When new users pop up in the moderation dashboard (which happens when they make their first post/comment), we see the HTTP referrer they had the first time they landed on the site. (At domain granularity, not page-level granularity, and only for users who clicked a link not users who typed the URL into the address bar). So, if we get a bunch of users coming from YouTube leaving bad comments that would make the site worse, we do have the ability to notice that’s what happening.
That said, I do think that there’s a real risk here. Among all the places on the internet, YouTube is unique in that it isn’t filtering for people who read a lot, so it may attract a crowd that’s both much larger and much less intellectually sophisticated than LW is used to. On the other hand, maybe the subset of people who wouldn’t fit on LW wind up bouncing off the walls of text anyways. I could see it going either way.
When new users pop up in the moderation dashboard (which happens when they make their first post/comment), we see the HTTP referrer they had the first time they landed on the site. (At domain granularity, not page-level granularity, and only for users who clicked a link not users who typed the URL into the address bar). So, if we get a bunch of users coming from YouTube leaving bad comments that would make the site worse, we do have the ability to notice that’s what happening.
That said, I do think that there’s a real risk here. Among all the places on the internet, YouTube is unique in that it isn’t filtering for people who read a lot, so it may attract a crowd that’s both much larger and much less intellectually sophisticated than LW is used to. On the other hand, maybe the subset of people who wouldn’t fit on LW wind up bouncing off the walls of text anyways. I could see it going either way.