Communities: A single moderator is often superior to the wisdom of crowds
Less Wrong is a community where I believe that most of the people would accept that “knowledge is power”. In our modern age, the internet provides some of the best tools for distributing this information. Many tools, such as Reddit, StackExchange or Less Wrong itself, use voting as a method to determine the highest quality content.
One situation this works well for is when an area is niche (ie. http://www.reddit.com/r/criticaltheory, http://www.reddit.com/r/neuroscience). Because these areas are so niche, the vast majority of people who decide to participate in these forums will have at least a minimum amount of knowledge, meaning that the content can remain high quality even where there are large numbers of participants.
Another situation is when a forum is highly moderated. Examples include Less Wrong, which bans politics, Skeptics Stackexchange, which requires references and Ask Historians where sources aren’t mandatory, but you’re expected to be able to back up your claims on demand.
What is interesting is when an area is neither niche, nor easy to be objective about. Take for example https://www.reddit.com/r/socialskills, https://www.reddit.com/r/dating or personal development (https://www.reddit.com/r/decidingtobebetter). In these areas, large numbers of people come along and post various articles and questions that interest them. Unfortunately, there are often huge amounts of overlap between the articles that are posted. Between articles telling you to “be yourself”, “have confidence in yourself” and to “step out of your comfort zone” it is very hard to find articles telling you things you haven’t seen before. It is very hard to find new content buried among all of the noise.
This is a shame because social skills, dating and personal development are all important areas. Sites like Reddit theoretically allow you to access the best content available on the web, but this benefit doesn’t accrue if all the articles are saying the same thing. What is particularly ironic is that it wouldn’t be too hard for a single person to do a much better job of filtering this content. All they would have to do, is filter out the articles that are duplicates of articles that are already existing. Sure they wouldn’t be perfect and a significant percentage of useful articles would be filtered out due to their biases, but this would still be superior to the status quo where only a small number of people who find these sub-reddits actually gain consistent value from them because of all of the duplicate content.
Unfortunately, this kind of site is unlikely to be set up, because people would feel it was unfair for a single moderator to have this arbitrary power. I can understand this to some degree, as in, I would be annoyed when I submitted articles and I thought that they were wrongly rejected, but the amount of value that could be gained from such a site would be immense. I don’t believe that a particularly high level of competence would be required from the moderator. One question is what happens if the moderator is bad? This could be detrimental in the short term, but the moderator would likely be voted out very quickly if they weren’t doing a good job.
I’ve argued that even a single moderator with the sole ability to choose the articles and a reasonable level of competence could do better than current sites. However, reading all those articles could be a lot of work, so perhaps a few moderators could be selected to divide up the work and give feedback to each other on whether or not they thought an article was new enough to be deserving of inclusion. Perhaps there is a more democratic solution to this—I would love for this to exist—but the solution I have proposed is likely to work due to its simplicity.
I don’t think “newness” is the core measuring stick for content. Seeking new advice seems to me a bit like seeking insight porn.
I think if you read one article on a subject and then don’t read anymore about it you are very unlikely to develop new phenomenological primitives. It’s quite easy to say “be yourself”. On the other hand it’s quite hard lesson to teach and unlikely that someone learns the lesson in a month or less. Especially outside of a seminar context.
Indeed. I have the opposite problem. On a bookshelf, you see books side by side, some written a year ago, some twenty, some a hundred. On blogs you see the latest content. The blogosphere buzzes about the latest content. We really need a timeless view on the Internet. We just bury and forget top quality a few months after.
It’s definitely true that “Newness” isn’t the best measuring stick, but if you’re looking for a semi-objective measuring stick to cut down the number of articles that get posted, you could do much worse.
Here’s an example of a good article on “be yourself” (http://postmasculine.com/just-be-yourself). It explains that “being yourself” mean developing a strong sense of identity and being consistent with it, rather than being someone who doesn’t grow and develop.
I don’t think it’s a good article or that it provides deep insight. It’s basically about pretending that a certain advice doesn’t exist because the author can’t see any reason why someone might give that advice. That’s because a single article is not enough to learn a new primitives. You can be a PD-blogger without having learned the corresponding lesson.
It includes the line: “She’s not saying you should accept the habits that have held you back.”
This suggest that the author doesn’t understand the value of accepting negative issues. Very often acceptance is necessary to let go of a behavior afterwards. Various personal development paradigms put a high value on acceptance.
Okay, maybe you don’t think the advice is useful. Under this system you probably won’t find lots of advice useful, but you’ll still be exposed to new ideas.
The point is not whether his advice is useful. The point is that he fails to understand and that understanding concepts that are foreign to your world view is hard. Really hard.
Understanding on the other hand needs dealing with a topic for longer amount of time. Deeper understanding is unlikely if you don’t deal with the same topic multiple times but always seek for something new.
In general don’t take what it means to say “be yourself” from someone who cringes when he hears the phrase and who wouldn’t use it himself.
Politics isn’t banned here, just discouraged.
At this point, LW is mostly self-policing. I’m the moderator and I don’t have a whole lot of work. This doesn’t mean LW would be in good shape after (I’m guessing) a year with no moderator.
Sites with a lot of traffic tend to have multiple moderators. When Ta Nehisi Coates used to have an excellent comment section on a blog about mostly controversial topics at a national magazine, he eventually had sub-moderators. Coates was the only one who could offer articles. Making Light has at least three moderators, possibly as many as five. That is, there are only five people who can write top-level articles, but only three of them seem to be active moderators.
Does reddit have the ability to offer moderated fora? That would be a good compromise. People would even have a handy place to post rejected articles in other fora.
By this I assume you’re referring to the karma system, correct?
I would say mostly social pressure, with downvoting into invisibility functioning as a heavy blunt object to persuade people not amenable to social pressure :-)
I agree.
