Sometimes I feel LW is very harsh for Main articles, but not harsh enough for Discussion articles. It is very difficult to write a Main article, but many kinds of trivialities get posted in Discussion.
It’s like if you measure quality from 0 to 10, then a typical Main article is 9 or 10, a typical Discussion article is 1 or 2 (you must get to 0 to get downvoted)… and the articles between 4 and 7 somehow don’t belong anywhere.
And maybe it is this category of articles—not good enough for Main, but already too good for Discussion—that people prefer to take to their own blogs.
One of the proposed splits for the site, to replace the current Main/Discussion split, is by subject matter- instrumental rationality, epistemic rationality, meetups, futurism, and so on. Everything related to instrumental rationality, from a one-sentence post with a link to a six thousand word detailed referenced article, would go in that subreddit, and there would probably be a ‘high quality’ page where you can see all of the articles that have been promoted from any of the subreddits.
It seems like that would be good at encouraging posts of medium quality- you don’t have to say “I think this is Main-quality,” you just post it where it belongs and either the editors think it’s Main-quality or they don’t, and someone sitting on a 7 post just posts it instead of agonizing over it (and eventually not posting it because of an ugh field).
Sometimes I feel LW is very harsh for Main articles, but not harsh enough for Discussion articles. It is very difficult to write a Main article, but many kinds of trivialities get posted in Discussion.
It’s like if you measure quality from 0 to 10, then a typical Main article is 9 or 10, a typical Discussion article is 1 or 2 (you must get to 0 to get downvoted)… and the articles between 4 and 7 somehow don’t belong anywhere.
And maybe it is this category of articles—not good enough for Main, but already too good for Discussion—that people prefer to take to their own blogs.
One of the proposed splits for the site, to replace the current Main/Discussion split, is by subject matter- instrumental rationality, epistemic rationality, meetups, futurism, and so on. Everything related to instrumental rationality, from a one-sentence post with a link to a six thousand word detailed referenced article, would go in that subreddit, and there would probably be a ‘high quality’ page where you can see all of the articles that have been promoted from any of the subreddits.
It seems like that would be good at encouraging posts of medium quality- you don’t have to say “I think this is Main-quality,” you just post it where it belongs and either the editors think it’s Main-quality or they don’t, and someone sitting on a 7 post just posts it instead of agonizing over it (and eventually not posting it because of an ugh field).