This was the first time I used the dialogue feature and it was a blast (much better experience than comment threads). Being able to see what the other person is writing as they write it, suggest edits, and swap things around is such a great user experience, and is so much closer to talking than any other form of written communication I used thus far. I kinda wish I had the option to use this format in each of my chats (Whatsapp, Discord, etc..).
I loved how this allowed the conversation to be free-flowing, and took us on interesting tangents that we probably wouldn’t have gone on otherwise. OTOH, this might make it worse to read. I personally haven’t found any dialogue great to read yet, and it might be related to this quality, but it seems they are definitely great to have. So perhaps what’s needed is just to go the extra step and distill the dialogue afterward.
Two other points:
One thing I noticed is that we very often wrote meta notes that we later deleted, and it may be nice to have a box on the side for meta discussion, so you can keep the main thread clean.
I think it would also be nice if we could do inline reacts while editing, to be easily able to mark agreement on something (Like you would nod your head or go “aha” in the middle of a sentence to show that you agree).
I loved how this allowed the conversation to be free-flowing, and took us on interesting tangents that we probably wouldn’t have gone on otherwise. OTOH, this might make it worse to read. I personally haven’t found any dialogue great to read yet, and it might be related to this quality
I strongly agree with this. I have also not found any dialogue great to read, and that is definitely because of this exact quality.
So perhaps what’s needed is just to go the extra step and distill the dialogue afterward.
That is definitely needed, but “just” is very much the wrong word to use here. Distilling a dialogue would end up providing most of the value to readers—much more value than the un-distilled dialogue. Unfortunately, it would also require considerable effort from the dialogue participants. It would, after all, be much like writing a regular post…
It’s possible that with the dialogue written, a well prompted LLM could distill the rest. Especially if each section that was distilled could be linked back to the section in the dialogue it was distilled from.
Sure, it’s possible. I don’t trust LLMs nearly enough to depend directly on such a thing in a systematic way, but perhaps there could be a workflow where the LLM-generated summary is then fed back to the dialogue participants to sign off on. That might be a very useful thing for either the LW team or some third party to build, if it worked.
Meta comment about the dialogue feature:
This was the first time I used the dialogue feature and it was a blast (much better experience than comment threads). Being able to see what the other person is writing as they write it, suggest edits, and swap things around is such a great user experience, and is so much closer to talking than any other form of written communication I used thus far. I kinda wish I had the option to use this format in each of my chats (Whatsapp, Discord, etc..).
I loved how this allowed the conversation to be free-flowing, and took us on interesting tangents that we probably wouldn’t have gone on otherwise. OTOH, this might make it worse to read. I personally haven’t found any dialogue great to read yet, and it might be related to this quality, but it seems they are definitely great to have. So perhaps what’s needed is just to go the extra step and distill the dialogue afterward.
Two other points:
One thing I noticed is that we very often wrote meta notes that we later deleted, and it may be nice to have a box on the side for meta discussion, so you can keep the main thread clean.
I think it would also be nice if we could do inline reacts while editing, to be easily able to mark agreement on something (Like you would nod your head or go “aha” in the middle of a sentence to show that you agree).
I strongly agree with this. I have also not found any dialogue great to read, and that is definitely because of this exact quality.
That is definitely needed, but “just” is very much the wrong word to use here. Distilling a dialogue would end up providing most of the value to readers—much more value than the un-distilled dialogue. Unfortunately, it would also require considerable effort from the dialogue participants. It would, after all, be much like writing a regular post…
It’s possible that with the dialogue written, a well prompted LLM could distill the rest. Especially if each section that was distilled could be linked back to the section in the dialogue it was distilled from.
Sure, it’s possible. I don’t trust LLMs nearly enough to depend directly on such a thing in a systematic way, but perhaps there could be a workflow where the LLM-generated summary is then fed back to the dialogue participants to sign off on. That might be a very useful thing for either the LW team or some third party to build, if it worked.
Remember to link to this feedback on Intercom, to increase the chance that the LW team sees it.
Thanks for the reminder, I will :)