That does tend to happen, yes, which is unfortunate. What would you suggest doing to reduce this tendency? (It’s totally fine if you don’t have a concrete solution of course, these sorts of problems are notoriously hard)
Karma should not be visible to anyone but mods, to whom it serves as a distributed mechanism for catching their attention and not much else. Large threads could use karma to decide which posts to initially display, but for smaller threads comments should be chronological.
People should be encouraged to post anonymously, as I am doing. Unfortunately the LW forum software devs are reverting this capability, which is a step backwards.
Get rid of featured articles and sequences. I mean keep the posts, but don’t feature them prominently on the top of the site. Have an infobar on the side maybe that can be a jumping off point for people to explore curated content, but don’t elevate it to the level of dogma as the current site does.
Encourage rigorous experimentation to verify one’s belief. A position arrived at through clever argumentation is quite possibly worthless. This is a particular vulnerability of this site, which is built around the exchange of words not physical evidence. So a culture needs to be developed which demands empirical investigation of the form “I wondered if X is true, so I did A, B, and C, and this is what happened...”
That was five minutes of thinking on the subject. I’m sure I could probably come up with more.
That does tend to happen, yes, which is unfortunate. What would you suggest doing to reduce this tendency? (It’s totally fine if you don’t have a concrete solution of course, these sorts of problems are notoriously hard)
Karma should not be visible to anyone but mods, to whom it serves as a distributed mechanism for catching their attention and not much else. Large threads could use karma to decide which posts to initially display, but for smaller threads comments should be chronological.
People should be encouraged to post anonymously, as I am doing. Unfortunately the LW forum software devs are reverting this capability, which is a step backwards.
Get rid of featured articles and sequences. I mean keep the posts, but don’t feature them prominently on the top of the site. Have an infobar on the side maybe that can be a jumping off point for people to explore curated content, but don’t elevate it to the level of dogma as the current site does.
Encourage rigorous experimentation to verify one’s belief. A position arrived at through clever argumentation is quite possibly worthless. This is a particular vulnerability of this site, which is built around the exchange of words not physical evidence. So a culture needs to be developed which demands empirical investigation of the form “I wondered if X is true, so I did A, B, and C, and this is what happened...”
That was five minutes of thinking on the subject. I’m sure I could probably come up with more.