More commenters increase the rate of great comments per hour
Yep—to the point that it’s becoming hard to keep up.
If we “fix” the issue that is holding people back from participating, we may risk creating a worse one, where overload causes people to stop participating.
One of the things I like about LW is how people have longer memories than elsewhere (it’s one thing that keeps us from returning to covered ground); we are often linking not just to past top-level posts but also to past comments.
But that requires keeping up with a lot of discussion. Even those of us who are fast readers with good memories and a “blink” capability for identifying which comments are worth reading and responding to… are only human and have limits.
I’m not sure how scalable the model is that makes the LW-of-today valuable to me, and presumably makes it valuable to others also.
The memory issue is a really good point. Perhaps as LW grows posters will have to specialize. For example, I might follow everything written about philosophy and just read the top comments/collective wisdom on physics, ev psych etc.
Yep—to the point that it’s becoming hard to keep up.
If we “fix” the issue that is holding people back from participating, we may risk creating a worse one, where overload causes people to stop participating.
One of the things I like about LW is how people have longer memories than elsewhere (it’s one thing that keeps us from returning to covered ground); we are often linking not just to past top-level posts but also to past comments.
But that requires keeping up with a lot of discussion. Even those of us who are fast readers with good memories and a “blink” capability for identifying which comments are worth reading and responding to… are only human and have limits.
I’m not sure how scalable the model is that makes the LW-of-today valuable to me, and presumably makes it valuable to others also.
The memory issue is a really good point. Perhaps as LW grows posters will have to specialize. For example, I might follow everything written about philosophy and just read the top comments/collective wisdom on physics, ev psych etc.
I was thinking about the scaling and attention problem, with no obvious answer except that LW might hive off related blogs.