What are the reasons for not wanting to grow? You didn’t state any reasons I haven’t already stated.
For the record, I am aware that it’s not a good idea to assume that growth is 100% good. That’s why I put that in the OP.
I feel that LessWrong could be really important—and maybe it already is—that’s why I want to see it grow (that much is obvious.) I started writing about why, but I want to hear your reasons for not wanting it to grow.
You’re going against the grain—not a bad thing but it means you’re going to have to really lay out your reasons if you want to change the way the wind is blowing.
(I think you may have a wrong idea of what “pontificate” means. Either that or you’re being gratuitously rude, which I’m going to assume you aren’t.)
The following two propositions are different. (1) Growth is not always 100% good. (2) Growth is not always good. #1 is what you stated. #2 is what I’m saying. #2 goes much further than #1 does. The obvious inference from #1 is “make sure you grow, but take some measures to mitigate the possible downsides”; the obvious inference from #2 is “consider carefully whether growth is what you want”.
I don’t know whether I want LW to grow, or how fast, or when (which is why I said that optimal growth for LW could be any of several things, including “grow very rapidly”) so I can’t really give you “[my] reasons for not wanting it to grow”. What I can do is to give some possible reasons why growth—especially rapid growth, especially especially rapid growth by the mechanism you’re implicitly proposing—might be the Wrong Thing.
The main reason is this: It may not be possible to grow rapidly by the sort of means you describe without changing the demographics of LW in a way that would lower its quality. I don’t just mean “LW might start to attract trolls and spammers and idiots”. I mean that maybe only a small fraction of new visitors to LW are people whose presence would enhance LW, and that if that’s so then anything we do to encourage a lot more new visitors to stay will make LW worse.
There’ve been a couple of surveys of LW participants. They suggest that the userbase of LW is very unusual. So, for that matter, does a casual look at the discussions here. LW participants are unusually interested in rationality (of course, since that’s the central topic of the site), something like three standard deviations above average in measured intelligence (according to self-reports, so take that with a pinch of salt, but I don’t find it hard to believe that something of the kind is true), and willing to read and in many cases write long, well researched, sometimes highly technical material. This combination of characteristics is rare. It’s surely a large part of what gives LW the distinctive character it has. I am not optimistic about the prospects of keeping it if LW grows rapidly by keeping a much larger fraction of its new visitors.
(I am aware that the foregoing paragraph sounds as if I’m saying “look at us, we’re superior to everyone else”. That is not, even slightly, the point. LW regulars, as a population, are unusually good at some things, unusually bad at others, and very average at others, and treating one group of people as “superior” to others is a road to ruin for all sorts of reasons. All I’m saying is that a community with the particular strengths LW has is a very unusual thing, and I think a lot of LW’s distinctive merits derive from those strengths.)
Now, I know that you said things like “We’d better choose what audience to target”. But I think you underestimate what an … odd … audience it is that LW might need to target, and the general shape of your proposals—make it so people are immediately grabbed without having to read all that text; base the design on general “web marketing” principles—seems like it’s implicitly aimed at exactly the people who don’t have the peculiar characteristics that make LW what it currently is.
I think this lies behind your perception that people here “seem to be totally unaware of the field of web marketing”. Probably many are, but please consider the possibility that in some cases the issue isn’t others’ obtuseness but that they simply aren’t interested in the “web marketing” goals you have in mind, and for a possibly-good reason.
A large increase in LW’s audience could have big benefits; I’m not denying that. They might outweigh the likely loss in quality of discussion that (I think) would go along with it. Or maybe there’s a way to increase the audience a lot without a big growth in the population of active participants. Or maybe “basic web marketing principles” can in fact be applied in a way that pulls in a huge new population of people with the extremely unusual characteristics LW’s current regulars have. So I’m not (to repeat myself) saying that LW should not aim to grow a lot. I don’t know whether it should. It just makes me really uneasy to see growth being treated as axiomatically good and important (which, repeating myself again, is not the same as saying that it has no downsides, and which I know you weren’t saying).
Oops sorry. I removed pontificate. Thank you for not assuming I was being rude.
“I mean that maybe only a small fraction of new visitors to LW are people whose presence would enhance LW, and that if that’s so then anything we do to encourage a lot more new visitors to stay will make LW worse.”
Good problem. However, that can happen whether it grows quickly or slowly.
“I am not optimistic about the prospects of keeping it if LW grows rapidly by keeping a much larger fraction of its new visitors.”
