I think LW would profit immensely from a team of professional moderators who
take a thread with lots of comments and turn it into a structured overview of arguments and counterarguments (and give an evaluation of how open or complete the discussion is)
and mark open discussion points and important aspects that haven’t gotten propper attention yet
rate comments in a way that is more informative than mere up/downvotes, possibly in more than one dimension ( Relevance / logical structure of the comment / Quality of the central argument)
promote high quality comments, especially if they put a new perspective on a topic that had seemed to be closed
take interesting spin-off discussions and promote them as a thread on its own
Of course, funding these moderators might run into this problem:
One lower cost way to do this is to explicitly ask people more to expand a comment into a Main-level post. Or ask people to pause a disagreement and expand it into a dialogue in discussion. This is a technique I use to curate comments on my blog. It helps highlight high quality stuff without making everyone trawl through the threads.
I think LW would profit immensely from a team of professional moderators who
take a thread with lots of comments and turn it into a structured overview of arguments and counterarguments (and give an evaluation of how open or complete the discussion is)
and mark open discussion points and important aspects that haven’t gotten propper attention yet
rate comments in a way that is more informative than mere up/downvotes, possibly in more than one dimension ( Relevance / logical structure of the comment / Quality of the central argument)
promote high quality comments, especially if they put a new perspective on a topic that had seemed to be closed
take interesting spin-off discussions and promote them as a thread on its own
Of course, funding these moderators might run into this problem:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/
But if we don’t get funding organized, we really suck as rationalists.
That sounds awfully expensive. Also, it might actually be hard to find someone who can do that competently enough to do more good than harm.
One lower cost way to do this is to explicitly ask people more to expand a comment into a Main-level post. Or ask people to pause a disagreement and expand it into a dialogue in discussion. This is a technique I use to curate comments on my blog. It helps highlight high quality stuff without making everyone trawl through the threads.