As I often say, I haven’t been here long, but I notice a sort of political-esque conflict between empirical clusters of people that I privately refer to as the Nice People and the Forthright People. The Nice People think that being nice is pragmatic. The Forthright People think that too much niceness decreases the signal-to-noise ratio and also that there’s a slippery slope towards vacuous niceness that no longer serves its former pragmatic functions. A lot of it has to do with personality. Not everyone fits neatly, and there are Moderate People, but many fit pretty well.
I also notice policy preferences among these groups. The Nice don’t mind discussion of object-level things that people have been drawn towards as the result of purportedly rational thinking and deciding. The Forthright often prefer technical topics and more meta-level discussion of how to be rational, and many harken back to the Golden Age when LW was, as far as I can tell, basically a way to crowdsource hyperintelligent nerds (in the non-disparaging sense) to work past inadequate mainstream decision theories, and also to do cognitive-scientific philosophizing as opposed to the ceiling-gazing sort. The Nice think that new LW members should be welcomed with open arms and that this helps advance the Cause. The Forthright often profess that the Eternal September is long past and that new members that cannot tolerate their Forthrightness are only reducing the discussion quality further.
The current LW is a not-so-useful (certainly not useless, as far as I’m concerned) compromise between the two extremes. The Nice think that the Forthright are often rude and pedantic (often being from academia, as the Forthright are), and prefer not to post here. The Forthright think that the discussion quality has fallen too far, such that the content stream is too difficult to follow time-efficiently, and that to do so would have little value, and prefer not to post here.
I know that you specifically spoke out against subreddits, but I think subreddits would help. Last time I checked, the post was called Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, not Hold Off On Implementing Solutions Indefinitely. (Excuse my Forthrightness!) Tags are good for getting fed the right content, but subreddits encourage subcultures, and subcultures already exist on LW. If you posted in a more technical subreddit, you could expect more Forthright behavior, but also super-high discussion quality. Forthrightness really isn’t so bad in a semi-academic context; it’s the outside-LW norm. If you posted in a sub-reddit for object-level lifestyle stuff, or miscellaneous stuff, you could expect more Nice behavior; that’s also the outside-LW norm. This might actually be a case of LW collectively overestimating how atypical it is, which is, so ironically, very typical.
That’s an interesting distinction, but I think the worst problem at LW is just that people rarely think of interesting things to write about. I don’t know whether all the low-hanging fruit has been gathered, or if we should be thinking about ways to find good topics. Scott Alexander seems to manage.
whether all the low-hanging fruit has been gathered
Still there is the issue that it is a format of publishing sorted by publishing date. It is not like a library where it is just as easy to find a book published 5 years ago than the one published yesterday because they are sorted by topic or the author’s name or something. Sequences and the wiki help this, still, a timeless view of the whole thing would be IMHO highly useful. A good post should not be “buried” just because it is 4 years old.
There’s a tremendous amount of material on LW. Do you have ideas about how to identify good posts and make them easier to find?
I can think of a solutions, but they might just converge on a few posts. Have a regular favorite posts thread. Alternatively, encourage people to look at high-karma older posts.
There’s a tremendous amount of material on LW. Do you have ideas about how to identify good posts and make them easier to find?
Actually, we could probably use off-the-shelf (literally) product recommendation software. The DB knows what posts people have upvoted and downvoted, and which posts they haven’t looked at yet (in order to get the “new since last visit” colored comment border).
That’s the thing though. My hypothesis is that the ‘people who seem to manage’ have left because the site is a lukewarm compromise between the two extremes that they might prefer it to be. Thus, subreddits.
Like, what would a Class Project to make good contributors on LW look like? Does that sound feasible to you?
Oh man, I’m arguing that blogging ability is innate.
I hope I didn’t come off like I’m going to automatically shoot all suggestions to reinvigorate LW out of the sky. That’s most of the problem with the userbase! I genuinely wonder what such a Class Project would look like, and would also be willing to participate if I am able.
Since my comment was written in the context of Nancy_Lebovitz’s comment, I’m specifically curious about how one would go about molding current members into high-quality contributors. I see a lot of stuff above about finding ways to make the user experience more palatable, but that in itself doesn’t seem to ensure the sort of change that I think most people want to see.
I don’t believe I was against subreddits, just against the two virtually useless ones we have currently. Certainly subreddits work OK on, well, Reddit. Maybe a bit of a segmentation with different topics and different moderation rules is a good idea, but there is no budget for this, as far as I know, and there is little interest from those still nominally in charge. In fact, I am not sure why Trike doesn’t just pull the plug. It costs them money, there are no ads or any other revenue, I am guessing.
