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.
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.