One thing I noticed: this article talks about Reddit, Hacker News, and Stack Exchange as the examples of vote-based forums. The first two are essentially “linking to someone else’s content and talking about it”, and the third one is “narrow questions, and answers”.
None of them is about “writing high-quality articles”. It sometimes happens that there is a very-high-quality comment or an answer, but those are a microscopic fraction of the set of all comments and all answers.
Maybe this is an answer for why LW fails at generating high-quality content recently. We are using a fundamentally wrong tool for this job. The Reddit system is good for linking interesting stuff, and sometimes it happens to generate good stuff as a side effect, simply because with the millions of comments, even if only one in a thousand is great, it means thousands of great comments in absolute numbers—but you wouldn’t want to read the whole Reddit systematically to find them. Reading Reddit is an archetypal example of procrastination.
It is not a mystery that LW fails to generate great content. That is the default functionality of Reddit-like systems. The part that needs explanation is how LW used to have great content in the past. But the answer seems quite simple—at the beginning, LW didn’t play by the usual Reddit rules. Actually, the first Eliezer’s articles were not even written on the Reddit-like platform; they were imported from the Overcoming Bias.
And the first months on the Reddit-like platform were probably sustained by the momentum—people saw the Sequences as the example of what is supposed to be published on LW, so they tried to write the similar kind of stuff, and some of them succeeded. But gradually the content followed the form, and the website became more Reddit-like, to the point where the Sequences became publicly treated as a joke, and the emphasis moved from the debated articles to the debates themselves, which of course disincentivizes writing high-quality articles.
So many people who still wanted to write high-quality articles did the obvious thing, and started to publish their articles elsewhere, and only repost, and later only link them from LW. They updated (consciously or not) to the fact that LW became more Reddit-like, and started approaching it just like one approaches Reddit.
I guess the lesson is, if we don’t want to become yet another Reddit, we shouldn’t use Reddit architecture. Because the Reddit architecture naturally converges towards Reddit-like quality, which is synomymous to procrastination, vote manipulation, etc.
While thinking about how to prevent vote manipulation and other undesired things in the forum, we should not forget that creating content needs to happen outside of the forum, using different rules. Reddit without vote manipulation would probablly still suck at generating Sequences-like content. (Essentially, great articles are supposed to be “timeless”, while forum is by its nature ephemeral, and you just can’t optimize for two contradictory things at the same time. Rationalist chat, and rationality books need to be two different things.)
It seems weird to me to talk about reddit as a bad example. Look at /r/ChangeMyView, /r/AskScience, /r/SpaceX, etc, not the joke subs that aren’t even trying for epistemic honesty. /r/SpaceX is basically a giant mechanism that takes thousands of nerds and geeks in on one end, and slowly converts them into dozens of rocket scientists, and spits them out the other side. For example, this is from yesterday. Even the majority that never buy a textbook or take a class learn a lot.
I think this is largely because Reddit is one of the best available architectures for sorting out the gems from the rest, when there is a critical mass of people who want gems. If you want more gems, you need to put more dirt through the filter.
The failure to this rule is the default subreddits, because everyone can vote, and not just those with high standards. An ideal solution would be to ask people to predict whether something will get, say, a 1-5 star rating by mods/curators, as a means of signal boosting. If you take a weighted average of these predictions based on each person’s historical accuracy, you can just use that as a rating, and spare the mods from having to review almost everything.
Really, I like extending this to multiple axes, rather than just lumping everything into one. For example, some topics are only new to new people, and such threads can be good places to link to older discussions and maybe even build on them. However, older members may have little interest, and may not want to have to engage with commenters who aren’t familiar with older discussions. Arbital seems to be moving in this direction, just by having more coherent chains of prerequisite concepts, rather than whatever couple links the author thought to include in an essay.
That is a great point!!! Can we turn it into actionable advice for “creating better LW”?
Maybe there is a chance to create a vivid (LW-style) rationalist community on Reddit. We just have to find out what is the secret that makes the three subreddits you mentioned different from the rest of Reddit, and make it work for a LW-style forum.
I noticed CMV has about 30 moderators, AskScience has several hundreds, and SpaceX has nine. I don’t know what is the average, but at this moment I have an impression that a large-ish number of active moderators is a must.
Another ingredient is probably that these sites seem to have clear rules on what is okay; what should one optimize for. In CMV, it’s replies that “change OP’s mind”; in AskScience it’s replies compatible with respected science. -- I am afraid we couldn’t have a similarly clear rule for “x-rationality”.
EDIT:
I like the anti-advice page for CMV. (And I find it quite amusing that a lot of them pretty much describe how RationalWiki works.) I posted that link on LW.
