I still have about 95% of my hair. But I figure it’s best to be proactive. So over the past few days I’ve been reading a lot about how to prevent hair loss.
My goal here is to get a broad overview (i.e. I don’t want to put in the time necessary to understand what a 5-alpha-reductase inhibitor actually is, beyond just “an antiandrogenic drug that helps with hair loss”). I want to identify safe, inexpensive treatments that have both research and anecdotal support.
In the hair loss world, the “Big 3” refers to 3 well-known treatments for hair loss: finasteride, minoxidil, and ketoconazole. These treatments all have problems. Some finasteride users report permanent loss of sexual function. If you go off minoxidil, you lose all the hair you gained, and some say it wrinkles their skin. Ketoconazole doesn’t work very well.
To research treatments beyond the Big 3, I’ve been using various tools, including both Google Scholar and a “custom search engine” I created for digging up anecdotes from forums. Basically, take whatever query I’m interested in (“pumpkin seed oil” for instance), add this
Doing this repeatedly has left me feeling like a geologist who’s excavated a narrow stratigraphic column of Internet history.
And my big takeaway is how much dumber people got collectively between the “old school phpBB forum” layer and the “subreddit” layer.
This is a caricature, but I don’t think it would be totally ridiculous to summarize discussion on /r/tressless as:
Complaining about Big 3 side effects
Complaining that the state of the art in hair loss hasn’t advanced in the past 10 years
Putdowns for anyone who tries anything which isn’t the Big 3
If I was conspiracy-minded, I would wonder if Big 3 manufacturers had paid shills who trolled online forums making fun of anyone who tries anything which isn’t their product. It’s just the opposite of the behavior you’d expect based on game theory: Someone who tries something new individually runs the risk of new side effects, or wasting their time and money, with some small chance of making a big discovery which benefits the collective. So a rational forum user’s response to someone trying something new should be: “By all means, please be the guinea pig”. And yet that seems uncommon.
Compared with reddit, discussion of nonstandard treatments on old school forums goes into greater depth—I stumbled across a thread on an obscure treatment which was over 1000 pages long. And the old school forums have a higher capacity for innovation… here is a website that an old school forum user made for a DIY formula he invented, “Zix”, which a lot of forum users had success with. (The site has a page explaining why we should expect the existence of effective hair loss treatments that the FDA will never approve.) He also links to a forum friend who started building and selling custom laser helmets for hair regrowth. (That’s another weird thing about online hair loss forums… Little discussion of laser hair regrowth, even though it’s FDA approved, intuitively safe, and this review found it works better than finasteride or minoxidil.)
So what happened with the transition to reddit? Some hypotheses:
Generalized eternal September
Internet users have a shorter attention span nowadays
Upvoting/downvoting facilitates groupthink
reddit’s “hot” algorithm discourages the production of deep content; the “bump”-driven discussion structure of old school forums allows for threads which are over 1000 pages long
Weaker community feel due to intermixing with the entire reddit userbase
I’m starting to wonder if we should set up a phpBB style AI safety discussion forum. I have hundreds of thousands of words of AI content in my personal notebook, only a small fraction of which I’ve published. Posting to LW seems to be a big psychological speed bump for me. And I’m told that discussion on the Alignment Forum represents a fairly narrow range of perspectives within the broader AI safety community, perhaps because of the “upvoting/downvoting facilitates groupthink” thing.
The advantage of upvoting/downvoting seems to be a sort of minimal quality control—there is less vulnerability to individual fools as described in this post. But I’m starting to wonder if some of the highs got eliminated along with the lows.
Anyway, please send me a message if an AI safety forum sounds interesting to you.
I’ve noticed a similar trend in a very different area. In various strategic games there has IMO been a major drop in quality of discussion and content thanks to the shift from “discuss strategy on old-style forums and blogs” to “discuss strategy on group chats (Skype/Discord/Slack) and Reddit”.
The former was much better at creating “permanent information” that could easily be linked and referred to; the latter probably has a higher volume of messages sent, but information is much more ephemeral and tends to be lost if you weren’t in the right place at the right time. It’s a lot harder to refer to “that influential Discord conversation a few weeks ago” than it is to link to a forum thread!
