But that’s exactly what happens! How can anyone not see that?
Bad content drives out good. Right now LW has settled into a state where people write tons of low quality posts, because they are just as visible as high quality posts. The tiny difference in visibility between main and discussion isn’t a strong enough incentive.
In the early days of LW, posts were manually promoted to main by Eliezer, and the discussion section didn’t exist. That led to high average quality which attracted many people.
OK, thought experiment. Let’s say Scott announces a contest for the best guest post on SSC. Do you think there will be many high quality submissions? I think yeah. Now let’s say Scott opens posting on SSC to everyone with a pulse. Do you think the quality will stay high for long? I think nope.
Of course restrictions aren’t the only thing necessary for high quality. You also need a seed of amazing content. Luckily, LW already has that :-)
First, you are conflating categories. SSC is a blog—a place where one person (or maybe a few) posts content and the visitors consume it. Comments are secondary and are not that important. LW is not a blog—maybe it was once long time ago and it still misleadingly calls itself a blog, but functionally it’s a forum attached to an archive.
One important difference is that blogs have ownership. I’m not talking about the legal sense, but rather about the feeling of responsibility/control/caring. When things are not owned by anyone in particular, there are… consequences. Consult the XX century history for particulars. LW used to be owned by EY. Right now it’s not owned by anyone in particular.
If you want LW to go back to being a blog, you need to find preferably one, but not more than 5-6 people who will commit to the care and feeding of LW and who will have power to change things to their liking. But, of course, future is uncertain so as the result the LW might flower and be rejuvenated, or it may crash and burn.
The alternative is to treat LW as social platform, a forum, where content is provided mostly by the participants. Yes, you do not get solely high-level content, you get a lot of low-level stuff, too, but that’s a filtering problem which has many well-known solutions. At the moment LW’s filtering capabilities are rather… rudimentary.
Yeah, I want LW to be a high quality blog and I’m aware of the risk involved. I’m not as interested in a forum, there’s tons of those already and none of them are very exciting. IMO exciting things are more worth creating than non-exciting things.
I find the comments at SSC to be useless. I mean, there may or may not be good content in there, but it’s nearly impossible to read/participate in those comments so I just don’t use them or read them or look at them.
Maybe like 1 out of 10 posts, I’ll find myself heading towards the comments and giving up after 5 minutes.
The problem with them is that there is no sorting mechanism, so unless I have the time to read several hundred comments I must resort to things like Ctrl-F’ing for the names of certain commenters I particularly like, or going to the most recent comments and hoping that if a discussion has survived this long then it’s probably going to be interesting.
I don’t think the existance of the discussion-section prevents high quality posts in the main section.
But that’s exactly what happens! How can anyone not see that?
Bad content drives out good. Right now LW has settled into a state where people write tons of low quality posts, because they are just as visible as high quality posts. The tiny difference in visibility between main and discussion isn’t a strong enough incentive.
In the early days of LW, posts were manually promoted to main by Eliezer, and the discussion section didn’t exist. That led to high average quality which attracted many people.
It’s not that restrictions led to high quality posts. It’s that the availability of high quality posts allowed restrictions.
Don’t cargo-cult.
OK, thought experiment. Let’s say Scott announces a contest for the best guest post on SSC. Do you think there will be many high quality submissions? I think yeah. Now let’s say Scott opens posting on SSC to everyone with a pulse. Do you think the quality will stay high for long? I think nope.
Of course restrictions aren’t the only thing necessary for high quality. You also need a seed of amazing content. Luckily, LW already has that :-)
First, you are conflating categories. SSC is a blog—a place where one person (or maybe a few) posts content and the visitors consume it. Comments are secondary and are not that important. LW is not a blog—maybe it was once long time ago and it still misleadingly calls itself a blog, but functionally it’s a forum attached to an archive.
One important difference is that blogs have ownership. I’m not talking about the legal sense, but rather about the feeling of responsibility/control/caring. When things are not owned by anyone in particular, there are… consequences. Consult the XX century history for particulars. LW used to be owned by EY. Right now it’s not owned by anyone in particular.
If you want LW to go back to being a blog, you need to find preferably one, but not more than 5-6 people who will commit to the care and feeding of LW and who will have power to change things to their liking. But, of course, future is uncertain so as the result the LW might flower and be rejuvenated, or it may crash and burn.
The alternative is to treat LW as social platform, a forum, where content is provided mostly by the participants. Yes, you do not get solely high-level content, you get a lot of low-level stuff, too, but that’s a filtering problem which has many well-known solutions. At the moment LW’s filtering capabilities are rather… rudimentary.
Yeah, I want LW to be a high quality blog and I’m aware of the risk involved. I’m not as interested in a forum, there’s tons of those already and none of them are very exciting. IMO exciting things are more worth creating than non-exciting things.
The critical question is whose blog? Who will have ownership?
“The whole community” is not a good answer.
There are even more non-exciting blogs :-P
SSC is heavily dependent on comments, to the point where they are arguably not even secondary any more.
Interesting.
I find the comments at SSC to be useless. I mean, there may or may not be good content in there, but it’s nearly impossible to read/participate in those comments so I just don’t use them or read them or look at them.
Maybe like 1 out of 10 posts, I’ll find myself heading towards the comments and giving up after 5 minutes.
SSC has a very vigorous comment section, but for me at least Scott’s articles are an order of magnitude more valuable than the comments.
The problem with them is that there is no sorting mechanism, so unless I have the time to read several hundred comments I must resort to things like Ctrl-F’ing for the names of certain commenters I particularly like, or going to the most recent comments and hoping that if a discussion has survived this long then it’s probably going to be interesting.