Ah. My impression was that ship had kinda already sailed.
You can always make the problem worse.
My feeling is that yes, you could probably find ways to make low quality users posting to Shortform not dilute better Shortforms from better users, but (1) that’s a bunch of work we haven’t yet done and has opportunity cost, (2) once I’m doing that work, I might as well do it for posts? To the extent low quality users want to write posts (and I think they do), it’s better for author and readers if they’re a post (e.g. you get ToC, etc)
Without necessarily disagreeing with the rest of the comment, I’m not sure I buy this? The mechanism by which I see shortform is either by seeing it in recent discussion (in which case posts, comments or shortforms contribute to about the same rate of dilution, there’s nothing special about shortform), or I subscribe to the shortform of a particular author I like (which I can find via clicking on the user profiles of authors with otherwise highly upvoted comments)
I’m not saying there’s anything special about it, but just as I don’t want to make the SNR of the others worse, I don’t want that for Shortform either. I think discoverability for Shortform is a problem to be solved. Question is how do you know which authors have shortforms they regularly post to? Seems like not the best flow for the only way to find them is via manually checking profiles. (Not that this isn’t solvable, but it’s a thing to do, and if you give up on Shortform SNR, you lose option value and things that maybe could be made to work, etc.
Oh, that disconnect has caused odd decisions before. I never look at the homepage, and just have a bookmark to allPosts. I’ve missed out on Petrov Day announcements (and impact), and am often confused about discussions on “discoverability” which assume homepage starting point for everyone.
You can always make the problem worse.
My feeling is that yes, you could probably find ways to make low quality users posting to Shortform not dilute better Shortforms from better users, but (1) that’s a bunch of work we haven’t yet done and has opportunity cost, (2) once I’m doing that work, I might as well do it for posts? To the extent low quality users want to write posts (and I think they do), it’s better for author and readers if they’re a post (e.g. you get ToC, etc)
Without necessarily disagreeing with the rest of the comment, I’m not sure I buy this? The mechanism by which I see shortform is either by seeing it in recent discussion (in which case posts, comments or shortforms contribute to about the same rate of dilution, there’s nothing special about shortform), or I subscribe to the shortform of a particular author I like (which I can find via clicking on the user profiles of authors with otherwise highly upvoted comments)
I’m not saying there’s anything special about it, but just as I don’t want to make the SNR of the others worse, I don’t want that for Shortform either. I think discoverability for Shortform is a problem to be solved. Question is how do you know which authors have shortforms they regularly post to? Seems like not the best flow for the only way to find them is via manually checking profiles. (Not that this isn’t solvable, but it’s a thing to do, and if you give up on Shortform SNR, you lose option value and things that maybe could be made to work, etc.
I’m just one datapoint, but just an hour ago I found an interesting shortform via allPosts and left a comment on it.
Yeah I guess I’m just not modeling allPosts page, which is maybe more on the borderline of usable
Oh, that disconnect has caused odd decisions before. I never look at the homepage, and just have a bookmark to allPosts. I’ve missed out on Petrov Day announcements (and impact), and am often confused about discussions on “discoverability” which assume homepage starting point for everyone.