I think it might be valuable to ask a separate question about commenter preferences. But this question is mostly oriented around “if LessWrong leaned hard into the archipelago model, what would that look like?” which is a separate question from “Is the archipelago model good?”, and it comes with some background assumptions, which include:
For a given comment section, there can only be one set of norms. (Or at least, it’d require a lot of additional work to create multiple comment section norms per post, and that sounds really confusing and hard)
I think authors and commenters are jointly necessary for LessWrong being healthy, but I still think authors are dramatically upstream of commenters in terms of value. Slatestarcodex has a vibrant commenter community, but seems obvious (to me) that this is because Scott is a good writer that attracts people to the blog. In LessWrong’s healthy heyday, there were prominent authors who were skilled at writing who wrote constantly and when those authors left the good commenters driveled up.
There are relatively few candidates for “who gets to set the norms for a given comment section.”
I don’t think “aggregated preferences of commenters” is a viable candidate – I think that’s mostly a choice not to go the archipelago route, and instead go either “we figure out the single best set of norms and implement that universally” or “norms are always sort of confusing and depend on context”. (I’m not necessarily opposed to either of those, but the latter one in particular has some obvious downsides)
The three other schelling candidates I can see are “the author”, “the LessWrong moderation team”, and “freelance moderators that the author appoints, and/or opts into a particular moderation space.” (i.e. authors might submit to subreddits that have their own norms, but in this case the choices are still rooted in author preference)
There is a skillset, separate from authorship, which is “willingness to cultivate* and/or enforce* norms”. One of the problems with my initial conception of archipelago-on-LW was that it required those two skillsets be found in the same person (but, actually, they are quite distinct).
So it may be particularly valuable to ask “of people who would be interested in running a subreddit and enforcing/cultivating norms there, what clusters of norms would they be interested in cultivating?”. But I still think the value of this question is downstream of “which authors would actually want to post in that subreddit?”
But I’d guess/hope that this is addressed by the “you count as an ‘author’ for this question if you’d be motivated to actively create spaces with particular normsets.”
*there’s two fairly different conceptions of norms, one of which is where they’re something you enforce, another is they’re something you cultivate. Enforcement looks more like saying “hey, you’re violating the norm, please don’t” (which is backed up by force). Cultivation looks more like just being a “good participant” who helps steer conversations in useful ways.
In many ways I think cultivation is better, except that it’s much more costly in terms of time, and sometimes emotional energy.
For compeleteness, not sure if I endorse it: another conception of norms is that they’re something you discover. They’re an emergent feature of very complex social expectations, and even the attempt to formalize them causes ripple effects that can make the norms less effective. There are certainly ways to influence norms, both to filter for participants more amenable to norms you prefer, and to nudge those participants toward behaviors that reinforce those norms, but they remain fundamentally illegible and chaotic.
I guess that’s “lightweight cultivation”, more ‘tending’ than ‘planning’.
I think it might be valuable to ask a separate question about commenter preferences. But this question is mostly oriented around “if LessWrong leaned hard into the archipelago model, what would that look like?” which is a separate question from “Is the archipelago model good?”, and it comes with some background assumptions, which include:
For a given comment section, there can only be one set of norms. (Or at least, it’d require a lot of additional work to create multiple comment section norms per post, and that sounds really confusing and hard)
I think authors and commenters are jointly necessary for LessWrong being healthy, but I still think authors are dramatically upstream of commenters in terms of value. Slatestarcodex has a vibrant commenter community, but seems obvious (to me) that this is because Scott is a good writer that attracts people to the blog. In LessWrong’s healthy heyday, there were prominent authors who were skilled at writing who wrote constantly and when those authors left the good commenters driveled up.
There are relatively few candidates for “who gets to set the norms for a given comment section.”
I don’t think “aggregated preferences of commenters” is a viable candidate – I think that’s mostly a choice not to go the archipelago route, and instead go either “we figure out the single best set of norms and implement that universally” or “norms are always sort of confusing and depend on context”. (I’m not necessarily opposed to either of those, but the latter one in particular has some obvious downsides)
The three other schelling candidates I can see are “the author”, “the LessWrong moderation team”, and “freelance moderators that the author appoints, and/or opts into a particular moderation space.” (i.e. authors might submit to subreddits that have their own norms, but in this case the choices are still rooted in author preference)
There is a skillset, separate from authorship, which is “willingness to cultivate* and/or enforce* norms”. One of the problems with my initial conception of archipelago-on-LW was that it required those two skillsets be found in the same person (but, actually, they are quite distinct).
So it may be particularly valuable to ask “of people who would be interested in running a subreddit and enforcing/cultivating norms there, what clusters of norms would they be interested in cultivating?”. But I still think the value of this question is downstream of “which authors would actually want to post in that subreddit?”
But I’d guess/hope that this is addressed by the “you count as an ‘author’ for this question if you’d be motivated to actively create spaces with particular normsets.”
*there’s two fairly different conceptions of norms, one of which is where they’re something you enforce, another is they’re something you cultivate. Enforcement looks more like saying “hey, you’re violating the norm, please don’t” (which is backed up by force). Cultivation looks more like just being a “good participant” who helps steer conversations in useful ways.
In many ways I think cultivation is better, except that it’s much more costly in terms of time, and sometimes emotional energy.
For compeleteness, not sure if I endorse it: another conception of norms is that they’re something you discover. They’re an emergent feature of very complex social expectations, and even the attempt to formalize them causes ripple effects that can make the norms less effective. There are certainly ways to influence norms, both to filter for participants more amenable to norms you prefer, and to nudge those participants toward behaviors that reinforce those norms, but they remain fundamentally illegible and chaotic.
I guess that’s “lightweight cultivation”, more ‘tending’ than ‘planning’.
Do you model different threads on reddit as each thread having their own norm, which can’t be entirely codified/put into words?