For COVID in-particular we added a specific threshold that is “yes, this is news based, but important enough that we will frontpage the most important posts in this category anyways”. I think we announced it somewhere, let me look it up…
I think that explains some but not all of the sorting (e.g. the niacin post was partially about long covid, and similar posts about the flu should be and previously have been approved).
I think this is probably not worth the effort to fix, which is why I didn’t push back. But I do think it’s worth making common knowledge of the inconsistency of the sorting process.
Oh, yeah, I totally think what happened here is “we had more rules/guidelines about COVID, which increased the complexity of the rules we had to follow, which caused us to be more inconsistent in applying those rules”. I didn’t mean to imply that we actually flawlessly followed the rules.
For COVID in-particular we added a specific threshold that is “yes, this is news based, but important enough that we will frontpage the most important posts in this category anyways”. I think we announced it somewhere, let me look it up…
Here is the comment where we announced we would no longer frontpage Zvi’s COVID updates: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EzcZ82QbTcB3Bn7JB/covid-3-17-22-the-rise-of-ba-2?commentId=mjn3uc9rPEzP3fEr9
Here is where Ruby writes about “Long COVID” posts being frontpage: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6uwLq8kofo4Tzxfe2/long-covid-is-not-necessarily-your-biggest-problem?commentId=LY3aKxbeC6P9DpXBT
I feel like I remember a comment or post where we stated publicly we would start frontpaging some COVID stuff, but I can’t find it quickly.
In any case, in the domain of COVID the frontpage/personal stuff is particularly confusing.
I think that explains some but not all of the sorting (e.g. the niacin post was partially about long covid, and similar posts about the flu should be and previously have been approved).
I think this is probably not worth the effort to fix, which is why I didn’t push back. But I do think it’s worth making common knowledge of the inconsistency of the sorting process.
Oh, yeah, I totally think what happened here is “we had more rules/guidelines about COVID, which increased the complexity of the rules we had to follow, which caused us to be more inconsistent in applying those rules”. I didn’t mean to imply that we actually flawlessly followed the rules.