And there’s also social inertia, where people who aren’t interested in an LWish sort of community aren’t likely to post.
Moderated fora? Each sub-reddit has its own moderation team.
Thanks for the information—I just assumed that the original post was describing a real problem. Perhaps the next question is why there aren’t fora with better information about some of those popular subjects.
Lol, I am OP.
The reason why there aren’t sub-reddits is discussed in the article. You either need an exclusive niche or strict moderation. The areas described are both general interest and hard to strictly moderate because of the difficulty in defining objective article quality.
Less Wrong doesn’t ban politics.
Also, who thinks LW is highly moderated?
I don’t. Is there all sorts of moderation going on that I’m not aware of?
There are about 30 accounts banned during the whole history of LW.
Most of them are spammers, who created their accounts, posted one or ten spam comments, subsequently had their accounts banned and comments removed. (The comments of the banned users have to be removed separately; banning the user merely disallows them to log in again.)
For curious people, the spam does not seem related to LW context. There were spam accounts promoting:
iPhones,
wedding rings,
silver earrings,
silver necklaces,
a Korean casino,
astrological service,
a computer games website,
jackets, caps, and handbags,
fake passports and driving licenses,
a collection of links without description that I didn’t click,
some generic text (“I like this website, thank you, also look at my website”) followed by a link that I didn’t click
The number of non-spam users banned is less than one per year.
In addition to banning users, moderators can also remove individual comments. I don’t have a good statistics for this. But I suppose that if this ability would be abused, the users would complain in their other comments.
Question: Are you seeking an effective community, or an effective stream of new information?
Duplicate information encourages community formation; it makes it easy for new members to join the community, as the average content level never deviates too far from what a new member can readily be expected to pick up. A continual stream of new information very rapidly becomes impossible for a new user to incorporate, and so if the community emphasizes new information, new members have ever-increasing amounts of catching-up to do before they get to participate. Given that participation is part of the appeal of communities, you’ll lose the vast majority of all potential members, productive or otherwise. A graduation system doesn’t work either; if your best members are always busy discussing the latest-and-greatest piece of information, they’re -not- helping newbies past the difficult introductory hurdles.
More simply, you’re missing the point of a community. A community doesn’t exist to feed you an endless stream of new and interesting things, it exists so you can exchange new and interesting things you’ve encountered with other people. “Ask not what your forum can do for you, but what you can do for your forum.” What you seem to want can be better served by an encyclopedia or textbook.
The solution is to facilitate micropayments. People aren’t going to spend as much money on topics that there’s a surplus of. The more readily available something is… the less money that people are willing to pay for it. So facilitating micropayments will allow the crowd to help lift the scarcest/rarest and most valuable content to the top of the list.
Oranges used to be a luxury. In other words, an orange was uncommon but valuable content. Then what happened? Payment.
Orchids used to be a luxury. In other words, an orchid was uncommon but valuable content. Then what happened? Payment.
So we add (micro)payments to Reddit, Youtube, Less Wrong and what will happen? What will happen when we incentivize/reward people who produce scarce but valuable content?
https://medium.com/on-blendle/blendle-a-radical-experiment-with-micropayments-in-journalism-365-days-later-f3b799022edc
Is this comment supposed to be empty or am I supposed to pay to see it?
Neither. I screwed up the link, then found I’d somehow posted the same reply twice, with the second time including a functioning link. Since there’s no way to actually remove the blank comment—just to strike it out—I thought I might as well leave it.
Joke noted.
It’s possible to delete comments if nobody responded if you reload the page.
“The solution”—People have been trying to get micropayments working for decades and it still doesn’t seem to have had any major successes. Regardless, all micropayments would do is further incentivise the kinds of articles that are already been voted to the top and make the issues discussed here worse.
My approach is ridiculously simple. In the forum thread that I linked to… nobody has disputed my approach yet.
So popularity equals demand? That sure would make economics a whole lot easier. Nobody would have to spend any money. We’d all just vote for all the products that we want. Voila! The efficient allocation of society’s limited resources!
According to your theory, the most voted for threads on this forum would receive the most money. Care to bet on that? If so, how much?
50 Shades of Gray is the best novel because the most people payed for it?
“The Secret” is on of the most important personal development books because a lot of people brought it?
Heh. I started reading my gf’s 50 Shades of Gray on her kindle… but I couldn’t finish it because it was so bad. She liked it though. shrug
Here are two subreddits...
Economy
Invisible hand
The same economics article isn’t going to be equally valuable in both subs. In the first sub, Ha-Joon Chang’s articles are going to be a lot more valuable than Peter Boettke’s articles. And the opposite would be true in the second sub.
See how that would work? There’s riches in niches.
Here’s a promising experiment with micropayments for journalism.
Thanks for sharing! Blendle is pretty neat because you can get a refund if you’re unsatisfied. But I’m pretty sure that the “One-Price-Fits-All” (OPFA) model isn’t as good as the “Pay-What-You-Want” (PWYW) model.
I guess LW nails the third one like jocks do to cheerleaders, at least it should otherwise.. well shit. But for the two other two I like HughRistik’s comments. He had a comment with plenty of links to other comments of his. I’ll look for it but not promising anything.
EDIT: here it is: http://lesswrong.com/lw/44r/post_proposal_attraction_and_seduction_for/3hn5
Now go get laid!
Still plenty of work, especially it’s your hourly variant of “HOW DO I ASK THIS GIRL OUT”. You either have a well-kept garden or you don’t.
I would settle for a moderator-user ratio.
On topic, I have no idea why I haven’t been banned yet.
I mostly react to complaints rather than keeping track of everyone. You seem to have annoyed people, but you haven’t posted on a large enough scale to be a problem. Also, at least your more recent comments have been getting positive karma.