Make new content more visible. Right now the landing page, and in particular the first screen, mostly consists of boilerplate. You have to scroll or click in order to view if new content has been posted. In the current attention scarce era of Facebook and Twitter streams, this is not ideal.
Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.
Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.
I’d say the opposite: the open threads are the part that’s working. So I’d rather remove main/discussion and make everything into open thread, i.e. move to something more like a traditional forum model. I don’t know whether that’s functionally the same thing.
•Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.
I don’t think this is a practical idea. The site is hostile enough to new users who lack much rationality knowledge and perspective on the content. The Open threads (and even moreso the Stupid Question threads) give people a place to pose questions and try out ideas that they aren’t confident enough in to make into Discussion posts. People are less harsh in those threads (although I’ve seen people be harsh in stupid questions threads) and it provides a chance to participate in content without having read the 1700 pages of The Sequences or having lurked on the site for 2+ years.
These are the exact three points that I wanted to voice. The fewer steps there are between entering lesswrong and seeing articles, the fewer steps there are between entering lesswrong and participating in discussions. That our landing page is a navigation list and not a a set of recent articles, the way any other group blog website would have, has irked me since the previous skull graphic was introduced.
This wouldn’t change the need to scroll or click, since the front page, AND “Main”, show only promoted articles, and promotion appears to be based on either being written by a MIRI staffer, or being some sort of general notice about an event or job opportunity, rather than having to do with quality of content.
(I don’t even know what the difference is between “promoted” and “featured”, or why we have both categories.)
I think a better improvement would be to automatically insert a summary break after the first paragraph for all posts that have no summary breaks, and/or to have a forum index that listed just the post titles. MIRI staff are especially guilty of posting huge articles with no summary breaks.
A more ambitious change would be to choose admins from the active forum participants to promote things to main. I get the impression that the LW admins don’t participate much on LW. I haven’t been around much myself lately, so I say that with low confidence.
My impression is that people are reluctant to post in Main for three reasons:
Less likely to be seen, because everyone pays more attention to Discussion, because people are reluctant to post in Main.
Fear of losing a ton of karma because of the 10x rule.
Fear of being Not Good Enough For Main.
Merging Main and Discussion would deal with the last of those. The first is clearly parasitic on the other two so we probably needn’t worry about it independently, and in any case merging Main and Discussion would make it go away.
The second would remain, I think. If we merge Main and Discussion—and perhaps even if we don’t—I suggest that the “Main post karma multiplier” should be substantially reduced. Maybe 2 or 3 would work well. If we don’t merge Main and Discussion, I would also suggest applying the same karma multiplier to posts in Discussion.
I think the issue of “Fear of being Not Good Enough” and therefore fearing to lose a lot of karma can be circumvented by giving the draft of the article to other people and improving on the draft till it’s good enough.
Maybe we can find a way to promote the circulation of draft articles?
In case it wasn’t clear: “losing karma” and “not good enough” were intended to be separate fears. Writing something I know is great and still losing a ton of karma hurts in one way. Writing something that shows me up as an idiot hurts in a very different way.[1] Circulating an article means fewer people to notice I’m an idiot, but also closer scrutiny and more effort required on their part. I think the fear of not being good enough would be about as bad either way.
[1] So far as I can recall, neither has actually happened to me, so I’m guessing on the basis of introspection. But I’ve had kinda-parallel experiences outside LW.
I think making it easy to circulate drafts and encouraging people to do so is a great idea, but I don’t think it’s a solution to the “fear of being Not Good Enough” problem.
I think the fear of not being good enough would be about as bad either way.
I think there are multiple different issues of “not good enough”. From my own perspective I do believe that I have good ideas worthy of sharing but on the other hand I know that the quality of my writing ability isn’t as high as I would like it to be. The writeup of the idea improves though letting the draft circulate and incorporating feedback.
On the other hand it wouldn’t help in the same way for a person who thinks their ideas aren’t good enough.
