Naturally paying people to write essays on specific topics is very expensive, but one can imagine more subtle ways in which LW could incentivize people to write on specific topics. To brainstorm a few ideas:
Some kind of feature where prospective writers can make public lists of things they could write about (in the form of Post Title + 1-paragraph summary), and a corresponding way for LW users to indicate which posts they’re interested in. (E.g. I liked this post of blog post ideas by lsusr, but for our purposes that’s insufficient context for prospective readers.) Maybe by voting on stuff that sounds interesting, or by doing the equivalent of subscribing to a newsletter. (In fact, there’s already a LW feature to subscribe to all comments by a user, as well as all comments on a post, so this would be like subscribing to a draft post so you’d get a notification if and when it’s released.) Of course one could even offer bounties here, but that might not be worth the complexity and the adverse incentives. Anyway, the main benefit here would be for prolific writers to gauge interest on their ideas and prioritize what to write about. I don’t know to which extent that’s typically a bottleneck, however.
Or maybe writers aren’t bottlenecked by or don’t care about audience interest, but would love a way to publically request specific support resources for their post ideas. Maybe to write a specific post they need money, or a Roam license, or a substack subscription, or access to a tool like DALL-E, or information from some domain experts, or support from a programmer, or help with finding some datasets or papers, etc. LW already has a fantastic feature where you can request proofreaders and editors for your posts, but those are 1-to-1 requests to the LW team, not public requests which e.g. a domain expert or programmer could see and respond to themselves.
Anyway, that’s a perspective from the supply side. The equivalent from the demand side would be features that indicate to prospective writers what readers would like to see. There have been posts on this in the past (e.g. here or here or here), but I’m imagining something more like a banner on the New Post page à la “Don’t know what to write about? Here’s what readers would love to read”. This could again be a list of topics plus 1-paragraph summaries (this time suggested by readers), which could be upvoted by LW users or otherwise incentivized.
This was already suggested by others in the past, but a feature for users to nominate great comments to be written up as posts. Could again include an option of offering a bounty or other incentives.
Removing friction for writers, e.g. by making the editor better. Personally I’d love it if we could borrow the feature from Notion where you paste a link over selected text to turn that text into a link (rather than replacing the text with the link); and I’ve also seen a request for better citation support.
A social accountability feature where you commit to write a post on X by deadline Y and ask to be held accountable by LW users. Could once again be combined with users offering incentives or bounties if the post idea seems promising enough.
Finally, to speak a bit from personal experience: I’ve been meaning to write a LW sequence on Health for a year now (here’s how that might look like). Things that have stopped me so far include: mostly akrasia and perfectionism; uncertainty of whether the idea would produce enough value to warrant spending my limited energy on; the daunting scale of the project; the question to which extent what I’ll actually produce can live up to my envisioned ideal; lack of monetary reward for what sounds like a lot of work; lack of clarity or experience on how to manage the gazillion citations and sources (both when posting on LW, and in my personal draft notes); some confusion regarding how to keep this LW sequence up-to-date over time (do I update an existing essay? or repost it as a “2023 edition”?); and more besides.
To be clear, I’m mostly limited by akrasia, but a few of the thing I brainstormed above could help in my case, too.
Re: “Content I’d like to see more of”:
Naturally paying people to write essays on specific topics is very expensive, but one can imagine more subtle ways in which LW could incentivize people to write on specific topics. To brainstorm a few ideas:
Some kind of feature where prospective writers can make public lists of things they could write about (in the form of Post Title + 1-paragraph summary), and a corresponding way for LW users to indicate which posts they’re interested in. (E.g. I liked this post of blog post ideas by lsusr, but for our purposes that’s insufficient context for prospective readers.) Maybe by voting on stuff that sounds interesting, or by doing the equivalent of subscribing to a newsletter. (In fact, there’s already a LW feature to subscribe to all comments by a user, as well as all comments on a post, so this would be like subscribing to a draft post so you’d get a notification if and when it’s released.) Of course one could even offer bounties here, but that might not be worth the complexity and the adverse incentives. Anyway, the main benefit here would be for prolific writers to gauge interest on their ideas and prioritize what to write about. I don’t know to which extent that’s typically a bottleneck, however.
Or maybe writers aren’t bottlenecked by or don’t care about audience interest, but would love a way to publically request specific support resources for their post ideas. Maybe to write a specific post they need money, or a Roam license, or a substack subscription, or access to a tool like DALL-E, or information from some domain experts, or support from a programmer, or help with finding some datasets or papers, etc. LW already has a fantastic feature where you can request proofreaders and editors for your posts, but those are 1-to-1 requests to the LW team, not public requests which e.g. a domain expert or programmer could see and respond to themselves.
Anyway, that’s a perspective from the supply side. The equivalent from the demand side would be features that indicate to prospective writers what readers would like to see. There have been posts on this in the past (e.g. here or here or here), but I’m imagining something more like a banner on the New Post page à la “Don’t know what to write about? Here’s what readers would love to read”. This could again be a list of topics plus 1-paragraph summaries (this time suggested by readers), which could be upvoted by LW users or otherwise incentivized.
This was already suggested by others in the past, but a feature for users to nominate great comments to be written up as posts. Could again include an option of offering a bounty or other incentives.
Removing friction for writers, e.g. by making the editor better. Personally I’d love it if we could borrow the feature from Notion where you paste a link over selected text to turn that text into a link (rather than replacing the text with the link); and I’ve also seen a request for better citation support.
A social accountability feature where you commit to write a post on X by deadline Y and ask to be held accountable by LW users. Could once again be combined with users offering incentives or bounties if the post idea seems promising enough.
Finally, to speak a bit from personal experience: I’ve been meaning to write a LW sequence on Health for a year now (here’s how that might look like). Things that have stopped me so far include: mostly akrasia and perfectionism; uncertainty of whether the idea would produce enough value to warrant spending my limited energy on; the daunting scale of the project; the question to which extent what I’ll actually produce can live up to my envisioned ideal; lack of monetary reward for what sounds like a lot of work; lack of clarity or experience on how to manage the gazillion citations and sources (both when posting on LW, and in my personal draft notes); some confusion regarding how to keep this LW sequence up-to-date over time (do I update an existing essay? or repost it as a “2023 edition”?); and more besides.
To be clear, I’m mostly limited by akrasia, but a few of the thing I brainstormed above could help in my case, too.