I would be interested in seeing what happens if someone creates a phpBB style AI Safety forum. If it works better than what we have, we should probably just switch the existing stuff we have towards a more similar architecture (though of course, the right tradeoffs might depend on the number of users, so maybe the right choice is to have both architectures in parallel).
Another point is that if LW and a hypothetical phpBB forum have different “cognitive styles”, it could be valuable to keep both around for the sake of cognitive diversity.
I checked the obvious subreddit (r/hairloss), and it seems to do just about everything wrong. It’s not just that the Hot algorithm is favoring ephemeral content over accumulation of knowledge; they also don’t have an FAQ, or any information in the sidebar, or active users with good canned replies to paste, or anything like that. I also note that most of the phpBBs mentioned are using subforums, to give the experimenters a place to talk without a stream of newbie questions, etc., which the subreddit is also missing.
I think the phpBB era had lots of similarly-neglected forums, which (if they somehow got traffic) would have been similarly bad. I think the difference is that Reddit is propping up this forum with a continuous stream of users, where a similarly-neglected phpBB would have quickly fallen to zero traffic.
So… I think this may be a barriers-to-entry story, where the relevant barrier is not on the user side, but on the administrator side; most Reddit users can handle signing up for a phpBB just fine, but creating a phpBB implies a level of commitment that usually implies you’ll set up some subforums, create an FAQ, and put nonzero effort into making it good.
The way I’m currently thinking about it is that reddit was originally designed as a social news website, and you have tack on a bunch of extras if you want your subreddit to do knowledge-accumulation, but phpBB gets you that with much less effort. (Could be as simple as having a culture of “There’s already a thread for that here, you should add your post to it.”)
Progress Studies: Hair Loss Forums
I still have about 95% of my hair. But I figure it’s best to be proactive. So over the past few days I’ve been reading a lot about how to prevent hair loss.
My goal here is to get a broad overview (i.e. I don’t want to put in the time necessary to understand what a 5-alpha-reductase inhibitor actually is, beyond just “an antiandrogenic drug that helps with hair loss”). I want to identify safe, inexpensive treatments that have both research and anecdotal support.
In the hair loss world, the “Big 3” refers to 3 well-known treatments for hair loss: finasteride, minoxidil, and ketoconazole. These treatments all have problems. Some finasteride users report permanent loss of sexual function. If you go off minoxidil, you lose all the hair you gained, and some say it wrinkles their skin. Ketoconazole doesn’t work very well.
To research treatments beyond the Big 3, I’ve been using various tools, including both Google Scholar and a “custom search engine” I created for digging up anecdotes from forums. Basically, take whatever query I’m interested in (“pumpkin seed oil” for instance), add this
site:worldhairloss.org OR site:folliclethought.com OR site:aheadfullofhair.blogspot.com OR site:www.hairmax.com OR site:hairyscalp.com OR site:howtopreventhairloss.ca OR site:hairloss-reversible.com OR site:immortalhair.forumandco.com OR site:baldtruthtalk.com OR site:regrowth.com OR site:hairlosshelp.com OR site:hairlosstalk.com OR site:www.reddit.com/r/bald/ OR site:www.reddit.com/r/tressless/ OR site:dannyroddy.com OR site:jdmoyer.com OR site:americanhairloss.organd then search on Google.
Doing this repeatedly has left me feeling like a geologist who’s excavated a narrow stratigraphic column of Internet history.
And my big takeaway is how much dumber people got collectively between the “old school phpBB forum” layer and the “subreddit” layer.
This is a caricature, but I don’t think it would be totally ridiculous to summarize discussion on /r/tressless as:
Complaining about Big 3 side effects
Complaining that the state of the art in hair loss hasn’t advanced in the past 10 years
Putdowns for anyone who tries anything which isn’t the Big 3
If I was conspiracy-minded, I would wonder if Big 3 manufacturers had paid shills who trolled online forums making fun of anyone who tries anything which isn’t their product. It’s just the opposite of the behavior you’d expect based on game theory: Someone who tries something new individually runs the risk of new side effects, or wasting their time and money, with some small chance of making a big discovery which benefits the collective. So a rational forum user’s response to someone trying something new should be: “By all means, please be the guinea pig”. And yet that seems uncommon.
