Story stats are my favorite feature of Medium. Let me tell you why.
I write primarily to impact others. Although I sometimes choose to do very little work to make myself understandable to anyone who is more than a few inferential steps behind me and then write out on a far frontier of thought, nonetheless my purpose remains sharing my ideas with others. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t bother to write much at all, and certainly not in the same way as I do when writing for others. Thus I care instrumentally a lot about being able to assess if I am having the desired impact so that I can improve in ways that might help serve my purposes.
LessWrong provides some good, high detail clues about impact: votes and comments. Comments on LW are great, and definitely better in quality and depth of engagement than what I find other places. Votes are also relatively useful here, caveat the weaknesses of LW voting I’ve talked about before. If I post something on LW and it gets lots of votes (up or down) or lots of comments, relative to what other posts receive, then I’m confident people have read what I wrote and I impacted them in some way, whether or not it was in the way I had hoped.
That’s basically where story stats stop on LessWrong. Here’s a screen shot of the info I get from Medium:
For each story you can see a few things here: views, reads, read ratio, and fans, which is basically likes. I also get an email every week telling me about the largest updates to my story stats, like how many additional views, reads, and fans a story had in the last week.
If I click the little “Details” link under a story name I get more stats: average read time, referral sources, internal vs. external views (external views are views on RSS, etc.), and even a list of “interests” associated with readers who read my story.All of this is great. Each week I get a little positive reward letting me know what I did that worked, what didn’t, and most importantly to me, how much people are engaging with things I wrote.
I get some of that here on LessWrong, but not all of it. Although I’ve bootstrapped myself now to a point where I’ll keep writing even absent these motivational queues, I still find this info useful for understanding what things I wrote that people liked best or found most useful and what they found least useful. Some of that is mirrored here by things like votes, but it doesn’t capture all of it.
I think it would be pretty cool if I could see more stats about my posts on LessWrong similar to what I get on Medium, especially view and read counts (knowing that “reads” is a ultimately a guess based on some users allowing Javascript that lets us guess that they read it).
Very quick thought: basically the reasons we haven’t and might not do more in this direction is how it might alter what gets written. It doesn’t seem good if people were to start writing more heavily for engagement metrics. Also not clear to me that engagement metrics capture the true value that matters of intellectual contributions.
(Habryka has an old comment somewhere delving into this, which I couldn’t find. But the basic gist was “the entire rest of the internet is optimizing directly for eyeballs, and it seemed good for LessWrong to be a place trying to have a different set of incentives”)
Story stats are my favorite feature of Medium. Let me tell you why.
I write primarily to impact others. Although I sometimes choose to do very little work to make myself understandable to anyone who is more than a few inferential steps behind me and then write out on a far frontier of thought, nonetheless my purpose remains sharing my ideas with others. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t bother to write much at all, and certainly not in the same way as I do when writing for others. Thus I care instrumentally a lot about being able to assess if I am having the desired impact so that I can improve in ways that might help serve my purposes.
LessWrong provides some good, high detail clues about impact: votes and comments. Comments on LW are great, and definitely better in quality and depth of engagement than what I find other places. Votes are also relatively useful here, caveat the weaknesses of LW voting I’ve talked about before. If I post something on LW and it gets lots of votes (up or down) or lots of comments, relative to what other posts receive, then I’m confident people have read what I wrote and I impacted them in some way, whether or not it was in the way I had hoped.
That’s basically where story stats stop on LessWrong. Here’s a screen shot of the info I get from Medium:
For each story you can see a few things here: views, reads, read ratio, and fans, which is basically likes. I also get an email every week telling me about the largest updates to my story stats, like how many additional views, reads, and fans a story had in the last week.
If I click the little “Details” link under a story name I get more stats: average read time, referral sources, internal vs. external views (external views are views on RSS, etc.), and even a list of “interests” associated with readers who read my story.All of this is great. Each week I get a little positive reward letting me know what I did that worked, what didn’t, and most importantly to me, how much people are engaging with things I wrote.
I get some of that here on LessWrong, but not all of it. Although I’ve bootstrapped myself now to a point where I’ll keep writing even absent these motivational queues, I still find this info useful for understanding what things I wrote that people liked best or found most useful and what they found least useful. Some of that is mirrored here by things like votes, but it doesn’t capture all of it.
I think it would be pretty cool if I could see more stats about my posts on LessWrong similar to what I get on Medium, especially view and read counts (knowing that “reads” is a ultimately a guess based on some users allowing Javascript that lets us guess that they read it).
Very quick thought: basically the reasons we haven’t and might not do more in this direction is how it might alter what gets written. It doesn’t seem good if people were to start writing more heavily for engagement metrics. Also not clear to me that engagement metrics capture the true value that matters of intellectual contributions.
(Habryka has an old comment somewhere delving into this, which I couldn’t find. But the basic gist was “the entire rest of the internet is optimizing directly for eyeballs, and it seemed good for LessWrong to be a place trying to have a different set of incentives”)