A good system for finding old content. Often old posts or comment threads represent the best content on a given topic, but if there isn’t a way to browse by topic they’re basically lost. This makes me less excited about engaging in the first place—vice versa a sense that something will persist is a draw in a venue for circulating ideas.
This is one thing where I think the forums/subforums structure of old UBB boards is actually superior to most more modern replacements (although such boards have other significant problems, most notably lack of threading).
Interesting. I agree with this, but am not super sure about the best solution. I was hoping we could fix this with something like the sequences feature, which would be optimized for creating persistent content, and a sense of canon in the community.
I.e. there would be a set of sequences that would be considered core, and that would be prominently placed on the page. Users would have the ability to add sequences, and if they are good enough and popular enough, they get added to the core sequences
This seems to make past content more accessible, though it is better suited for making top-level posts findable, and worse suited for making very good discussions findable. Unsure how to best make the discussions more findable.
There seem to be two related problems here: content discovery for old posts without a specific topic; and finding posts on specific topics.
For the former, Less Wrong currently has two mechanisms: the Sequences wiki articles, and http://lesswrong.com/top/ . Neither of these is entirely adequate. The Sequences wiki articles fail to mention some of the best content. /top/ is close, but it’s a feature that you can only use once; if you go back a second time, it works badly because you have to click Next a bunch of times before you get to something you haven’t already read. This seems fixable! It might be good if LW tracked which articles you’ve read, in a way that’s more reliable/persistent than browser history, and provided a feed of unread posts with a mix of new posts and highly-upvoted old posts.
I don’t think that using up prominent real estate on core sequences is a good idea. I think that /top/ on lesswrong is a better idea, and agree with jim that mixing in top/unread with recent stuff would be pretty reasonable (e.g. if 1⁄3 of stuff I saw was just the highest rated article I hadn’t read or skipped too many times).
Putting everything into a giant book is not a reasonable form of organizing institutional knowledge. (At least not beyond a certain point.)
In general, I feel like the sequences approach strangled the intellectual growth of LW 1.0 by sending people the message that unless their content is in the top 0.1% of content they should just go home. So that’s what people did.
If you want a thriving discussion you’re going to need to have a space for discussing things with reasonable but not incredible quality standards. You do not want to give users the message that for their discussion to be worthwhile it must ultimately be worthy of inclusion into a canon. Trying to build a canon too early just strangles everything. You’re overemphasizing it because it’s what EY did when you really should if anything underemphasize it.
p.s. Overemphasizing the construction of a canon also has negative PR effects, because it gives the impression of a fanatic group.
A good system for finding old content. Often old posts or comment threads represent the best content on a given topic, but if there isn’t a way to browse by topic they’re basically lost. This makes me less excited about engaging in the first place—vice versa a sense that something will persist is a draw in a venue for circulating ideas.
This is one thing where I think the forums/subforums structure of old UBB boards is actually superior to most more modern replacements (although such boards have other significant problems, most notably lack of threading).
Interesting. I agree with this, but am not super sure about the best solution. I was hoping we could fix this with something like the sequences feature, which would be optimized for creating persistent content, and a sense of canon in the community.
I.e. there would be a set of sequences that would be considered core, and that would be prominently placed on the page. Users would have the ability to add sequences, and if they are good enough and popular enough, they get added to the core sequences
This seems to make past content more accessible, though it is better suited for making top-level posts findable, and worse suited for making very good discussions findable. Unsure how to best make the discussions more findable.
There seem to be two related problems here: content discovery for old posts without a specific topic; and finding posts on specific topics.
For the former, Less Wrong currently has two mechanisms: the Sequences wiki articles, and http://lesswrong.com/top/ . Neither of these is entirely adequate. The Sequences wiki articles fail to mention some of the best content. /top/ is close, but it’s a feature that you can only use once; if you go back a second time, it works badly because you have to click Next a bunch of times before you get to something you haven’t already read. This seems fixable! It might be good if LW tracked which articles you’ve read, in a way that’s more reliable/persistent than browser history, and provided a feed of unread posts with a mix of new posts and highly-upvoted old posts.
It seems to me like tags are potentially a good solution here, so long as citizen-editors have the power to create tags and keep them orderly.
I don’t think that using up prominent real estate on core sequences is a good idea. I think that /top/ on lesswrong is a better idea, and agree with jim that mixing in top/unread with recent stuff would be pretty reasonable (e.g. if 1⁄3 of stuff I saw was just the highest rated article I hadn’t read or skipped too many times).
Putting everything into a giant book is not a reasonable form of organizing institutional knowledge. (At least not beyond a certain point.)
In general, I feel like the sequences approach strangled the intellectual growth of LW 1.0 by sending people the message that unless their content is in the top 0.1% of content they should just go home. So that’s what people did.
If you want a thriving discussion you’re going to need to have a space for discussing things with reasonable but not incredible quality standards. You do not want to give users the message that for their discussion to be worthwhile it must ultimately be worthy of inclusion into a canon. Trying to build a canon too early just strangles everything. You’re overemphasizing it because it’s what EY did when you really should if anything underemphasize it.
p.s. Overemphasizing the construction of a canon also has negative PR effects, because it gives the impression of a fanatic group.