I think the biggest problem with how posts are presented is it doesn’t make the author embarrassed to make their post needlessly long, and doesn’t signal “we want you to make this shorter”. Shortforms do this, so you get very info dense posts, but actual posts kinda signal the opposite. If its so short, why not just make it a shortform, and if it shouldn’t be a shortform, surely you can add more to it. After all, nobody makes half-page lesswrong posts anymore.
This. The struggle is real. My brain has started treating publishing a LessWrong post almost the way it’d treat publishing a paper. An acquaintance got upset at me once because they thought I hadn’t provided sufficient discussion of their related Lesswrong post in mine. Shortforms are the place I still feel safe just writing things.
It makes sense to me that this happened. AI Safety doesn’t have a journal, and training programs heavily encourage people to post their output on LessWrong. So part of it is slowly becoming a journal, and the felt social norms around posts are morphing to reflect that.
I’d love to see the reading time listed on the frontpage. That would make the incentives naturally slide towards shorter posts, as more people would click and it would get more karma. Feels much more decision relevant than when the post was posted.
I think the biggest problem with how posts are presented is it doesn’t make the author embarrassed to make their post needlessly long, and doesn’t signal “we want you to make this shorter”. Shortforms do this, so you get very info dense posts, but actual posts kinda signal the opposite. If its so short, why not just make it a shortform, and if it shouldn’t be a shortform, surely you can add more to it. After all, nobody makes half-page lesswrong posts anymore.
This. The struggle is real. My brain has started treating publishing a LessWrong post almost the way it’d treat publishing a paper. An acquaintance got upset at me once because they thought I hadn’t provided sufficient discussion of their related Lesswrong post in mine. Shortforms are the place I still feel safe just writing things.
It makes sense to me that this happened. AI Safety doesn’t have a journal, and training programs heavily encourage people to post their output on LessWrong. So part of it is slowly becoming a journal, and the felt social norms around posts are morphing to reflect that.
In some ways the equilibrium here is worse, journals have page limits.
I’d love to see the reading time listed on the frontpage. That would make the incentives naturally slide towards shorter posts, as more people would click and it would get more karma. Feels much more decision relevant than when the post was posted.