So, I am in fact pretty wary of the fact that we’ve been frontpaging these. They do pretty clearly violate our frontpage guidelines (even after chatting with Zvi a bunch and toning down the most obvious stuff). I think we at least should have written up an explanation that we re-link to each time.
But I feel discomfort when rules are applied to everybody except the gold-star club members. I’m not sure I agree with the claim that “once you make enough exceptions then the rule is lost”; I’d rather say “once you make an exception then the understanding of the word ‘rule’ changes”. The previous behavior may have been compatible with a strict understanding of the word, but once you make an exception the meaning changes. I would have preferred a regime of “topics that may have political implications: yes; gray tribe op-eds on American politics: no”. (After all, AI safety stuff is also politics-related.)
I share this discomfort, and think we’re currently trying to make some tradeoffs given the (current) implementation of the site, but I think this situation is pretty strong evidence to me that we just need a better system that is less reliant on judgment.
The current problem is that even many longterm members don’t realize there’s a bunch of non-frontpaged content that they might want to see. We got complaints about people not having known about the Zvi covid posts, and wishing they had seen it.
We’ve chatted with Zvi about this a bunch, and he’s toned down / removed some of the more overt/extreme politicization. But, it’s like 10x easier for him to write the essays the way they currently are than to translate them into non-gray-tribe-op-eds that nonetheless make the points he thinks are important. (I think this is a fairly common problem among writers – they have a natural way of thinking/writing and enforcing rules too rigidly ends up killing the golden goose).
I am currently thinking about a couple possible solutions to all this.
We change the homepage rules to “personal blogposts are completely hidden” to “personal blogposts get a −50 karma filter penalty.” Then we enforce the stated rules more consistently, and the deal is “well, if your posts can reliably attract 75+ karma, they’ll show up for everyone. If not, they only show up for users who’ve explicitly opted into it.”
We just make the “show personal blogposts” button way more noticeable. It’s had different degrees of noticeability over the years, and I think it got less visible when we switched to the tag-filter UI. If the problem is people not noticing they can show personal blogposts, we should just make sure they actually notice that.
...come up with some weirder thing that rebuilds the entire system from scratch.
I’m interested in what people think about those options (and in any third ideas people have)
I’d go with number 2, because my snap reaction was “ooh, there’s a “show personal blogposts” button?”
EDIT: Ok, I found the button. The problem with that button is that it looks identical to the other tags, and is at the right side of the screen when the structure of “Latest” draws your eyes to the left side of the screen. I’d make it a bit bigger and on the left side of the screen.
Another way you can follow the new posts of all kinds is the RSS button on the frontpage (together with an RSS feed reader). You can also select to see all kinds of posts above a certain threshold of “karma”, e.g. this. (I think that is independent of whether it’s just a personal blogpost, but I currently have a technical problem and cannot really check that.)
So, I am in fact pretty wary of the fact that we’ve been frontpaging these. They do pretty clearly violate our frontpage guidelines (even after chatting with Zvi a bunch and toning down the most obvious stuff). I think we at least should have written up an explanation that we re-link to each time.
I share this discomfort, and think we’re currently trying to make some tradeoffs given the (current) implementation of the site, but I think this situation is pretty strong evidence to me that we just need a better system that is less reliant on judgment.
The current problem is that even many longterm members don’t realize there’s a bunch of non-frontpaged content that they might want to see. We got complaints about people not having known about the Zvi covid posts, and wishing they had seen it.
We’ve chatted with Zvi about this a bunch, and he’s toned down / removed some of the more overt/extreme politicization. But, it’s like 10x easier for him to write the essays the way they currently are than to translate them into non-gray-tribe-op-eds that nonetheless make the points he thinks are important. (I think this is a fairly common problem among writers – they have a natural way of thinking/writing and enforcing rules too rigidly ends up killing the golden goose).
I am currently thinking about a couple possible solutions to all this.
We change the homepage rules to “personal blogposts are completely hidden” to “personal blogposts get a −50 karma filter penalty.” Then we enforce the stated rules more consistently, and the deal is “well, if your posts can reliably attract 75+ karma, they’ll show up for everyone. If not, they only show up for users who’ve explicitly opted into it.”
We just make the “show personal blogposts” button way more noticeable. It’s had different degrees of noticeability over the years, and I think it got less visible when we switched to the tag-filter UI. If the problem is people not noticing they can show personal blogposts, we should just make sure they actually notice that.
...come up with some weirder thing that rebuilds the entire system from scratch.
I’m interested in what people think about those options (and in any third ideas people have)
I’d go with number 2, because my snap reaction was “ooh, there’s a “show personal blogposts” button?”
EDIT: Ok, I found the button. The problem with that button is that it looks identical to the other tags, and is at the right side of the screen when the structure of “Latest” draws your eyes to the left side of the screen. I’d make it a bit bigger and on the left side of the screen.
Another way you can follow the new posts of all kinds is the RSS button on the frontpage (together with an RSS feed reader). You can also select to see all kinds of posts above a certain threshold of “karma”, e.g. this. (I think that is independent of whether it’s just a personal blogpost, but I currently have a technical problem and cannot really check that.)