I very much want an atmosphere where people feel encouraged to post things and not stressed out about “doing a good enough job.” But hopefully, ALSO have an atmosphere where people are focused on improving their writing. I think good writing is the limiting factor here. We can’t get there if we’re too stressed out about it but I do think it requires some focus on craftsmanship, i.e. what writing elements make for a good post?
I actually want shorter posts, expressing an idea concisely to prompt discussion. I almost don’t care what the topic is (I assume if it’s posted by a LWer it’s probably interesting).
(Or rather—I want posts to be as short and interesting as-is possible, to cover the material. For example, if doing a survey of a field, I’d prefer a tldr that summarizes it with bullet points, and then have the actual essay briefly discuss the most interesting avenues of discussion)
I’d actually like to see, instead of link posts, posts with a short description of the link that summarizes the key information and asks a few interesting questions about it. (I feel like otherwise I have do a lot more up-front work to start a discussion, and so would everyone else. One person kicking things off can make the rest of the discussion more frictionless)
Absolutely. There are link posts to decent content sitting with no discussion. There was an article about octopuses a couple of days ago that I really enjoyed and would have liked to discuss—plenty of LW-relevant material in it about how brains work—but I couldn’t think of anything to start the ball rolling other than “aren’t octopuses cool?” which I think would have been Frowned Upon.
(To be fair to morganism, who posted that link, they do at least create a comment on each one with a relevant quote from the article, which is more than some people do.)
I think is is a very very good idea. Simply having a short discussion with links (so all of them are technically text posts that at least keep the flow of the website) seems like a small change that could really help the UX / discussion.
I very much want an atmosphere where people feel encouraged to post things and not stressed out about “doing a good enough job.” But hopefully, ALSO have an atmosphere where people are focused on improving their writing. I think good writing is the limiting factor here. We can’t get there if we’re too stressed out about it but I do think it requires some focus on craftsmanship, i.e. what writing elements make for a good post?
I actually want shorter posts, expressing an idea concisely to prompt discussion. I almost don’t care what the topic is (I assume if it’s posted by a LWer it’s probably interesting).
(Or rather—I want posts to be as short and interesting as-is possible, to cover the material. For example, if doing a survey of a field, I’d prefer a tldr that summarizes it with bullet points, and then have the actual essay briefly discuss the most interesting avenues of discussion)
I’d actually like to see, instead of link posts, posts with a short description of the link that summarizes the key information and asks a few interesting questions about it. (I feel like otherwise I have do a lot more up-front work to start a discussion, and so would everyone else. One person kicking things off can make the rest of the discussion more frictionless)
Absolutely. There are link posts to decent content sitting with no discussion. There was an article about octopuses a couple of days ago that I really enjoyed and would have liked to discuss—plenty of LW-relevant material in it about how brains work—but I couldn’t think of anything to start the ball rolling other than “aren’t octopuses cool?” which I think would have been Frowned Upon.
(To be fair to morganism, who posted that link, they do at least create a comment on each one with a relevant quote from the article, which is more than some people do.)
I think is is a very very good idea. Simply having a short discussion with links (so all of them are technically text posts that at least keep the flow of the website) seems like a small change that could really help the UX / discussion.