I am sad about making the add-tag button less prominent for people who tag stuff, but it’s only used by <1% of users or so, and so not really worth the prominent screen estate where it was previously.
I really don’t understand the reasoning here. As I see it, tagging is a LW public good that is currently undersupplied, and the “prominent screen estate” is pretty much the only reason it is not even more undersupplied. “We have this feature that users can use to make the site better for everyone, but it’s not being used as much as we’d want to, so it’s not such a big deal if we make it less prominent” seems backwards to me; the solution would seem to make it even more prominent, no? With a subgoal of increasing the proportion of “people who tag stuff” to be much more than 1%.
Let’s make this more concrete: does LW not already suffer from the problem that too few people regularly tag posts (at least with the requisite degree of care)? As a mod, you should definitely have more data on this, and perhaps you do and believe I am wrong about this, but in my experience, tags are often missing, improper, etc., until some of the commenters try (and often fail) to pick up the slack. This topic has been talked about for a long time, ever since the tagging system began, with many users suggesting that the tags be made even more prominent at the top of a post. Raemon even said, just a over a week ago:
I notice some people go around tagging posts with every plausible tag that possible seems like it could fit. I don’t think this is a good practice – it results in an extremely overwhelming and cluttered tag-list, which you can’t quickly skim to figure out “what is this post actually about”?, and I roll to disbelieve on “stretch-tagging” actually helping people who are searching tag pages.
There should probably be guidance on this when you go to add a tag. When I write a post I just randomly put some tags and have never previously considered that it might be prosocial to put more or less tags on my post.
This certainly seems like a problem that gets solved by increasing community involvement in tagging, so that it’s not just the miscalibrated or idiosyncratic beliefs of a small minority of users that determines what gets tagged with what. And making the tags harder to notice seems like it shifts the incentives the complete opposite direction.
I am confused about the quote. Indeed, in that quote Ray is complaining about people tagging things too aggressively, saying basically the opposite of your previous paragraph (i.e. he is complaining that tags are currently often too prominent, look too cluttered, and some users tag too aggressively).
My current sense is that tagging is going well and I don’t super feel like I want to increase the amount of tagging that people do (though I do think much less tagging would be bad).
It’s also the case that tagging is the kind of task that probably has a decent chance of being substantially automated with AI systems, and indeed, if I wanted to tackle the problem of posts not being reliably tagged, I would focus on doing so in an automated way, now that LLMs are just quite good and cheap at this kind of intellectual labor. I don’t think it could fully solve the problem and would still need a bunch of human in the loop, but I think it could easily speed up tagging efficiency by 20x+. I’ve been thinking about building an auto-tagger, and might do so if we see tagging activity drop out of making these buttons less prominent.
(i.e. he is complaining that tags are currently often too prominent, look too cluttered, and some users tag too aggressively).
Right, but the point I was trying to make is that the reason why this happens is because you don’t have sufficient engagement from the broader community in this stuff, so when mistakes like these happen (maybe because the people doing the tagging are a small and unrepresentative sample of the LW userbase), they don’t get corrected quickly because there are too few people to do the correcting. Do you disagree with this?
I think it’s messy. In this case, it seems like the problem would have never appeared in the first place if the tagging button had been less available. I agree many other problems would be better addressed by having more people participate in the tagging system.
I really don’t understand the reasoning here. As I see it, tagging is a LW public good that is currently undersupplied, and the “prominent screen estate” is pretty much the only reason it is not even more undersupplied. “We have this feature that users can use to make the site better for everyone, but it’s not being used as much as we’d want to, so it’s not such a big deal if we make it less prominent” seems backwards to me; the solution would seem to make it even more prominent, no? With a subgoal of increasing the proportion of “people who tag stuff” to be much more than 1%.
Let’s make this more concrete: does LW not already suffer from the problem that too few people regularly tag posts (at least with the requisite degree of care)? As a mod, you should definitely have more data on this, and perhaps you do and believe I am wrong about this, but in my experience, tags are often missing, improper, etc., until some of the commenters try (and often fail) to pick up the slack. This topic has been talked about for a long time, ever since the tagging system began, with many users suggesting that the tags be made even more prominent at the top of a post. Raemon even said, just a over a week ago:
And in response, Joseph Miller pointed out:
This certainly seems like a problem that gets solved by increasing community involvement in tagging, so that it’s not just the miscalibrated or idiosyncratic beliefs of a small minority of users that determines what gets tagged with what. And making the tags harder to notice seems like it shifts the incentives the complete opposite direction.
I am confused about the quote. Indeed, in that quote Ray is complaining about people tagging things too aggressively, saying basically the opposite of your previous paragraph (i.e. he is complaining that tags are currently often too prominent, look too cluttered, and some users tag too aggressively).
My current sense is that tagging is going well and I don’t super feel like I want to increase the amount of tagging that people do (though I do think much less tagging would be bad).
It’s also the case that tagging is the kind of task that probably has a decent chance of being substantially automated with AI systems, and indeed, if I wanted to tackle the problem of posts not being reliably tagged, I would focus on doing so in an automated way, now that LLMs are just quite good and cheap at this kind of intellectual labor. I don’t think it could fully solve the problem and would still need a bunch of human in the loop, but I think it could easily speed up tagging efficiency by 20x+. I’ve been thinking about building an auto-tagger, and might do so if we see tagging activity drop out of making these buttons less prominent.
Right, but the point I was trying to make is that the reason why this happens is because you don’t have sufficient engagement from the broader community in this stuff, so when mistakes like these happen (maybe because the people doing the tagging are a small and unrepresentative sample of the LW userbase), they don’t get corrected quickly because there are too few people to do the correcting. Do you disagree with this?
I think it’s messy. In this case, it seems like the problem would have never appeared in the first place if the tagging button had been less available. I agree many other problems would be better addressed by having more people participate in the tagging system.