Ouch! I clicked the Rejected Posts link, and now my eyes hurt. But at the same time, my respect for the moderators and their hard work increased.
Some of that is pure WTF. Such as, why would one post a Chinese article to an English-speaking website.
Some of that, crackpots and similar. A Youtube video containing an open message for Eliezer; I watched the first three minutes of it, still not sure what it was about. Someone else hears voices talking to them at night.
Friendly reminders that the current AI is not superintelligent yet.
More interesting is content of the type: “It depends on frequency. Once a month would be okay, but every day is an overkill.” Two major subcategories are fiction and 101 questions. I don’t mind occasional fiction; some of it definitely belongs here (beisutsukai, HPMoR fan fiction). But when new authors come and post long, mediocre stories about AI, I wish they tried their luck somewhere else instead. Similarly, an occasional 101 question is an opportunity to think again about the basics, and maybe a reminder to write/update a FAQ. Too much, and the questions are just left unanswered, or only answered by other enthusiastic newbies.
EDIT:
Looking at the rejected comments makes me wonder: would it make sense to only allow new users to comment on articles less than 7 days old? Then their comments would be seen by most users. As opposed to commenting on old articles, where it is more likely to be seen by either moderators or no one.
Ruby and I had some disagreement about how to handle fiction, but my current take is “fiction is too hard to evaluate from new users. I can’t figure out if it’s any good from the first few paragraphs, and I don’t have time to read it all. So basically I think LWers should first post something more concrete/object-level/easy-to-evaluate as part of their getting-familiar with the site, and post fiction once they’re a bit more vetted.
I think Ruby is a bit more open to fiction from new users but we haven’t talked through it thoroughly yet.
I fear Ray might be right, even though I’m sad if we’re blocking fiction. I actually still hope we can build a Fiction Page of the site, but we would to make it be good fiction.
To be clear I think fiction is totally fine once a user’s demonstrated that they’re otherwise a pretty good fit for the site. So the thing here is “we get the fiction later”, not “not at all” (hopefully).
Yeah, wanted to say something similar. An interesting failure mode would be irrational writers of good fiction; like someone who gets on average +20 karma for their fiction articles, −20 karma for their non-fiction articles, and write so much really good fiction that they can afford to write lots of bad articles.
Perhaps we could officially recommend some existing fiction website as the default place to go if you want to post fiction? Intuitively, saying “go to X instead” sounds more polite and more actionable than saying “go away”. Especially if X would already have something like rationalist fiction as a category.
Looking at the rejected comments makes me wonder: would it make sense to only allow new users to comment on articles less than 7 days old? Then their comments would be seen by most users. As opposed to commenting on old articles, where it is more likely to be seen by either moderators or no one.
Recent comments appear in the “Recent Discussion” section of the front page, regardless of post age. Not sure how many people use this feature, but I like it as a way to follow longer-term ongoing discussions after I’ve hidden the post itself or it has fallen off the top of the “Latest Posts” section.
So I do occasionally see comments from new users on much older posts. The quality varies, but I’m not sure that there’s any correlation between post age and new-user comment quality that would make a rule like this worth implementing.
Ouch! I clicked the Rejected Posts link, and now my eyes hurt. But at the same time, my respect for the moderators and their hard work increased.
Some of that is pure WTF. Such as, why would one post a Chinese article to an English-speaking website.
Some of that, crackpots and similar. A Youtube video containing an open message for Eliezer; I watched the first three minutes of it, still not sure what it was about. Someone else hears voices talking to them at night.
Friendly reminders that the current AI is not superintelligent yet.
More interesting is content of the type: “It depends on frequency. Once a month would be okay, but every day is an overkill.” Two major subcategories are fiction and 101 questions. I don’t mind occasional fiction; some of it definitely belongs here (beisutsukai, HPMoR fan fiction). But when new authors come and post long, mediocre stories about AI, I wish they tried their luck somewhere else instead. Similarly, an occasional 101 question is an opportunity to think again about the basics, and maybe a reminder to write/update a FAQ. Too much, and the questions are just left unanswered, or only answered by other enthusiastic newbies.
EDIT:
Looking at the rejected comments makes me wonder: would it make sense to only allow new users to comment on articles less than 7 days old? Then their comments would be seen by most users. As opposed to commenting on old articles, where it is more likely to be seen by either moderators or no one.
Ruby and I had some disagreement about how to handle fiction, but my current take is “fiction is too hard to evaluate from new users. I can’t figure out if it’s any good from the first few paragraphs, and I don’t have time to read it all. So basically I think LWers should first post something more concrete/object-level/easy-to-evaluate as part of their getting-familiar with the site, and post fiction once they’re a bit more vetted.
I think Ruby is a bit more open to fiction from new users but we haven’t talked through it thoroughly yet.
I fear Ray might be right, even though I’m sad if we’re blocking fiction. I actually still hope we can build a Fiction Page of the site, but we would to make it be good fiction.
To be clear I think fiction is totally fine once a user’s demonstrated that they’re otherwise a pretty good fit for the site. So the thing here is “we get the fiction later”, not “not at all” (hopefully).
Yeah, wanted to say something similar. An interesting failure mode would be irrational writers of good fiction; like someone who gets on average +20 karma for their fiction articles, −20 karma for their non-fiction articles, and write so much really good fiction that they can afford to write lots of bad articles.
Perhaps we could officially recommend some existing fiction website as the default place to go if you want to post fiction? Intuitively, saying “go to X instead” sounds more polite and more actionable than saying “go away”. Especially if X would already have something like rationalist fiction as a category.
Recent comments appear in the “Recent Discussion” section of the front page, regardless of post age. Not sure how many people use this feature, but I like it as a way to follow longer-term ongoing discussions after I’ve hidden the post itself or it has fallen off the top of the “Latest Posts” section.
So I do occasionally see comments from new users on much older posts. The quality varies, but I’m not sure that there’s any correlation between post age and new-user comment quality that would make a rule like this worth implementing.