New qualified users need to remain comfortable (trivial inconveniences like interacting with a moderator at all are a very serious issue), and for new users there is not enough data to do safe negativeselection on anything subtle. So talking of “principles in the Sequences” is very suspicious, I don’t see an operationalization that works for new users and doesn’t bring either negative selection or trivial inconvenience woes.
Agreed. Talking from the perspective of a very occasional author, suppose I post a LW essay and then link it in r/slatestarcodex. I want it to be as easy as possible for readers to comment on my essay wherever I link it. If it’s impossible or even just inconvenient for them to simply comment on the essay, they might not do so.
In which case, why would the author post their stuff on LW, specifically?
I also see that as a downside (although not the end of the world—it depends on the filters). Like, is LW a blogging platform? Or is it a discussion forum for a particular online community? Right now we kinda have it both ways—when describing why I post on LW, I might says something like “it’s a very nice blogging platform, and also has a great crowd of regular readers & commenters who I tend to know and like”. But the harder it is for random people to comment on my posts, the less it feels like a “blogging platform”, and the more it feels like I’m just talking within a gated community, which isn’t necessarily what I’m going for.
Right now I have a pretty strong feeling that I don’t want to start a substack / wordpress / whatever and cross-post everything to LW, mostly for logistical reasons (more annoying to post, need to fix typos in two places), plus it splits up the comment section. But I do get random people opening a LW account to comment on my posts sometimes, and I like that †, and if that stops being an option it would be a marginal reason for me to switch to “separate blog + crossposting”. Wouldn’t be the end of the world, just wanted to share. Hmm, I might also / alternatively mitigate the problem by putting an “email-me” link / invitation at the bottom of all my posts.
Random thought: Just like different authors get to put different moderation guidelines on their own posts, maybe different authors could also get to put different barriers-to-new-user-comments on their own posts?? I haven’t really thought it through, it’s just an idea that popped into my head.
† Hmm, actually, I’m happy about the pretty-low-friction ability of anyone to comment on my LW posts in the case of e.g. obscure technical posts, and neuroscience posts, and random posts. I haven’t personally written posts that draw lots of really bad takes on AI, at least not so far, and I can see that being very annoying.
Stop displaying user’s Karma total, so that there is no numbers-go-up reward for posting lots of mediocre stuff, instead count the number of comments/posts in some upper quantile by Karma (which should cash out as something like 15+ Karma for comments). Use that number where currently Karma is used, like vote weights. (Also, display the number of comments below some negative threshold like −3 in the last few months.)
In some ways this sounds better than either my proposal or Raemon’s. But there is still the spurious upvoting issue, so a metric should be able to not get too excited about a few highly upvoted things.
FYI a similar I’ve thinking about is “you see the total karma of the user’s top ~20 comments/posts”, which you can initially improve by writing somewhat-good-comments but you’ll quickly max that out. That metric emphasizes “what was their best content like?”, your metric is something like “how much ‘at least pretty solid’ content do they have?” and I’m not sure which is better.
There are some viral posts (including on community drama) where (half of) everything gets unusually highly upvoted, compared to normal. So the inclination I get is to recalibrate thresholds according to post’s popularity and the current year, to count fewer such comments (that’s too messy, isn’t worth it, but other things should be robust to this effect). This is why I specifically proposed number of 15+ Karma comments, not their total Karma. Also, the total number still counts as some sort of “total contribution” as opposed to the less savory “user quality”.
New qualified users need to remain comfortable (trivial inconveniences like interacting with a moderator at all are a very serious issue), and for new users there is not enough data to do safe negative selection on anything subtle. So talking of “principles in the Sequences” is very suspicious, I don’t see an operationalization that works for new users and doesn’t bring either negative selection or trivial inconvenience woes.
Agreed. Talking from the perspective of a very occasional author, suppose I post a LW essay and then link it in r/slatestarcodex. I want it to be as easy as possible for readers to comment on my essay wherever I link it. If it’s impossible or even just inconvenient for them to simply comment on the essay, they might not do so.
In which case, why would the author post their stuff on LW, specifically?
I also see that as a downside (although not the end of the world—it depends on the filters). Like, is LW a blogging platform? Or is it a discussion forum for a particular online community? Right now we kinda have it both ways—when describing why I post on LW, I might says something like “it’s a very nice blogging platform, and also has a great crowd of regular readers & commenters who I tend to know and like”. But the harder it is for random people to comment on my posts, the less it feels like a “blogging platform”, and the more it feels like I’m just talking within a gated community, which isn’t necessarily what I’m going for.
Right now I have a pretty strong feeling that I don’t want to start a substack / wordpress / whatever and cross-post everything to LW, mostly for logistical reasons (more annoying to post, need to fix typos in two places), plus it splits up the comment section. But I do get random people opening a LW account to comment on my posts sometimes, and I like that †, and if that stops being an option it would be a marginal reason for me to switch to “separate blog + crossposting”. Wouldn’t be the end of the world, just wanted to share. Hmm, I might also / alternatively mitigate the problem by putting an “email-me” link / invitation at the bottom of all my posts.
Random thought: Just like different authors get to put different moderation guidelines on their own posts, maybe different authors could also get to put different barriers-to-new-user-comments on their own posts?? I haven’t really thought it through, it’s just an idea that popped into my head.
† Hmm, actually, I’m happy about the pretty-low-friction ability of anyone to comment on my LW posts in the case of e.g. obscure technical posts, and neuroscience posts, and random posts. I haven’t personally written posts that draw lots of really bad takes on AI, at least not so far, and I can see that being very annoying.
Some authors would view the moderation as a feature, not a bug.
I think avoiding the negative selection failure modes is an important point. I’m mulling over how to think about it.
Do you have a thing you’re imagining with “positive selection?” that you expect to work?
Stop displaying user’s Karma total, so that there is no numbers-go-up reward for posting lots of mediocre stuff, instead count the number of comments/posts in some upper quantile by Karma (which should cash out as something like 15+ Karma for comments). Use that number where currently Karma is used, like vote weights. (Also, display the number of comments below some negative threshold like −3 in the last few months.)
Something like an h-index might be better than a total.
In some ways this sounds better than either my proposal or Raemon’s. But there is still the spurious upvoting issue, so a metric should be able to not get too excited about a few highly upvoted things.
Mmm. Yeah something in that space makes sense.
FYI a similar I’ve thinking about is “you see the total karma of the user’s top ~20 comments/posts”, which you can initially improve by writing somewhat-good-comments but you’ll quickly max that out. That metric emphasizes “what was their best content like?”, your metric is something like “how much ‘at least pretty solid’ content do they have?” and I’m not sure which is better.
There are some viral posts (including on community drama) where (half of) everything gets unusually highly upvoted, compared to normal. So the inclination I get is to recalibrate thresholds according to post’s popularity and the current year, to count fewer such comments (that’s too messy, isn’t worth it, but other things should be robust to this effect). This is why I specifically proposed number of 15+ Karma comments, not their total Karma. Also, the total number still counts as some sort of “total contribution” as opposed to the less savory “user quality”.