Yes! I did warn that this could happen, and that it could happen whether we like it or not.
I like that things can be voted up and down, but I think it would be a heck of a lot more effective if specific feedback was provided. As a new user, I will adjust a lot faster if I know WHAT I am doing wrong/right not just THAT I am doing something wrong/right. Also, I wouldn’t write off the votes to “bad attitude” and “trolls” when I don’t understand them. That’s what I’m doing now, lol, and I don’t like that, but I don’t know what else to think of them, lol.
I think if the votes required a reason, which could be as quick as the word “Trolling” or the name of a logical fallacy, that would make a huge difference. That would ALSO force us to get conscious of our reasons for voting, which would provoke conscious review of the reason, which would probably result in better decisions.
And to ensure the culture doesn’t change too quickly, what if it took, say, three months and X number of posts before you’re allowed to vote? That way, the oldest users get to influence the culture, and users who just aren’t compatible with LessWrong will wander away before they’ve exerted an influence.
This is basically the same as how you have to be a resident of a country before you can vote.
From a developer’s standpoint, that would be a very easy change, but more importantly, it would protect the site no matter whether it grows faster or at the current pace.
“please consider the possibility that in some cases the issue isn’t others’ obtuseness but that they simply aren’t interested in the “web marketing” goals you have in mind, and for a possibly-good reason.”
Oh, I did! I did consider that. (: That was the entire reason I created this thread. I figured you would all let me know what you wanted and if growth wasn’t it, you’d shoot me down. (:
“They might outweigh the likely loss in quality of discussion that (I think) would go along with it. ”
Has anyone thought much about what would improve the quality of discussion? Because that could be improved at the same time. Or before making marketing changes—to be sure that the safeguard is in place first.
“Or maybe “basic web marketing principles” can in fact be applied in a way that pulls in a huge new population of people with the extremely unusual characteristics LW’s current regulars have. ”
Yes! That’s what I was hoping for. (: That’s why I asked who your target demographic is. I might think I know, but you guys are the ones that have been talking to them for years.
However, that can happen whether it grows quickly or slowly.
Yes. It’s an issue regardless. But if pursuing a strategy of rapid growth guarantees an influx of negative-net-value-to-LW new users, it’s probably a bad thing. (We will all die eventually, but I still prefer there to be fewer mass murders.)
I wonder whether you think this idea would work
I don’t have a good enough mental model of the typical first-time visitor to LW to have a strong opinion. What I do think likely is that either it wouldn’t work or it would work at the cost of getting rid of that rapid growth you were hoping for. Because I think it’s likely that rapid growth by increasing visitor retention implies the sort of change in LW’s demographics that I described.
I think it would be a heck of a lot more effective if specific feedback was provided
I have proposed something similar myself. The UI would be tricky to get right. It might well make LW a better place (or it might not; these things have a way of producing unexpected consequences). But I don’t see how it would do much to solve the problem I described, if (as I suspect but don’t claim to know) it really is a problem.
what if it took, say, three months and X number of posts before you’re allowed to vote?
Might work. Has anyone reading this got experience of such systems? (The obvious concern is that it would drive away “good” users as effectively as it would drive away “bad” ones, so that it would slow growth without actually making the overall pattern of growth any more favourable.)
I figured you would all let me know what you wanted and if growth wasn’t it, you’d shoot me down.
According to my quick count, 28 different people have commented here [EDITED to add: not counting “metatroll”], of whom 7 seemed definitely in favour of growth (perhaps having thought it through, perhaps just because it’s a sort of default goal), one seemed definitely against growth, and 6 seemed definitely skeptical (i.e., saying “growth might not be what we want”, basically my position). The other 14 expressed no opinion on the matter that I could detect. Make of that what you will.
Has anyone thought much about what would improve the quality of discussion?
I think a lot of people have, but so far as I know no one (here or elsewhere) has a silver bullet that ensures that a community of unusual people will retain its distinctively valuable characteristics as it grows. (Or for that matter as it doesn’t.)
what if it took, say, three months and X number of posts before you’re allowed to vote?
Might work. Has anyone reading this got experience of such systems? (The obvious concern is that it would drive away “good” users as effectively as it would drive away “bad” ones, so that it would slow growth without actually making the overall pattern of growth any more favourable.)
I’m not sure if I like the basic idea, but tying it to the new users’ karma would favor good users over bad (for certain values of good).