As I often say, I haven’t been here long, but I notice a sort of political-esque conflict between empirical clusters of people that I privately refer to as the Nice People and the Forthright People. The Nice People think that being nice is pragmatic. The Forthright People think that too much niceness decreases the signal-to-noise ratio and also that there’s a slippery slope towards vacuous niceness that no longer serves its former pragmatic functions. A lot of it has to do with personality. Not everyone fits neatly, and there are Moderate People, but many fit pretty well.
I also notice policy preferences among these groups. The Nice don’t mind discussion of object-level things that people have been drawn towards as the result of purportedly rational thinking and deciding. The Forthright often prefer technical topics and more meta-level discussion of how to be rational, and many harken back to the Golden Age when LW was, as far as I can tell, basically a way to crowdsource hyperintelligent nerds (in the non-disparaging sense) to work past inadequate mainstream decision theories, and also to do cognitive-scientific philosophizing as opposed to the ceiling-gazing sort. The Nice think that new LW members should be welcomed with open arms and that this helps advance the Cause. The Forthright often profess that the Eternal September is long past and that new members that cannot tolerate their Forthrightness are only reducing the discussion quality further.
The current LW is a not-so-useful (certainly not useless, as far as I’m concerned) compromise between the two extremes. The Nice think that the Forthright are often rude and pedantic (often being from academia, as the Forthright are), and prefer not to post here. The Forthright think that the discussion quality has fallen too far, such that the content stream is too difficult to follow time-efficiently, and that to do so would have little value, and prefer not to post here.
I know that you specifically spoke out against subreddits, but I think subreddits would help. Last time I checked, the post was called Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, not Hold Off On Implementing Solutions Indefinitely. (Excuse my Forthrightness!) Tags are good for getting fed the right content, but subreddits encourage subcultures, and subcultures already exist on LW. If you posted in a more technical subreddit, you could expect more Forthright behavior, but also super-high discussion quality. Forthrightness really isn’t so bad in a semi-academic context; it’s the outside-LW norm. If you posted in a sub-reddit for object-level lifestyle stuff, or miscellaneous stuff, you could expect more Nice behavior; that’s also the outside-LW norm. This might actually be a case of LW collectively overestimating how atypical it is, which is, so ironically, very typical.
That’s an interesting distinction, but I think the worst problem at LW is just that people rarely think of interesting things to write about. I don’t know whether all the low-hanging fruit has been gathered, or if we should be thinking about ways to find good topics. Scott Alexander seems to manage.
Still there is the issue that it is a format of publishing sorted by publishing date. It is not like a library where it is just as easy to find a book published 5 years ago than the one published yesterday because they are sorted by topic or the author’s name or something. Sequences and the wiki help this, still, a timeless view of the whole thing would be IMHO highly useful. A good post should not be “buried” just because it is 4 years old.
There’s a tremendous amount of material on LW. Do you have ideas about how to identify good posts and make them easier to find?
I can think of a solutions, but they might just converge on a few posts. Have a regular favorite posts thread. Alternatively, encourage people to look at high-karma older posts.
Actually, we could probably use off-the-shelf (literally) product recommendation software. The DB knows what posts people have upvoted and downvoted, and which posts they haven’t looked at yet (in order to get the “new since last visit” colored comment border).
That’s the thing though. My hypothesis is that the ‘people who seem to manage’ have left because the site is a lukewarm compromise between the two extremes that they might prefer it to be. Thus, subreddits.
Like, what would a Class Project to make good contributors on LW look like? Does that sound feasible to you?
Oh man, I’m arguing that blogging ability is innate.
Obviously there’s an innate portion to blogging ability. We can still manipulate the environmental portion.
I hope I didn’t come off like I’m going to automatically shoot all suggestions to reinvigorate LW out of the sky. That’s most of the problem with the userbase! I genuinely wonder what such a Class Project would look like, and would also be willing to participate if I am able.
Since my comment was written in the context of Nancy_Lebovitz’s comment, I’m specifically curious about how one would go about molding current members into high-quality contributors. I see a lot of stuff above about finding ways to make the user experience more palatable, but that in itself doesn’t seem to ensure the sort of change that I think most people want to see.
I don’t believe I was against subreddits, just against the two virtually useless ones we have currently. Certainly subreddits work OK on, well, Reddit. Maybe a bit of a segmentation with different topics and different moderation rules is a good idea, but there is no budget for this, as far as I know, and there is little interest from those still nominally in charge. In fact, I am not sure why Trike doesn’t just pull the plug. It costs them money, there are no ads or any other revenue, I am guessing.