For whatever it’s worth, I believe I was the first to propose weighted voting on LW, and I’ve come to agree with Czynski that this is a big downside. Not necessarily enough to outweigh the upsides, and probably insufficient to account for all the things Czynski dislikes about LW, but I’m embarrassed that I didn’t foresee it as a potential problem. If I was starting a new forum today, I think I’d experiment with no voting at all—maybe try achieving quality control by having an application process for new users? Does anyone have thoughts about that?
Personally, I am allergic to application processes. Especially opaque ones. I likely would have never joined this website if there was an application process for new users. I don’t think the site is too crowded with bad content right now, though that’s certainly a potential problem if more people choose to write posts. If lots more people flood this site with low quality posts then an alternative solution could be to just tighten the frontpage criteria.
For context: I was not part of Less Wrong 1.0. I have only known Less Wrong 2.0.
IMO the thing voting is mostly useful for is sorting content, not users. You might imagine me writing twenty different things, and then only some of them making it in front of the eyes of most users, and this is done primarily through people upvoting and downvoting to say “I want to see more/less content like this”, and then more/less people being shown that content.
Yes, this has first-mover problems and various other things, but so do things like ‘recent discussion’ (where the number of comments that are spawned by something determines its ‘effective karma’).
Now, in situations where all the users see all the things, I don’t think you need this sort of thing—but I’m assuming LW-ish things are hoping to be larger than that scale.
The ‘application process’ used by Overcoming Bias back in the day, namely ‘you have to send an email with your post and name’, would probably be entirely sufficient. It screens out almost everyone, after all.
But in actuality, what I’d most favor would be everyone maintaining their own blog and the central repository being nothing but a blogroll. Maybe allow voting on the blogroll’s ordering.
For whatever it’s worth, I believe I was the first to propose weighted voting on LW, and I’ve come to agree with Czynski that this is a big downside. Not necessarily enough to outweigh the upsides, and probably insufficient to account for all the things Czynski dislikes about LW, but I’m embarrassed that I didn’t foresee it as a potential problem. If I was starting a new forum today, I think I’d experiment with no voting at all—maybe try achieving quality control by having an application process for new users? Does anyone have thoughts about that?
Personally, I am allergic to application processes. Especially opaque ones. I likely would have never joined this website if there was an application process for new users. I don’t think the site is too crowded with bad content right now, though that’s certainly a potential problem if more people choose to write posts. If lots more people flood this site with low quality posts then an alternative solution could be to just tighten the frontpage criteria.
For context: I was not part of Less Wrong 1.0. I have only known Less Wrong 2.0.
Good to know! I was thinking the application process would be very transparent and non-demanding, but maybe it’s better to ditch it altogether.
IMO the thing voting is mostly useful for is sorting content, not users. You might imagine me writing twenty different things, and then only some of them making it in front of the eyes of most users, and this is done primarily through people upvoting and downvoting to say “I want to see more/less content like this”, and then more/less people being shown that content.
Yes, this has first-mover problems and various other things, but so do things like ‘recent discussion’ (where the number of comments that are spawned by something determines its ‘effective karma’).
Now, in situations where all the users see all the things, I don’t think you need this sort of thing—but I’m assuming LW-ish things are hoping to be larger than that scale.
Makes sense, thanks.
The ‘application process’ used by Overcoming Bias back in the day, namely ‘you have to send an email with your post and name’, would probably be entirely sufficient. It screens out almost everyone, after all.
But in actuality, what I’d most favor would be everyone maintaining their own blog and the central repository being nothing but a blogroll. Maybe allow voting on the blogroll’s ordering.