I feel pretty good about LessWrong. The amount of attention I give to LW tends to ebb and flow in phases, and I’m currently in a phase where I gave it less attention (In large part due to the war in Israel), and now I’m probably going to enter into a phase of giving it a lot of attention because of the 2022 review.
I think the team is doing a great job with the site, both in terms of feature and moderation, and the site keeps getting better.
I do feel the warping effect of the AI topic on the site, and I’m ambivalent about it. On the one hand, I do think it’s an important topic that should be discussed here, on the other hand, it does flood out everything else (I’ve changed my filters to deal with it) and a lot of it is low quality. I also see and feel the pressure to make everything related to AI somehow, which again, I’m ambivalent about. On the one hand if it’s so significant and important, then it makes sense to connect many things to it, on the other hand, I’m not sure it does much good to the writing on the site.
I also wish the project to develop the art of rationality got more attention, as I think it is still important and there’s a lot of progress to be made and work to be done. But I also wish that whatever attention it got would be of higher quality—there are very few rationality posts in the last few years that were on the level of the old essays from Eliezer and Scott.
Perhaps the problem is that good writers just don’t stay on LessWrong, and prefer to go on their own platforms or to twitter where they can get more attention and make money from their writing. One idea I have to deal with that is to implement a gifting feature (with real money), perhaps using plural funding. I think it can incentivize people to write better things, and incentivize good writers to also post on LW. I definitely know it would motivate me, at least.
Another thing I would like, which would help deal with the fact that lots of writing that’s relevant to LW isn’t on LW, is to improve the way linkposts work. Currently, I come across a lot of writing that I want to share on LW, but it would be drowned out if I shared it in the open thread or a shortform post, and I don’t want to share it as a linkpost because I don’t want it to be displayed on my page as one of my posts (and drown out the rest of my posts). I also don’t feel like I deserve all the Karma it would get, so it feels a bit… dirty? Here’s what I have in mind instead—have a clear distinction between corssposts and linkposts:
Crossposts would be your own writing that you post partially or in full on LW, and it would be shown like Linkposts are currently shown.
Linkposts would be someone else’s writing that you want to share and discuss on LW, and it would be shown in a different section on your profile (“Shared posts” or something), perhaps also in a different section on the front page (though I’m not sure about that), would have the original author’s name (you’d have to input that) which you could click and it would bring to something like a user page for that author which would show all their writing which was shared onto LW, and the user who shared the post would get 10% of the karma it gets (their name would be displayed, but not as the author). Other than that they would work normally—they would show normally on the all posts page and in search, and you could tag them like you would any other post.
I think these two features would greatly help LW be a place where great writing can be found and discussed, and hopefully that disproportionately includes writing on the art of rationality.
The linkposts idea is interesting. I agree that it’s weird to get karma for posting linkposts for other people.
In addition, there’s also a problem where, no matter on which site you are (e.g. Reddit or Twitter or LW), native posts get much more engagement and upvotes than linkposts that require visiting an external site. But of course you also can’t just copy the content from the external site, because that would be copyright infringement.
Anyway, as per elsewhere in this thread, your linkposts suggestion has a higher chance of being seen if you also make it on Intercom.
Fwiw I just think it’s fine to get karma for sharing linkposts – you’re doing a valuable service if you’re sharing useful information. I don’t know of other forums that draw a distinction between linkposts and regular posts in terms of where they show up.
It makes sense that it feels a bit weird, but given our limited dev time I think I’d mostly recommend feeling more free to do linkposts as they currently are (marking down who the author is in the title, so people can see what’s going on)
I feel pretty good about LessWrong. The amount of attention I give to LW tends to ebb and flow in phases, and I’m currently in a phase where I gave it less attention (In large part due to the war in Israel), and now I’m probably going to enter into a phase of giving it a lot of attention because of the 2022 review.
I think the team is doing a great job with the site, both in terms of feature and moderation, and the site keeps getting better.
I do feel the warping effect of the AI topic on the site, and I’m ambivalent about it. On the one hand, I do think it’s an important topic that should be discussed here, on the other hand, it does flood out everything else (I’ve changed my filters to deal with it) and a lot of it is low quality. I also see and feel the pressure to make everything related to AI somehow, which again, I’m ambivalent about. On the one hand if it’s so significant and important, then it makes sense to connect many things to it, on the other hand, I’m not sure it does much good to the writing on the site.
I also wish the project to develop the art of rationality got more attention, as I think it is still important and there’s a lot of progress to be made and work to be done. But I also wish that whatever attention it got would be of higher quality—there are very few rationality posts in the last few years that were on the level of the old essays from Eliezer and Scott.
Perhaps the problem is that good writers just don’t stay on LessWrong, and prefer to go on their own platforms or to twitter where they can get more attention and make money from their writing. One idea I have to deal with that is to implement a gifting feature (with real money), perhaps using plural funding. I think it can incentivize people to write better things, and incentivize good writers to also post on LW. I definitely know it would motivate me, at least.
Another thing I would like, which would help deal with the fact that lots of writing that’s relevant to LW isn’t on LW, is to improve the way linkposts work. Currently, I come across a lot of writing that I want to share on LW, but it would be drowned out if I shared it in the open thread or a shortform post, and I don’t want to share it as a linkpost because I don’t want it to be displayed on my page as one of my posts (and drown out the rest of my posts). I also don’t feel like I deserve all the Karma it would get, so it feels a bit… dirty? Here’s what I have in mind instead—have a clear distinction between corssposts and linkposts:
Crossposts would be your own writing that you post partially or in full on LW, and it would be shown like Linkposts are currently shown.
Linkposts would be someone else’s writing that you want to share and discuss on LW, and it would be shown in a different section on your profile (“Shared posts” or something), perhaps also in a different section on the front page (though I’m not sure about that), would have the original author’s name (you’d have to input that) which you could click and it would bring to something like a user page for that author which would show all their writing which was shared onto LW, and the user who shared the post would get 10% of the karma it gets (their name would be displayed, but not as the author). Other than that they would work normally—they would show normally on the all posts page and in search, and you could tag them like you would any other post.
I think these two features would greatly help LW be a place where great writing can be found and discussed, and hopefully that disproportionately includes writing on the art of rationality.
The linkposts idea is interesting. I agree that it’s weird to get karma for posting linkposts for other people.
In addition, there’s also a problem where, no matter on which site you are (e.g. Reddit or Twitter or LW), native posts get much more engagement and upvotes than linkposts that require visiting an external site. But of course you also can’t just copy the content from the external site, because that would be copyright infringement.
Anyway, as per elsewhere in this thread, your linkposts suggestion has a higher chance of being seen if you also make it on Intercom.
Fwiw I just think it’s fine to get karma for sharing linkposts – you’re doing a valuable service if you’re sharing useful information. I don’t know of other forums that draw a distinction between linkposts and regular posts in terms of where they show up.
It makes sense that it feels a bit weird, but given our limited dev time I think I’d mostly recommend feeling more free to do linkposts as they currently are (marking down who the author is in the title, so people can see what’s going on)
My main aversion is that I don’t want them to drown out my own posts on my user page.