Er, the (somewhat fuzzy) thesis of the post is that there’s a thing where, like, one or two prominent Socrati set the vibe, and then a bunch of other people follow suit; I find that criticism on LW feels more like [that guy] + [100 emulators of his style of engagement] than it used to.
Ultimately, it isn’t about just that one person’s engagement (although as I note above, they seem to have an outsized direct impact) so much as it is about a … prion disease?
As someone who’s posted about 60 or 70 essays on LW over the past eight years, doing so in 2023 involves a lot of bracing, as if I were hyping myself up to grab an electric fence. I straightforwardly expect the experience of posting to involve a net-negative subsequent four days. This was not the case in e.g. the Conor Moreton days, even though one or two of the Conor Moreton essays ended up in net negative territory.
If it’s that rough for me, when I’m a good writer who’s confident in his insights and has a lot of people who are interested-by-default in his thoughts, I imagine it can get a lot harder for the twenty-year-old not-yet-known version of me.
My recollection is that “Conor Moreton” at least once wrote something along the lines of “I find writing for LW stressful because I get a lot of criticism”. Maybe I’m misremembering, and for sure the obvious guess would be that you remember more clearly than I do, but my recollection now of my impression then is that it was nearer than you’re suggesting to how you describe your present experience of posting on LW.
Oh, I’ve definitely found it somewhat stressful all along; I think I’m in the most sensitive quintile if not decile.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that the shift was from [zero] to [large number]. More wanted to gesture at a shift from [moderate number] to [large number].
Like, there’s the difference between viscerally expecting one in four essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 10 lasting for a day or two, and viscerally expecting two in three essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 30 lasting for four days.
If the “ban commenter” function had not been implemented, I wouldn’t have posted any of my last five or six essays, and would be already gone.
Ah, I see. I don’t really disagree, but I also don’t think LW is unique in this, nor that there is (or can be) a long-lived growing-popularity group that maintains the feel of the early days. This seems like an evolution that’s plagued old-timers of a medium for all time, from SF fandom to pre-internet BBSs and Usenet, to early-internet special-purpose forums, to LW and rationalist-adjecent fora.
I don’t think Duncan’s gesturing at the “eternal September” problem—I think he’s talking about the “toxic low-grade criticism” problem, which is a related but separate issue. A persistent culture of toxic low-grade criticism exacerbates the eternal September problem by allowing impressionable newcomers to become acculturated to the pre-existing toxic dynamic, or to self-select for compatibility with it, making it that much harder to deal with. But you can work on improving the culture while also admitting that the constant influx of newcomers may make it difficult to go as far as you’d like to in terms of creating a specific and consistent set of norms.
I think there are some differences between this and other instances of degradation of quality by growth and entry of less-hardcore newcomers, and a resulting shift in norms that are generally negative in terms of quality. But I think there are a lot more similarities than differences.
Er, the (somewhat fuzzy) thesis of the post is that there’s a thing where, like, one or two prominent Socrati set the vibe, and then a bunch of other people follow suit; I find that criticism on LW feels more like [that guy] + [100 emulators of his style of engagement] than it used to.
Ultimately, it isn’t about just that one person’s engagement (although as I note above, they seem to have an outsized direct impact) so much as it is about a … prion disease?
As someone who’s posted about 60 or 70 essays on LW over the past eight years, doing so in 2023 involves a lot of bracing, as if I were hyping myself up to grab an electric fence. I straightforwardly expect the experience of posting to involve a net-negative subsequent four days. This was not the case in e.g. the Conor Moreton days, even though one or two of the Conor Moreton essays ended up in net negative territory.
If it’s that rough for me, when I’m a good writer who’s confident in his insights and has a lot of people who are interested-by-default in his thoughts, I imagine it can get a lot harder for the twenty-year-old not-yet-known version of me.
My recollection is that “Conor Moreton” at least once wrote something along the lines of “I find writing for LW stressful because I get a lot of criticism”. Maybe I’m misremembering, and for sure the obvious guess would be that you remember more clearly than I do, but my recollection now of my impression then is that it was nearer than you’re suggesting to how you describe your present experience of posting on LW.
Oh, I’ve definitely found it somewhat stressful all along; I think I’m in the most sensitive quintile if not decile.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that the shift was from [zero] to [large number]. More wanted to gesture at a shift from [moderate number] to [large number].
Like, there’s the difference between viscerally expecting one in four essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 10 lasting for a day or two, and viscerally expecting two in three essays to result in a negative experience of magnitude 30 lasting for four days.
If the “ban commenter” function had not been implemented, I wouldn’t have posted any of my last five or six essays, and would be already gone.
Ah, I see. I don’t really disagree, but I also don’t think LW is unique in this, nor that there is (or can be) a long-lived growing-popularity group that maintains the feel of the early days. This seems like an evolution that’s plagued old-timers of a medium for all time, from SF fandom to pre-internet BBSs and Usenet, to early-internet special-purpose forums, to LW and rationalist-adjecent fora.
I don’t think Duncan’s gesturing at the “eternal September” problem—I think he’s talking about the “toxic low-grade criticism” problem, which is a related but separate issue. A persistent culture of toxic low-grade criticism exacerbates the eternal September problem by allowing impressionable newcomers to become acculturated to the pre-existing toxic dynamic, or to self-select for compatibility with it, making it that much harder to deal with. But you can work on improving the culture while also admitting that the constant influx of newcomers may make it difficult to go as far as you’d like to in terms of creating a specific and consistent set of norms.
I think there are some differences between this and other instances of degradation of quality by growth and entry of less-hardcore newcomers, and a resulting shift in norms that are generally negative in terms of quality. But I think there are a lot more similarities than differences.