evil tricks, such as carefully timing when you get notifications, outright lying about the number of new posts there are to read (on mobile, it always says 9+ EVEN WHEN THERE ARE EXACTLY ZERO BECAUSE YOU UNSUBSCRIBED FROM EVERYTHING), infinite scroll, not showing you all the things your friends post at once so you can only see everything by going back repeatedly, not propagating notification counts between different clients, showing new notification *counts* without refresh but not showing the new notifications themselves without refresh, etc etc. it’s not hard to be less addictive than facebook—it’s the default.
I don’t want high pageviews. I don’t want upvotes. I want discussion. I want a place where people can exchange ideas. I want to take what already exists on rationalist’s facebook walls and move it to lesswrong.
fwiw, I had the context to understand what you meant in the first place, but without that context I don’t think the OP is very clear about what you want and why you want it.
Why should LessWrong be that, as opposed to having it be in-person or on various slacks/IRCs/discord servers? Seems like the thing you want is people developing thoughts in ways that don’t need the whole ’community’s eyes.
because otherwise people don’t read less wrong because the only things that happen there are people posting overthought crystallized ideas.
It seems like ‘people’ read LessWrong as it currently exists, although I’m not aware of the actual visitation stats.
Happy to provide people with any stats they want.
I share the model that shorter content would attract more readers, and that we should build something more short-form shaped, but also that it seems very unlikely that we want to give up the more traditional post-format as the primary way of engagement with LessWrong.
One thing I’ll point out is the “recent discussion” feels less accessible than on old LW (requires scrolling), and the lack of a “top users, 30 days” section probably decreases my engagement a bit as well—both because of the lack of a “leaderboard effect” and because it can be useful to look at that to see who’s been posting interesting content that I might otherwise have missed.
Interesting – on old LW I basically never read the recent discussion because it was small and off to the side and didn’t display much of the comments.
I do think not having the leaderboard thing decreases engagement, and have mixed feelings about that, since the way it increased engagement was the sort of facebook-like-thing that’s kinda hijacking your monkey brain in skinner-boxy-ways.
Same. The recent discussion section feels a lot more prominent to me than on old LW. I also practically never used the recent discussion section on the old site.
it’s literally the only thing I use. I basically never click on the post list because they’re all collapsed and on a different page. give me a feeeeeeed
On old-LW, did you view recent discussion via the sidebar widget, or were you going to an endpoint like `/comments`?
Both, but the sidebar widget is the main thing I miss. I notice that I still use it on the EA Forum, for instance, which has much of old-LW’s structure. On current LW I have to scroll down a lot on the front page to see recent comments and they don’t appear while reading posts, which IMO quite reduces my engagement.
I realized I never posted this here, but it does seem good to mention that we do have a “recent comments in chronological order” page here.
I did and still do read /comments.
my metric of success: “get rationalists off of facebook”. to do this you need to replace facebook. discord replaces part of it with a much healthier thing, but lesswrong like stuff is needed for the other part.