I understand that the community should (and hopefully could) do better, to optimize for a certain culture, that the status quo is Not Good Enough. However, I’m not clear on how widespread you consider this problem to be. My personal impression is that there are <5 controversial posts per month, posts which demand a ton from LW’s culture. These are high-stakes events where we noticeably fall short of what is asked of us, and so such occasions could hence benefit a lot from e.g. better culture, or more explicit moderation. The rest of the site, it seems to me, is handled decently well by the karma system. What’s your take on that?
E.g. regarding several of your explicitly-acknowledged-as-terrible suggestions: I’m not clear on what kind of comment you have in mind that would warrant a temporary ban but which would not get downvoted into oblivion. And similarly, the “team of well-paid moderators” part suggests to me you see a site-wide problem, not just a “we fall short in the high-stakes cases” problem.
In any case, if the problem is specifically the high-stakes controversial posts, that opens up a different class of solutions: e.g. a mod could flag a post as controversial, which would also trigger a stricter commenting policy or something.
To expand on this impression of mine: I was surprised by this illustration of how big LW is nowadays.
To put this into perspective for a non-representative but popular post: this post was briefly on Hacker News, got >17k unique pageviews, and now has 93 karma with 55 votes, and 10 comments by 8 unique commenters. So there are orders of magnitude between the number of passive readers, the number of votes, and the number of comments.
Conversely, jessicata’s post on MIRI has >8k unique pageviews, 61 karma with 171 votes, and 925 comments by I-will-*not*-count-those unique commenters.
I file these not-randomly-chosen examples in the to-me-natural-seeming categories “controversial posts in need of better culture”, versus “uncontroversial posts with little active engagement”.
Regarding your fully-acknowledged-as-terrible suggestions: There is a tradeoff between LW being inviting for newcomers, versus being the best it could be for veterans. Any community desperately needs new blood to survive. And… I don’t really think we can demand much more from newcomers (who after all haven’t yet had a chance to absorb the culture here)? I occasionally see comments of the form “I’m too intimidated by the high-quality discussions on this site, so I never post myself”. I’m a veteran myself, so-to-speak, having registered on the site 8 years ago, and yet I only wrote my first effortful post this year (partly incentivized by the new feedback system). I am in favor of attempts that make participating here easier, not harder, and would not wish to trade that off for a better culture. (So I’d e.g. much prefer incentives which reward good behavior, rather than punish poor behavior, so as not to discourage newcomers.)
I have more thoughts, including suggestions of my own, but will post those separately.
Conversely, jessicata’s post on MIRI has >8k unique pageviews, 61 karma with 171 votes, and 925 comments by I-will-not-count-those unique commenters.
121 147 unique commenters, as of this writing.
EDIT: Method for count is as follows: on GreaterWrong, turn on the anti-kibitzer feature. Find the lexically-last commenter identifier; in this case, it is ‘EQ’, which is the 121st identifier (26 * 4 + 17 = 121).
EDIT 2: Whoops, I can’t count. Obviously it should be 26 * 5 + 17 = 147.
Hmm, I got 146. My method was: load the page, use command-F to expand the comments, search the page for “[+]” and click on all of them; then select all, copy, and run:
Then pipe the whole thing into wc, yielding 146. (Also, this method captured 918 comments out of the 924 the page currently reports; there are 8 deleted comments, so I’m not sure exactly what explains the difference; oh well, it seems close enough.)
Well, for one thing, I made a dumb arithmetic mistake, so my result should’ve been 147, not 121.
That’s actually still off by 2 from yours (because GreaterWrong labels the OP as such, without a letter identifier, resulting in a total of 148). I do not know why this is.
As I tried to link to in the original post, Oliver Habryka posted a screenshot of LW’s Google Analytics page for roughly October 2021. I’m referencing the two topmost linked URLs (rows 2 and 3), plus the “unique pageviews” column.
Misc. thoughts on the object level:
I understand that the community should (and hopefully could) do better, to optimize for a certain culture, that the status quo is Not Good Enough. However, I’m not clear on how widespread you consider this problem to be. My personal impression is that there are <5 controversial posts per month, posts which demand a ton from LW’s culture. These are high-stakes events where we noticeably fall short of what is asked of us, and so such occasions could hence benefit a lot from e.g. better culture, or more explicit moderation. The rest of the site, it seems to me, is handled decently well by the karma system. What’s your take on that?
E.g. regarding several of your explicitly-acknowledged-as-terrible suggestions: I’m not clear on what kind of comment you have in mind that would warrant a temporary ban but which would not get downvoted into oblivion. And similarly, the “team of well-paid moderators” part suggests to me you see a site-wide problem, not just a “we fall short in the high-stakes cases” problem.
In any case, if the problem is specifically the high-stakes controversial posts, that opens up a different class of solutions: e.g. a mod could flag a post as controversial, which would also trigger a stricter commenting policy or something.
To expand on this impression of mine: I was surprised by this illustration of how big LW is nowadays.
To put this into perspective for a non-representative but popular post: this post was briefly on Hacker News, got >17k unique pageviews, and now has 93 karma with 55 votes, and 10 comments by 8 unique commenters. So there are orders of magnitude between the number of passive readers, the number of votes, and the number of comments.
Conversely, jessicata’s post on MIRI has >8k unique pageviews, 61 karma with 171 votes, and 925 comments by I-will-*not*-count-those unique commenters.
I file these not-randomly-chosen examples in the to-me-natural-seeming categories “controversial posts in need of better culture”, versus “uncontroversial posts with little active engagement”.
Regarding your fully-acknowledged-as-terrible suggestions: There is a tradeoff between LW being inviting for newcomers, versus being the best it could be for veterans. Any community desperately needs new blood to survive. And… I don’t really think we can demand much more from newcomers (who after all haven’t yet had a chance to absorb the culture here)? I occasionally see comments of the form “I’m too intimidated by the high-quality discussions on this site, so I never post myself”. I’m a veteran myself, so-to-speak, having registered on the site 8 years ago, and yet I only wrote my first effortful post this year (partly incentivized by the new feedback system). I am in favor of attempts that make participating here easier, not harder, and would not wish to trade that off for a better culture. (So I’d e.g. much prefer incentives which reward good behavior, rather than punish poor behavior, so as not to discourage newcomers.)
I have more thoughts, including suggestions of my own, but will post those separately.
121147 unique commenters, as of this writing.EDIT: Method for count is as follows: on GreaterWrong, turn on the anti-kibitzer feature. Find the lexically-last commenter identifier; in this case, it is ‘EQ’, which is the 121st identifier (26 * 4 + 17 = 121).
EDIT 2: Whoops, I can’t count. Obviously it should be 26 * 5 + 17 = 147.
Hmm, I got 146. My method was: load the page, use command-F to expand the comments, search the page for “[+]” and click on all of them; then select all, copy, and run:
Then pipe the whole thing into wc, yielding 146. (Also, this method captured 918 comments out of the 924 the page currently reports; there are 8 deleted comments, so I’m not sure exactly what explains the difference; oh well, it seems close enough.)
Well, for one thing, I made a dumb arithmetic mistake, so my result should’ve been 147, not 121.
That’s actually still off by 2 from yours (because GreaterWrong labels the OP as such, without a letter identifier, resulting in a total of 148). I do not know why this is.
How do you check how much unique pageviews a post got?
As I tried to link to in the original post, Oliver Habryka posted a screenshot of LW’s Google Analytics page for roughly October 2021. I’m referencing the two topmost linked URLs (rows 2 and 3), plus the “unique pageviews” column.