My two cents:
Merge Main and Discussion
Make new content more visible. Right now the landing page, and in particular the first screen, mostly consists of boilerplate. You have to scroll or click in order to view if new content has been posted. In the current attention scarce era of Facebook and Twitter streams, this is not ideal.
Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.
I’d say the opposite: the open threads are the part that’s working. So I’d rather remove main/discussion and make everything into open thread, i.e. move to something more like a traditional forum model. I don’t know whether that’s functionally the same thing.
I think it is, except that having different stuff into open threads makes it less visible.
I don’t think this is a practical idea. The site is hostile enough to new users who lack much rationality knowledge and perspective on the content. The Open threads (and even moreso the Stupid Question threads) give people a place to pose questions and try out ideas that they aren’t confident enough in to make into Discussion posts. People are less harsh in those threads (although I’ve seen people be harsh in stupid questions threads) and it provides a chance to participate in content without having read the 1700 pages of The Sequences or having lurked on the site for 2+ years.
These are the exact three points that I wanted to voice. The fewer steps there are between entering lesswrong and seeing articles, the fewer steps there are between entering lesswrong and participating in discussions. That our landing page is a navigation list and not a a set of recent articles, the way any other group blog website would have, has irked me since the previous skull graphic was introduced.
This wouldn’t change the need to scroll or click, since the front page, AND “Main”, show only promoted articles, and promotion appears to be based on either being written by a MIRI staffer, or being some sort of general notice about an event or job opportunity, rather than having to do with quality of content.
(I don’t even know what the difference is between “promoted” and “featured”, or why we have both categories.)
I think a better improvement would be to automatically insert a summary break after the first paragraph for all posts that have no summary breaks, and/or to have a forum index that listed just the post titles. MIRI staff are especially guilty of posting huge articles with no summary breaks.
A more ambitious change would be to choose admins from the active forum participants to promote things to main. I get the impression that the LW admins don’t participate much on LW. I haven’t been around much myself lately, so I say that with low confidence.
My impression is that people are reluctant to post in Main for three reasons:
Less likely to be seen, because everyone pays more attention to Discussion, because people are reluctant to post in Main.
Fear of losing a ton of karma because of the 10x rule.
Fear of being Not Good Enough For Main.
Merging Main and Discussion would deal with the last of those. The first is clearly parasitic on the other two so we probably needn’t worry about it independently, and in any case merging Main and Discussion would make it go away.
The second would remain, I think. If we merge Main and Discussion—and perhaps even if we don’t—I suggest that the “Main post karma multiplier” should be substantially reduced. Maybe 2 or 3 would work well. If we don’t merge Main and Discussion, I would also suggest applying the same karma multiplier to posts in Discussion.
I think the issue of “Fear of being Not Good Enough” and therefore fearing to lose a lot of karma can be circumvented by giving the draft of the article to other people and improving on the draft till it’s good enough.
Maybe we can find a way to promote the circulation of draft articles?
In case it wasn’t clear: “losing karma” and “not good enough” were intended to be separate fears. Writing something I know is great and still losing a ton of karma hurts in one way. Writing something that shows me up as an idiot hurts in a very different way.[1] Circulating an article means fewer people to notice I’m an idiot, but also closer scrutiny and more effort required on their part. I think the fear of not being good enough would be about as bad either way.
[1] So far as I can recall, neither has actually happened to me, so I’m guessing on the basis of introspection. But I’ve had kinda-parallel experiences outside LW.
I think making it easy to circulate drafts and encouraging people to do so is a great idea, but I don’t think it’s a solution to the “fear of being Not Good Enough” problem.
I think there are multiple different issues of “not good enough”. From my own perspective I do believe that I have good ideas worthy of sharing but on the other hand I know that the quality of my writing ability isn’t as high as I would like it to be. The writeup of the idea improves though letting the draft circulate and incorporating feedback.
On the other hand it wouldn’t help in the same way for a person who thinks their ideas aren’t good enough.