Voting is not moderation. It signals that an article is of interest, not that it is on-topic. AFAIK, you can’t vote an article below 0, which means you can’t distinguish between lack of interest, controversy, and inappropriateness. With that in mind, accurately assessing if an article is suitable to post is crucial to maintaining a healthy baseline of relevance so we can at least eliminate the latter as a factor.
Voting is not moderation. It signals that an article is of interest, not that it is on-topic.
I don’t see the problem with a community originally formed to discuss one issue discovering that all their members are also interested in some other issue and beginning to intensively discuss it. If an article is of interest, why isn’t that sufficient?
Subjects that are totally inappropriate for Less Wrong can still garner a vast and potentially interesting number of comments (I’ve seen comments on PUA that really don’t belong here, and yet sparked massive threads). There may even be a complete lack of criticism about how misplaced it may be, if it only attracts a certain audience. However, just because it generates interest here doesn’t mean it belongs here.
By “does not belong” you presumably mean “does not fit the general pattern of content that came before it as I perceived it”. Why do you think it is valuable for sites to maintain the same general pattern of content?
It’s not that hard to hide threads. There is a little minus button next to every author’s byline. The amount of damage an off-topic thread can do those who are not interested is quite minimal, but the amount it could help those who are interested is practically unbounded.
It’s easy to think that any one thread is easy to hide, but online forums tend to devolve. We are a species that watches breakups on TV, if you don’t maintain SOME pattern of content, then common content will bleed in and eventually dominate.
Voting is not moderation. It signals that an article is of interest, not that it is on-topic. AFAIK, you can’t vote an article below 0, which means you can’t distinguish between lack of interest, controversy, and inappropriateness. With that in mind, accurately assessing if an article is suitable to post is crucial to maintaining a healthy baseline of relevance so we can at least eliminate the latter as a factor.
I don’t see the problem with a community originally formed to discuss one issue discovering that all their members are also interested in some other issue and beginning to intensively discuss it. If an article is of interest, why isn’t that sufficient?
If we want detailed information about how our article is faring we can read the comments.
Subjects that are totally inappropriate for Less Wrong can still garner a vast and potentially interesting number of comments (I’ve seen comments on PUA that really don’t belong here, and yet sparked massive threads). There may even be a complete lack of criticism about how misplaced it may be, if it only attracts a certain audience. However, just because it generates interest here doesn’t mean it belongs here.
By “does not belong” you presumably mean “does not fit the general pattern of content that came before it as I perceived it”. Why do you think it is valuable for sites to maintain the same general pattern of content?
It’s not that hard to hide threads. There is a little minus button next to every author’s byline. The amount of damage an off-topic thread can do those who are not interested is quite minimal, but the amount it could help those who are interested is practically unbounded.
It’s easy to think that any one thread is easy to hide, but online forums tend to devolve. We are a species that watches breakups on TV, if you don’t maintain SOME pattern of content, then common content will bleed in and eventually dominate.