Discussion forum growth is not quite the same as general website growth. Having forums grow a lot while maintaining the culture that drew the initial contributors there is still something of an unsolved problem, and fast enough growth can kill forum cultures dead through the eternal September effect. It basically happens at the level of comment-response pairs. Things are good as long as most interactions have at least one side familiar with existing site culture, but once you start getting outside users talking with other outside users in volume, there’s not much left maintaining the older culture. And if the outside users come from The Internet In General, the new forum culture is going to end up looking like The Internet In General.
Active and clueful moderation can help, but that requires moderators who can spend a lot of time daily doing active and clueful moderation.
Some forums make things work a bit better by managing to make their content interesting enough that people are willing to pay $5 or $10 for making a new account, and then asking that. Drive-by trolling and spam becomes harder, but regular users with various issues can still make lots of work for active and clueful moderators.
There are plenty of general website growth experts, but who are the long-term forum growth experts? Matt Haughey of MetaFilter maybe? Paul Graham has been running Hacker News for a while, but I don’t think he’s exactly doing it full-time.
Things are good as long as most interactions have at least one side familiar with existing site culture, but once you start getting outside users talking with other outside users in volume, there’s not much left maintaining the older culture.
Worse yet, the new users may comply with the culture in form but not in spirit. In the concrete case of LW, this means new users who are polite and non-confrontational, familiar with the common topics and the material covered in the classic OB/LW articles, making appeals to all the right principles of epistemology and logic, etc., etc., but who nevertheless lack the ability and commitment for truly unbiased and open-minded discussion at the level that used to be the standard. I think this is indeed what has been happening, and I don’t see any way an open-access forum could prevent this course of events from taking place eventually.
(It’s hard to make a point like this without sounding arrogant and conceited, so I should add that in retrospect, I believe that when I joined LW, at the time it probably caused a net lowering of its standards, which were higher back then.)
When I first joined, I barely commented, because I felt it would inexcusably lower the average comment quality. I still refrain on topics which I’m interested, but not competent in; but for the last 18 months or so I’ve felt more comfortable with the vector my comments apply to the site average.
Separately, I generally agree with Will Newsome about the high quality of your contributions.
This being my first comment, I found LW through Google Plus, and my first reading was So You Want To Save The World, which took me a couple of weeks due to the prerequisite papers, plus a tonofother stuff i was reading at the time. One might say, that that might have been an unnecessarily daunting introduction to a community—any community—but I’m glad of the way it happened because I’d never have gotten as interested in cogsci and “A-grade+ rationality” as i have been ever since. That was just before Christmas last year. Now, I’ve read most of the sequences, and even used some of the tools recommended here, but constantly struggle to find a good place to start making contributions to discussions. So it’s taken me roughly 8 months of lurking to do this post. Does everyone do this, or am I a unique point in newb-space?
This was my biggest fear in joining this community; I did not want to be the clueless kid who forced the grown-ups to humor her. I’m quite new, so I don’t know how accurate this is, but I must say that the oldest comments on Overcoming Bias (around 2007-2008) were actually of a much lower quality than the 2009-2010 comments on Less Wrong. Maybe it was because OB, being sponsored by Oxford, had a higher rate of drive-by trolling?
As far as I can tell, Less Wrong is still intimidating enough to deter well-meaning newcomers from saying too much, although nothing but boredom kills trolls. Still, anything that increases traffic will pull quality of discourse toward the mean, unless we can somehow accomplish the miraculous task of bringing newcomers up to the LW mean.
Is there a way to quickly bring people up to speed on the spirit of the law, rather than just the letter of the law? Is there a way to make people want to display their curiosity, their ability to admit mistakes, their thick-skinned, careful consideration of criticism? Saying “I was wrong,” “Thanks for explaining my mistake,” “I’m confused,” etc is a sign of status among more established Less Wrong members (admittedly, the mistakes made shouldn’t be too elementary, and it definitely helps if you’re high status already). How do we get newcomers to care about this particular measure of status from the get-go?
