Lately I’ve been noticing myself getting drawn into more demon-thready discussions on LessWrong. This is in part due to UI choice – demon threads (i.e. usually “arguments framed through ‘who is good and bad and what is acceptable in the overton window’”) are already selected for getting above-average at engagement. Any “neutral” sorting mechanism for showing recent comments is going to reward demon-threads disproportionately.
An option might be to replace the Recent Discussion section with a version of itself that only shows comments and posts from the Questions page (in particular for questions that were marked as ‘frontpage’, i.e. questions that are not about politics).
I’ve had some good experiences with question-answering, where I actually get into a groove where the thing I’m doing is actual object-level intellectual work rather than “having opinions on the internet.” I think it might be good for the health of the site for this mode to be more heavily emphasized.
In any case, I’m interested in making a LW Team internal option where the mods can opt into a “replace recent discussion with recent question activity” to experiment with living in a world that contains more nudges towards the object level and seeing how that goes.
My current best guess is that the best option includes giving people more choices about Recent Discussion works, and then having the default choice for new users be something a little more magical that is filtered to push things more towards the object level.
Lately I’ve been noticing myself getting drawn into more demon-thready discussions on LessWrong. This is in part due to UI choice – demon threads (i.e. usually “arguments framed through ‘who is good and bad and what is acceptable in the overton window’”) are already selected for getting above-average at engagement. Any “neutral” sorting mechanism for showing recent comments is going to reward demon-threads disproportionately.
An option might be to replace the Recent Discussion section with a version of itself that only shows comments and posts from the Questions page (in particular for questions that were marked as ‘frontpage’, i.e. questions that are not about politics).
I’ve had some good experiences with question-answering, where I actually get into a groove where the thing I’m doing is actual object-level intellectual work rather than “having opinions on the internet.” I think it might be good for the health of the site for this mode to be more heavily emphasized.
In any case, I’m interested in making a LW Team internal option where the mods can opt into a “replace recent discussion with recent question activity” to experiment with living in a world that contains more nudges towards the object level and seeing how that goes.
My current best guess is that the best option includes giving people more choices about Recent Discussion works, and then having the default choice for new users be something a little more magical that is filtered to push things more towards the object level.