There’s a small caveat though. You say the current front page incentivizes #1, but actually it just recommends people to do #1, there’s no incentivizing. On the other hand, if you had a front page giving tasty attention to the best attempts to build on the sequences, that might incentivize all of #1-#4 better than our current front page. And focusing discussion on a few posts would make comments get more votes on average, increasing incentives for commenters as well. I think pre-2011 LW got all of those right, except the curation for Main wasn’t responsive enough.
Agreed that incentivizing isn’t the right word for what’s happening with #1, but there’s a related thing (maybe a superset that includes incentivizing, in some frames?) that also includes “nudges”, or “making certain things convenient” which seems like an important piece of the puzzle.
Yes, that’s a great explanation.
There’s a small caveat though. You say the current front page incentivizes #1, but actually it just recommends people to do #1, there’s no incentivizing. On the other hand, if you had a front page giving tasty attention to the best attempts to build on the sequences, that might incentivize all of #1-#4 better than our current front page. And focusing discussion on a few posts would make comments get more votes on average, increasing incentives for commenters as well. I think pre-2011 LW got all of those right, except the curation for Main wasn’t responsive enough.
Agreed that incentivizing isn’t the right word for what’s happening with #1, but there’s a related thing (maybe a superset that includes incentivizing, in some frames?) that also includes “nudges”, or “making certain things convenient” which seems like an important piece of the puzzle.