Make It Stick gives us a simple heuristic for getting ideas to burrow in people’s heads and inspire them to action: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story.
This says to me that we need to distill the spirit of truth-seeking and truth-speaking into something with the emotional resonance of a proverb—while avoiding the creepy cult vibe that the overtly religious phrasing of the Sequences tends to bring about. We then need to display this short credo prominently on the front page.
Our current main page is a flood of information. I think it’s quite elegantly designed, but the problem with the word “rationality” is that everyone uses it and everyone thinks they know what it means.
Maybe the front page should have a prominent “New? Start Here” button, which could be used to distill the intellectual culture of this place in an easy-to-swallow nugget. I would have definitely found that helpful.
The pursuit of rationality has to have emotional significance; emotions and values are like hooks onto which ideas can cling. We might be able to reduce the problem of newcomers diluting the culture if we focus on instilling the (honest) emotions we ourselves feel around the subject.
Unfortunately, I see lots of way for this to go wrong in a Dark Arts, manipulative kind of way, but the Sequences, for one, managed to get emotion right for the most part.
Have you adjusted for the likely event that you have become more rational, and what you have actually observed may have been LW becoming at a lower level relative to you, whilst staying relatively flat or even improving?
I was thinking the same, but I don’t know how to convince myself that there has been a clear decline or a markedly improved past state. My take is that LW has always had problems with user-generated content measuring up to the blog content core of the site. I don’t think I followed the forum that closely during the first year or so after the OB age, and the conversation in the pre-LW OB comment system often seemed pretty dismal to me.
This sounds plausible, but it also sounds like something I’d expect at least one old timer to feel even if it isn’t true. Furthermore, I’ve read many of the comments on the sequences, and they don’t seem to support this hypothesis. Can you provide any specific evidence?
Its also worth noting that one of Hacker News’ main strategies is flooding the page with advanced math and other highly technical topics whenever it gets serious mainstream attention.
And disabling new account creation for the duration of the attention.
(All that said though, HN regulars seem to often complain about the decline of Hacker News, how it is turning in to Reddit. (I’m in no position to judge if these complains are valid.))
Discussion forum growth is not quite the same as general website growth. Having forums grow a lot while maintaining the culture that drew the initial contributors there is still something of an unsolved problem, and fast enough growth can kill forum cultures dead through the eternal September effect. It basically happens at the level of comment-response pairs. Things are good as long as most interactions have at least one side familiar with existing site culture, but once you start getting outside users talking with other outside users in volume, there’s not much left maintaining the older culture. And if the outside users come from The Internet In General, the new forum culture is going to end up looking like The Internet In General.
Active and clueful moderation can help, but that requires moderators who can spend a lot of time daily doing active and clueful moderation.
Some forums make things work a bit better by managing to make their content interesting enough that people are willing to pay $5 or $10 for making a new account, and then asking that. Drive-by trolling and spam becomes harder, but regular users with various issues can still make lots of work for active and clueful moderators.
There are plenty of general website growth experts, but who are the long-term forum growth experts? Matt Haughey of MetaFilter maybe? Paul Graham has been running Hacker News for a while, but I don’t think he’s exactly doing it full-time.
Worse yet, the new users may comply with the culture in form but not in spirit. In the concrete case of LW, this means new users who are polite and non-confrontational, familiar with the common topics and the material covered in the classic OB/LW articles, making appeals to all the right principles of epistemology and logic, etc., etc., but who nevertheless lack the ability and commitment for truly unbiased and open-minded discussion at the level that used to be the standard. I think this is indeed what has been happening, and I don’t see any way an open-access forum could prevent this course of events from taking place eventually.
(It’s hard to make a point like this without sounding arrogant and conceited, so I should add that in retrospect, I believe that when I joined LW, at the time it probably caused a net lowering of its standards, which were higher back then.)
When I first joined, I barely commented, because I felt it would inexcusably lower the average comment quality. I still refrain on topics which I’m interested, but not competent in; but for the last 18 months or so I’ve felt more comfortable with the vector my comments apply to the site average.