Hacker News uses this sort of system: there are thresholds for things like being able to vote, being able to downvote, etc., and they are all based on your karma score. The same is true on Stack Overflow, though that’s a very different kind of site.
Both of them see frequent complaints that they’re going downhill, but it’s hard to be sure whether that’s anything more than standard “the world was better in my young days” thinking (which I think results from a general tendency to remember good things better than bad things).
However, that can happen whether it grows quickly or slowly.
Yes, but one of the things that effects wether someone is a good user or bad user is how well they acculturate. From what I understand, sites with a high old timer to newb ratio usually have an easier time acculturating the newbs.
That’s not what I meant… Imagine a curve that gets more and more steep as it progresses. In the first quarter of a year, say a website gets 1000 new users. In the second quarter of the year, it gets 1500 new users. In the third quarter of the year, 2250 new users.
In the second quarter, 2⁄3 of the members are old members, 1⁄3 of the members are new. In the third quarter, the ratio changes because there are so many new members—nearly half the members are new. In the fourth quarter, an even larger number of new members joins, and suddenly there are more new members than old ones. If this keeps up for any length of time, the culture will be totally destroyed.
Whether you start with 20 members and increase it by an increment of 1 and 1⁄4 the amount of users every quarter, or start with 1000 and increase it by an increment if 1 and 1⁄2 the number of users every quarter, if the number of users keeps increasing this way, eventually it will get to a point where the ratio flips and there are more new users than old ones.
It doesn’t matter whether that type of growth happens quickly or slowly. If the growth is exponential there’s a good risk of that eventually happening. Slow growth might mean it happens next year, fast growth might mean it happens next month. Either way, it’s important to protect the community from that problem.
I think you’re missing my point. Does your model have any allowance for the idea that new members can eventually become old members, and that this process is speed up by new members interacting with old members? Because the main point that I was trying to make is that a large portion (though nowhere near all) of a user’s desirability is how well they absorb the culture, and that culture can survive (more or less) intact through multiple “generations” if at any given point in time a large enough proportion of people have already acculturated. Consider a toy model were users can be discreetly divided into “old-hands” and “newbs”. In this toy model newbs turn into old-hands in x weeks iff at least 50% of the other users are old-hands (who can set a proper example), otherwise the culture collapses. In this case the culture can survive indefinitely iff the doubling time is longer than x.
What are the reasons for not wanting to grow? You didn’t state any reasons I haven’t already stated.
For the record, I am aware that it’s not a good idea to assume that growth is 100% good. That’s why I put that in the OP.
I feel that LessWrong could be really important—and maybe it already is—that’s why I want to see it grow (that much is obvious.) I started writing about why, but I want to hear your reasons for not wanting it to grow.
You’re going against the grain—not a bad thing but it means you’re going to have to really lay out your reasons if you want to change the way the wind is blowing.
Elaborate, please.
(I think you may have a wrong idea of what “pontificate” means. Either that or you’re being gratuitously rude, which I’m going to assume you aren’t.)
The following two propositions are different. (1) Growth is not always 100% good. (2) Growth is not always good. #1 is what you stated. #2 is what I’m saying. #2 goes much further than #1 does. The obvious inference from #1 is “make sure you grow, but take some measures to mitigate the possible downsides”; the obvious inference from #2 is “consider carefully whether growth is what you want”.
I don’t know whether I want LW to grow, or how fast, or when (which is why I said that optimal growth for LW could be any of several things, including “grow very rapidly”) so I can’t really give you “[my] reasons for not wanting it to grow”. What I can do is to give some possible reasons why growth—especially rapid growth, especially especially rapid growth by the mechanism you’re implicitly proposing—might be the Wrong Thing.
The main reason is this: It may not be possible to grow rapidly by the sort of means you describe without changing the demographics of LW in a way that would lower its quality. I don’t just mean “LW might start to attract trolls and spammers and idiots”. I mean that maybe only a small fraction of new visitors to LW are people whose presence would enhance LW, and that if that’s so then anything we do to encourage a lot more new visitors to stay will make LW worse.
There’ve been a couple of surveys of LW participants. They suggest that the userbase of LW is very unusual. So, for that matter, does a casual look at the discussions here. LW participants are unusually interested in rationality (of course, since that’s the central topic of the site), something like three standard deviations above average in measured intelligence (according to self-reports, so take that with a pinch of salt, but I don’t find it hard to believe that something of the kind is true), and willing to read and in many cases write long, well researched, sometimes highly technical material. This combination of characteristics is rare. It’s surely a large part of what gives LW the distinctive character it has. I am not optimistic about the prospects of keeping it if LW grows rapidly by keeping a much larger fraction of its new visitors.
