I’d love to add some questions about discussion norms and expectations on LessWrong.
Over the last year there was some pretty strong disagreement on how to argue with other users. I know of about two and a half posts on how rationalist discourse ought to be conducted, and I’m curious what kind of consensus any of them have. (I suspect mentioning the disagreement can reawaken the disagreement and would be sad if the object level disagreement broke out here. If there is a crux that could be answered by a community census though, there’s conveniently one planned anyway!)
I haven’t checked what questions you currently ask, so maybe all the stuff below is superfluous or off the mark; apologies if so.
Anyway, re: discussion norms & expectations, I figure that questions about mood affiliation might work fine?
E.g. “On a scale of 1 to 5, how pleasant do you find it to engage with commenters on LW?” Or “In comparison to other sites on the Internet, how pleasant do you find LW for discourse?” Or other questions in a similar vein.
Those questions might need to be disambiguated from questions about how (un)pleasant it is to post on LW.
And since one claim was that some styles of discourse push authors away, related questions on that topic would be: “In the last year, I have written less/the same number of/more LW posts”, same for comments. And questions for LW writers who used to write posts, but who now write less or not at all.
I’m also interested in how crossposting authors interact with LW. E.g. we now have a bunch of Substack crossposts here.
Overall, engagement on a feed-based site like LW seems more directly downstream from authors than from commenters, so I’m interested in questions re: how to get more people to (cross)post their stuff here. Especially non-AI stuff. And I wonder how current discussion norms & commenter behavior affect the willingness of authors to do so.
Mood affiliation questions could give a kind of baseline. Offhand, “On a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being very unpleasant, 4 being neutral, and 7 being very pleasant, how do you feel about engaging with commenters on LW?” seems serviceable? If I went down this path for my own curiosity though, it would be in pursuit of something more specific about figuring out what the expectations or norms are.
I’m sort of suspicious that “in the last year, I have written less/the same number of/more LW posts” wouldn’t get a useful answer because the selection effect has already happened. I’m even assuming I reach people in the first place! Like, if you went from writing a post a month in 2021 to writing zero posts in 2022, and then also had zero posts in 2023, you’d answer “the same number of LW posts.” Asking over a longer timespan works would work, asking people who used to write posts and now write less why they stopped could work. Though for the second, I’d be tempted to put the question somewhere else in the census so as to not blatantly prime people. (Does priming work like that? Replication crisis I think suggests no.)
At least one question about crossposts seems worthwhile but I don’t know what to ask. “If you crosspost, about how hard was it to set that up?” But then we’re trying to strain information out of a small subset of users. “Do you write elsewhere?” and “Do you crosspost to LW?” perhaps catches more.
I’d love to add some questions about discussion norms and expectations on LessWrong.
Over the last year there was some pretty strong disagreement on how to argue with other users. I know of about two and a half posts on how rationalist discourse ought to be conducted, and I’m curious what kind of consensus any of them have. (I suspect mentioning the disagreement can reawaken the disagreement and would be sad if the object level disagreement broke out here. If there is a crux that could be answered by a community census though, there’s conveniently one planned anyway!)
I haven’t checked what questions you currently ask, so maybe all the stuff below is superfluous or off the mark; apologies if so.
Anyway, re: discussion norms & expectations, I figure that questions about mood affiliation might work fine?
E.g. “On a scale of 1 to 5, how pleasant do you find it to engage with commenters on LW?” Or “In comparison to other sites on the Internet, how pleasant do you find LW for discourse?” Or other questions in a similar vein.
Those questions might need to be disambiguated from questions about how (un)pleasant it is to post on LW.
And since one claim was that some styles of discourse push authors away, related questions on that topic would be: “In the last year, I have written less/the same number of/more LW posts”, same for comments. And questions for LW writers who used to write posts, but who now write less or not at all.
I’m also interested in how crossposting authors interact with LW. E.g. we now have a bunch of Substack crossposts here.
Overall, engagement on a feed-based site like LW seems more directly downstream from authors than from commenters, so I’m interested in questions re: how to get more people to (cross)post their stuff here. Especially non-AI stuff. And I wonder how current discussion norms & commenter behavior affect the willingness of authors to do so.
Mood affiliation questions could give a kind of baseline. Offhand, “On a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 being very unpleasant, 4 being neutral, and 7 being very pleasant, how do you feel about engaging with commenters on LW?” seems serviceable? If I went down this path for my own curiosity though, it would be in pursuit of something more specific about figuring out what the expectations or norms are.
I’m sort of suspicious that “in the last year, I have written less/the same number of/more LW posts” wouldn’t get a useful answer because the selection effect has already happened. I’m even assuming I reach people in the first place! Like, if you went from writing a post a month in 2021 to writing zero posts in 2022, and then also had zero posts in 2023, you’d answer “the same number of LW posts.” Asking over a longer timespan works would work, asking people who used to write posts and now write less why they stopped could work. Though for the second, I’d be tempted to put the question somewhere else in the census so as to not blatantly prime people. (Does priming work like that? Replication crisis I think suggests no.)
At least one question about crossposts seems worthwhile but I don’t know what to ask. “If you crosspost, about how hard was it to set that up?” But then we’re trying to strain information out of a small subset of users. “Do you write elsewhere?” and “Do you crosspost to LW?” perhaps catches more.
I like the train of thought!