One thing I noticed: this article talks about Reddit, Hacker News, and Stack Exchange as the examples of vote-based forums. The first two are essentially “linking to someone else’s content and talking about it”, and the third one is “narrow questions, and answers”.
None of them is about “writing high-quality articles”. It sometimes happens that there is a very-high-quality comment or an answer, but those are a microscopic fraction of the set of all comments and all answers.
Maybe this is an answer for why LW fails at generating high-quality content recently. We are using a fundamentally wrong tool for this job. The Reddit system is good for linking interesting stuff, and sometimes it happens to generate good stuff as a side effect, simply because with the millions of comments, even if only one in a thousand is great, it means thousands of great comments in absolute numbers—but you wouldn’t want to read the whole Reddit systematically to find them. Reading Reddit is an archetypal example of procrastination.
It is not a mystery that LW fails to generate great content. That is the default functionality of Reddit-like systems. The part that needs explanation is how LW used to have great content in the past. But the answer seems quite simple—at the beginning, LW didn’t play by the usual Reddit rules. Actually, the first Eliezer’s articles were not even written on the Reddit-like platform; they were imported from the Overcoming Bias.
And the first months on the Reddit-like platform were probably sustained by the momentum—people saw the Sequences as the example of what is supposed to be published on LW, so they tried to write the similar kind of stuff, and some of them succeeded. But gradually the content followed the form, and the website became more Reddit-like, to the point where the Sequences became publicly treated as a joke, and the emphasis moved from the debated articles to the debates themselves, which of course disincentivizes writing high-quality articles.
So many people who still wanted to write high-quality articles did the obvious thing, and started to publish their articles elsewhere, and only repost, and later only link them from LW. They updated (consciously or not) to the fact that LW became more Reddit-like, and started approaching it just like one approaches Reddit.
I guess the lesson is, if we don’t want to become yet another Reddit, we shouldn’t use Reddit architecture. Because the Reddit architecture naturally converges towards Reddit-like quality, which is synomymous to procrastination, vote manipulation, etc.
While thinking about how to prevent vote manipulation and other undesired things in the forum, we should not forget that creating content needs to happen outside of the forum, using different rules. Reddit without vote manipulation would probablly still suck at generating Sequences-like content. (Essentially, great articles are supposed to be “timeless”, while forum is by its nature ephemeral, and you just can’t optimize for two contradictory things at the same time. Rationalist chat, and rationality books need to be two different things.)
It seems weird to me to talk about reddit as a bad example. Look at /r/ChangeMyView, /r/AskScience, /r/SpaceX, etc, not the joke subs that aren’t even trying for epistemic honesty. /r/SpaceX is basically a giant mechanism that takes thousands of nerds and geeks in on one end, and slowly converts them into dozens of rocket scientists, and spits them out the other side. For example, this is from yesterday. Even the majority that never buy a textbook or take a class learn a lot.
I think this is largely because Reddit is one of the best available architectures for sorting out the gems from the rest, when there is a critical mass of people who want gems. If you want more gems, you need to put more dirt through the filter.
The failure to this rule is the default subreddits, because everyone can vote, and not just those with high standards. An ideal solution would be to ask people to predict whether something will get, say, a 1-5 star rating by mods/curators, as a means of signal boosting. If you take a weighted average of these predictions based on each person’s historical accuracy, you can just use that as a rating, and spare the mods from having to review almost everything.
Really, I like extending this to multiple axes, rather than just lumping everything into one. For example, some topics are only new to new people, and such threads can be good places to link to older discussions and maybe even build on them. However, older members may have little interest, and may not want to have to engage with commenters who aren’t familiar with older discussions. Arbital seems to be moving in this direction, just by having more coherent chains of prerequisite concepts, rather than whatever couple links the author thought to include in an essay.
Just some musings.
That is a great point!!! Can we turn it into actionable advice for “creating better LW”?
Maybe there is a chance to create a vivid (LW-style) rationalist community on Reddit. We just have to find out what is the secret that makes the three subreddits you mentioned different from the rest of Reddit, and make it work for a LW-style forum.
I noticed CMV has about 30 moderators, AskScience has several hundreds, and SpaceX has nine. I don’t know what is the average, but at this moment I have an impression that a large-ish number of active moderators is a must.
Another ingredient is probably that these sites seem to have clear rules on what is okay; what should one optimize for. In CMV, it’s replies that “change OP’s mind”; in AskScience it’s replies compatible with respected science. -- I am afraid we couldn’t have a similarly clear rule for “x-rationality”.
EDIT:
I like the anti-advice page for CMV. (And I find it quite amusing that a lot of them pretty much describe how RationalWiki works.) I posted that link on LW.