Separately, I generally agree with Will Newsome about the high quality of your contributions.
This being my first comment, I found LW through Google Plus, and my first reading was So You Want To Save The World, which took me a couple of weeks due to the prerequisite papers, plus a ton of other stuff i was reading at the time. One might say, that that might have been an unnecessarily daunting introduction to a community—any community—but I’m glad of the way it happened because I’d never have gotten as interested in cogsci and “A-grade+ rationality” as i have been ever since. That was just before Christmas last year. Now, I’ve read most of the sequences, and even used some of the tools recommended here, but constantly struggle to find a good place to start making contributions to discussions. So it’s taken me roughly 8 months of lurking to do this post. Does everyone do this, or am I a unique point in newb-space?
This was my biggest fear in joining this community; I did not want to be the clueless kid who forced the grown-ups to humor her. I’m quite new, so I don’t know how accurate this is, but I must say that the oldest comments on Overcoming Bias (around 2007-2008) were actually of a much lower quality than the 2009-2010 comments on Less Wrong. Maybe it was because OB, being sponsored by Oxford, had a higher rate of drive-by trolling?
As far as I can tell, Less Wrong is still intimidating enough to deter well-meaning newcomers from saying too much, although nothing but boredom kills trolls. Still, anything that increases traffic will pull quality of discourse toward the mean, unless we can somehow accomplish the miraculous task of bringing newcomers up to the LW mean.
Is there a way to quickly bring people up to speed on the spirit of the law, rather than just the letter of the law? Is there a way to make people want to display their curiosity, their ability to admit mistakes, their thick-skinned, careful consideration of criticism? Saying “I was wrong,” “Thanks for explaining my mistake,” “I’m confused,” etc is a sign of status among more established Less Wrong members (admittedly, the mistakes made shouldn’t be too elementary, and it definitely helps if you’re high status already). How do we get newcomers to care about this particular measure of status from the get-go?
Make It Stick gives us a simple heuristic for getting ideas to burrow in people’s heads and inspire them to action: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, Story.
This says to me that we need to distill the spirit of truth-seeking and truth-speaking into something with the emotional resonance of a proverb—while avoiding the creepy cult vibe that the overtly religious phrasing of the Sequences tends to bring about. We then need to display this short credo prominently on the front page.
Our current main page is a flood of information. I think it’s quite elegantly designed, but the problem with the word “rationality” is that everyone uses it and everyone thinks they know what it means.
Maybe the front page should have a prominent “New? Start Here” button, which could be used to distill the intellectual culture of this place in an easy-to-swallow nugget. I would have definitely found that helpful.
The pursuit of rationality has to have emotional significance; emotions and values are like hooks onto which ideas can cling. We might be able to reduce the problem of newcomers diluting the culture if we focus on instilling the (honest) emotions we ourselves feel around the subject.
Unfortunately, I see lots of way for this to go wrong in a Dark Arts, manipulative kind of way, but the Sequences, for one, managed to get emotion right for the most part.
Have you adjusted for the likely event that you have become more rational, and what you have actually observed may have been LW becoming at a lower level relative to you, whilst staying relatively flat or even improving?
I was thinking the same, but I don’t know how to convince myself that there has been a clear decline or a markedly improved past state. My take is that LW has always had problems with user-generated content measuring up to the blog content core of the site. I don’t think I followed the forum that closely during the first year or so after the OB age, and the conversation in the pre-LW OB comment system often seemed pretty dismal to me.
This sounds plausible, but it also sounds like something I’d expect at least one old timer to feel even if it isn’t true. Furthermore, I’ve read many of the comments on the sequences, and they don’t seem to support this hypothesis. Can you provide any specific evidence?
Its also worth noting that one of Hacker News’ main strategies is flooding the page with advanced math and other highly technical topics whenever it gets serious mainstream attention.
And disabling new account creation for the duration of the attention.
(All that said though, HN regulars seem to often complain about the decline of Hacker News, how it is turning in to Reddit. (I’m in no position to judge if these complains are valid.))