(I am aware that the foregoing paragraph sounds as if I’m saying “look at us, we’re superior to everyone else”. That is not, even slightly, the point. LW regulars, as a population, are unusually good at some things, unusually bad at others, and very average at others, and treating one group of people as “superior” to others is a road to ruin for all sorts of reasons. All I’m saying is that a community with the particular strengths LW has is a very unusual thing, and I think a lot of LW’s distinctive merits derive from those strengths.)
Now, I know that you said things like “We’d better choose what audience to target”. But I think you underestimate what an … odd … audience it is that LW might need to target, and the general shape of your proposals—make it so people are immediately grabbed without having to read all that text; base the design on general “web marketing” principles—seems like it’s implicitly aimed at exactly the people who don’t have the peculiar characteristics that make LW what it currently is.
I think this lies behind your perception that people here “seem to be totally unaware of the field of web marketing”. Probably many are, but please consider the possibility that in some cases the issue isn’t others’ obtuseness but that they simply aren’t interested in the “web marketing” goals you have in mind, and for a possibly-good reason.
A large increase in LW’s audience could have big benefits; I’m not denying that. They might outweigh the likely loss in quality of discussion that (I think) would go along with it. Or maybe there’s a way to increase the audience a lot without a big growth in the population of active participants. Or maybe “basic web marketing principles” can in fact be applied in a way that pulls in a huge new population of people with the extremely unusual characteristics LW’s current regulars have. So I’m not (to repeat myself) saying that LW should not aim to grow a lot. I don’t know whether it should. It just makes me really uneasy to see growth being treated as axiomatically good and important (which, repeating myself again, is not the same as saying that it has no downsides, and which I know you weren’t saying).
You had a good point in your suggestion so I changed my “100% good” statement.
I also responded (different comment).
Oops sorry. I removed pontificate. Thank you for not assuming I was being rude.
“I mean that maybe only a small fraction of new visitors to LW are people whose presence would enhance LW, and that if that’s so then anything we do to encourage a lot more new visitors to stay will make LW worse.”
Good problem. However, that can happen whether it grows quickly or slowly.
“I am not optimistic about the prospects of keeping it if LW grows rapidly by keeping a much larger fraction of its new visitors.”
Yes! I did warn that this could happen, and that it could happen whether we like it or not.
I wonder whether you think this idea would work:
“http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/e5r/lesswrong_could_grow_a_lot_but_were_doing_it_wrong/78r2″
I also had another idea:
I like that things can be voted up and down, but I think it would be a heck of a lot more effective if specific feedback was provided. As a new user, I will adjust a lot faster if I know WHAT I am doing wrong/right not just THAT I am doing something wrong/right. Also, I wouldn’t write off the votes to “bad attitude” and “trolls” when I don’t understand them. That’s what I’m doing now, lol, and I don’t like that, but I don’t know what else to think of them, lol.
I think if the votes required a reason, which could be as quick as the word “Trolling” or the name of a logical fallacy, that would make a huge difference. That would ALSO force us to get conscious of our reasons for voting, which would provoke conscious review of the reason, which would probably result in better decisions.
And to ensure the culture doesn’t change too quickly, what if it took, say, three months and X number of posts before you’re allowed to vote? That way, the oldest users get to influence the culture, and users who just aren’t compatible with LessWrong will wander away before they’ve exerted an influence.
This is basically the same as how you have to be a resident of a country before you can vote.
From a developer’s standpoint, that would be a very easy change, but more importantly, it would protect the site no matter whether it grows faster or at the current pace.
“please consider the possibility that in some cases the issue isn’t others’ obtuseness but that they simply aren’t interested in the “web marketing” goals you have in mind, and for a possibly-good reason.”
Oh, I did! I did consider that. (: That was the entire reason I created this thread. I figured you would all let me know what you wanted and if growth wasn’t it, you’d shoot me down. (:
“They might outweigh the likely loss in quality of discussion that (I think) would go along with it. ”
Has anyone thought much about what would improve the quality of discussion? Because that could be improved at the same time. Or before making marketing changes—to be sure that the safeguard is in place first.