Compared with reddit, discussion of nonstandard treatments on old school forums goes into greater depth—I stumbled across a thread on an obscure treatment which was over 1000 pages long. And the old school forums have a higher capacity for innovation… here is a website that an old school forum user made for a DIY formula he invented, “Zix”, which a lot of forum users had success with. (The site has a page explaining why we should expect the existence of effective hair loss treatments that the FDA will never approve.) He also links to a forum friend who started building and selling custom laser helmets for hair regrowth. (That’s another weird thing about online hair loss forums… Little discussion of laser hair regrowth, even though it’s FDA approved, intuitively safe, and this review found it works better than finasteride or minoxidil.)
So what happened with the transition to reddit? Some hypotheses:
Generalized eternal September
Internet users have a shorter attention span nowadays
Upvoting/downvoting facilitates groupthink
reddit’s “hot” algorithm discourages the production of deep content; the “bump”-driven discussion structure of old school forums allows for threads which are over 1000 pages long
Weaker community feel due to intermixing with the entire reddit userbase
I’m starting to wonder if we should set up a phpBB style AI safety discussion forum. I have hundreds of thousands of words of AI content in my personal notebook, only a small fraction of which I’ve published. Posting to LW seems to be a big psychological speed bump for me. And I’m told that discussion on the Alignment Forum represents a fairly narrow range of perspectives within the broader AI safety community, perhaps because of the “upvoting/downvoting facilitates groupthink” thing.
The advantage of upvoting/downvoting seems to be a sort of minimal quality control—there is less vulnerability to individual fools as described in this post. But I’m starting to wonder if some of the highs got eliminated along with the lows.
Anyway, please send me a message if an AI safety forum sounds interesting to you.
I’ve noticed a similar trend in a very different area. In various strategic games there has IMO been a major drop in quality of discussion and content thanks to the shift from “discuss strategy on old-style forums and blogs” to “discuss strategy on group chats (Skype/Discord/Slack) and Reddit”.
The former was much better at creating “permanent information” that could easily be linked and referred to; the latter probably has a higher volume of messages sent, but information is much more ephemeral and tends to be lost if you weren’t in the right place at the right time. It’s a lot harder to refer to “that influential Discord conversation a few weeks ago” than it is to link to a forum thread!
I would be interested in seeing what happens if someone creates a phpBB style AI Safety forum. If it works better than what we have, we should probably just switch the existing stuff we have towards a more similar architecture (though of course, the right tradeoffs might depend on the number of users, so maybe the right choice is to have both architectures in parallel).
Another point is that if LW and a hypothetical phpBB forum have different “cognitive styles”, it could be valuable to keep both around for the sake of cognitive diversity.
I checked the obvious subreddit (r/hairloss), and it seems to do just about everything wrong. It’s not just that the Hot algorithm is favoring ephemeral content over accumulation of knowledge; they also don’t have an FAQ, or any information in the sidebar, or active users with good canned replies to paste, or anything like that. I also note that most of the phpBBs mentioned are using subforums, to give the experimenters a place to talk without a stream of newbie questions, etc., which the subreddit is also missing.
I think the phpBB era had lots of similarly-neglected forums, which (if they somehow got traffic) would have been similarly bad. I think the difference is that Reddit is propping up this forum with a continuous stream of users, where a similarly-neglected phpBB would have quickly fallen to zero traffic.
So… I think this may be a barriers-to-entry story, where the relevant barrier is not on the user side, but on the administrator side; most Reddit users can handle signing up for a phpBB just fine, but creating a phpBB implies a level of commitment that usually implies you’ll set up some subforums, create an FAQ, and put nonzero effort into making it good.
/r/tressless is about 6 times as big FYI.
The way I’m currently thinking about it is that reddit was originally designed as a social news website, and you have tack on a bunch of extras if you want your subreddit to do knowledge-accumulation, but phpBB gets you that with much less effort. (Could be as simple as having a culture of “There’s already a thread for that here, you should add your post to it.”)