A visible community vote on what we would like to see more of might get a flurry of people to cross the lurker/poster divide, but when I picture myself seeing that feature I wind up thinking about it as a way I could ask (“vote”) for something I wanted the particularly prolific or especially insightful writers here to talk about. Imagine ten thousand lurkers voting for a Project Hufflepuff update or something like that. A variation that might incentivize new writers might be an open vote, with what kind of posts each user wants placed somewhere notable on their profile. I ran across TheZvi’s You’re Good Enough post a few weeks ago, and that’s likely to be the kick I needed to start blogging long form again. (Status: Two half-written ~3k word posts. If I don’t have a blog I can point people at by the 15th of October, I will admit that it wasn’t enough of a kick.)
On that post, TheZvi offered to read things that were written because of their post, and knowing I have at least one guaranteed reader makes writing a lot easier for me. Commenters often want engagement of some sort. Stating at the end of a post that you precommit to reading the first ten on-topic comments and responding to them all with a comment of your own or the first ten blog posts responding to your own post that people link you and commenting on those posts seems like it might incentivize people to write the kind of responses you want them to write. This would allow the people who write a lot and who large parts of the community read to steer the conversation more; whether this is good or bad is a reasonable question but the notion isn’t obviously terrible. It would at least create a variety of topics budding writers could be directed at; a single outcome from a LessWrong topic vote might result in a dozen new posts about that one topic, while a different “this is the kind of content I want” statement from the widely read authors would be more likely to result in three or four posts on each of their topics.
I don’t think this would require any technical changes, and I think it would also be a worthwhile experiment.
A visible community vote on what we would like to see more of might get a flurry of people to cross the lurker/poster divide, but when I picture myself seeing that feature I wind up thinking about it as a way I could ask (“vote”) for something I wanted the particularly prolific or especially insightful writers here to talk about. Imagine ten thousand lurkers voting for a Project Hufflepuff update or something like that. A variation that might incentivize new writers might be an open vote, with what kind of posts each user wants placed somewhere notable on their profile. I ran across TheZvi’s You’re Good Enough post a few weeks ago, and that’s likely to be the kick I needed to start blogging long form again. (Status: Two half-written ~3k word posts. If I don’t have a blog I can point people at by the 15th of October, I will admit that it wasn’t enough of a kick.)
On that post, TheZvi offered to read things that were written because of their post, and knowing I have at least one guaranteed reader makes writing a lot easier for me. Commenters often want engagement of some sort. Stating at the end of a post that you precommit to reading the first ten on-topic comments and responding to them all with a comment of your own or the first ten blog posts responding to your own post that people link you and commenting on those posts seems like it might incentivize people to write the kind of responses you want them to write. This would allow the people who write a lot and who large parts of the community read to steer the conversation more; whether this is good or bad is a reasonable question but the notion isn’t obviously terrible. It would at least create a variety of topics budding writers could be directed at; a single outcome from a LessWrong topic vote might result in a dozen new posts about that one topic, while a different “this is the kind of content I want” statement from the widely read authors would be more likely to result in three or four posts on each of their topics.
I don’t think this would require any technical changes, and I think it would also be a worthwhile experiment.