“Or maybe “basic web marketing principles” can in fact be applied in a way that pulls in a huge new population of people with the extremely unusual characteristics LW’s current regulars have. ”
Yes! That’s what I was hoping for. (: That’s why I asked who your target demographic is. I might think I know, but you guys are the ones that have been talking to them for years.
Yes. It’s an issue regardless. But if pursuing a strategy of rapid growth guarantees an influx of negative-net-value-to-LW new users, it’s probably a bad thing. (We will all die eventually, but I still prefer there to be fewer mass murders.)
I don’t have a good enough mental model of the typical first-time visitor to LW to have a strong opinion. What I do think likely is that either it wouldn’t work or it would work at the cost of getting rid of that rapid growth you were hoping for. Because I think it’s likely that rapid growth by increasing visitor retention implies the sort of change in LW’s demographics that I described.
I have proposed something similar myself. The UI would be tricky to get right. It might well make LW a better place (or it might not; these things have a way of producing unexpected consequences). But I don’t see how it would do much to solve the problem I described, if (as I suspect but don’t claim to know) it really is a problem.
Might work. Has anyone reading this got experience of such systems? (The obvious concern is that it would drive away “good” users as effectively as it would drive away “bad” ones, so that it would slow growth without actually making the overall pattern of growth any more favourable.)
According to my quick count, 28 different people have commented here [EDITED to add: not counting “metatroll”], of whom 7 seemed definitely in favour of growth (perhaps having thought it through, perhaps just because it’s a sort of default goal), one seemed definitely against growth, and 6 seemed definitely skeptical (i.e., saying “growth might not be what we want”, basically my position). The other 14 expressed no opinion on the matter that I could detect. Make of that what you will.
I think a lot of people have, but so far as I know no one (here or elsewhere) has a silver bullet that ensures that a community of unusual people will retain its distinctively valuable characteristics as it grows. (Or for that matter as it doesn’t.)
I’m not sure if I like the basic idea, but tying it to the new users’ karma would favor good users over bad (for certain values of good).
(Your quoting is slightly broken.)
Hacker News uses this sort of system: there are thresholds for things like being able to vote, being able to downvote, etc., and they are all based on your karma score. The same is true on Stack Overflow, though that’s a very different kind of site.
Both of them see frequent complaints that they’re going downhill, but it’s hard to be sure whether that’s anything more than standard “the world was better in my young days” thinking (which I think results from a general tendency to remember good things better than bad things).
Frustratingly, the help doesn’t say how to do nested quotes.
Hmm, let’s experiment.
This line is normal.
This line is normal.
All those lines are separated by blank lines. (Not doing so produces bad results.)
Ok, I think I have it working.
Yes, but one of the things that effects wether someone is a good user or bad user is how well they acculturate. From what I understand, sites with a high old timer to newb ratio usually have an easier time acculturating the newbs.
That’s not what I meant… Imagine a curve that gets more and more steep as it progresses. In the first quarter of a year, say a website gets 1000 new users. In the second quarter of the year, it gets 1500 new users. In the third quarter of the year, 2250 new users.
In the second quarter, 2⁄3 of the members are old members, 1⁄3 of the members are new. In the third quarter, the ratio changes because there are so many new members—nearly half the members are new. In the fourth quarter, an even larger number of new members joins, and suddenly there are more new members than old ones. If this keeps up for any length of time, the culture will be totally destroyed.
Whether you start with 20 members and increase it by an increment of 1 and 1⁄4 the amount of users every quarter, or start with 1000 and increase it by an increment if 1 and 1⁄2 the number of users every quarter, if the number of users keeps increasing this way, eventually it will get to a point where the ratio flips and there are more new users than old ones.
It doesn’t matter whether that type of growth happens quickly or slowly. If the growth is exponential there’s a good risk of that eventually happening. Slow growth might mean it happens next year, fast growth might mean it happens next month. Either way, it’s important to protect the community from that problem.
I think you’re missing my point. Does your model have any allowance for the idea that new members can eventually become old members, and that this process is speed up by new members interacting with old members? Because the main point that I was trying to make is that a large portion (though nowhere near all) of a user’s desirability is how well they absorb the culture, and that culture can survive (more or less) intact through multiple “generations” if at any given point in time a large enough proportion of people have already acculturated. Consider a toy model were users can be discreetly divided into “old-hands” and “newbs”. In this toy model newbs turn into old-hands in x weeks iff at least 50% of the other users are old-hands (who can set a proper example), otherwise the culture collapses. In this case the culture can survive indefinitely iff the doubling time is longer than x.