A bot to do the reposting of the sequences to the discussion section.
I had written about bringing back the sequences, which was well received. The best way to implement that without messing with the LW codebase is to make a scraper to extract the data from the wiki and a bot to post in the discussion area on a regular basis.
I predict this should be doable by a couple of people working for a day.
The benefit would be that it would allow new members to read the sequences in a fun way, and the more experienced of us to re-examine the sequences in light of having absorbed most of the material and the insights that came after. In the spirit of the lens that sees its flaws, I expect us to find places that the sequences could be improved, in light of the sequences themselves.
Eliezer deserves a hell of a lot more karma for his sequences than he’s got. A bot reposting them would give the bot the karma.
There is a lot of useful discussion on the existing posts in comments. That would be lost.
You’d split incoming visitors between the two different versions of the post, depending on where they came to it from. People could thus easily miss out on relevant discussion / discussions could be fragmented.
Less of an issue here, but not having a canonical URL for the articles bugs me. Everything else aside, it penalises page rank on the search engines if links are split between different urls.
I think this would be much better done with a code change for the site, allowing editors to pick a featured article that sits at the top of the main page. My estimate would be 1 day for someone familiar with the source, maybe 2 for someone unfamiliar. Of course those estimates should be at least doubled to 2 / 4 days.
While I’m unfamiliar with the code myself, display code for the current featured article should be simple. The other, harder parts of the task would be an interface to allow editors to choose a featured article (but not necessarily that complicated, you might be able to take a url for instance and then editors could find it with a simple search), and storing the current featured article.
It woudnt be a straight repost. It would be a summary with a link. People will be directed to the original and encouraged to upvote that. As for the discussion, I am of two minds: yes it would be good to add to the existing, but there is something too be said for having a blank canvas.
But all this is moot. Nobody with commit privileges is around, and even if the changes were made (which will need to touch the database too btw), it would be a crapshot as to whether they would actually be applied. While I agree that code modifications would be ideal, as far as I am concerned, the better is the enemy of the good.
Well, how about rather than reposting, we just add a “featured sequence post of the day” section, or something. It’ll look just like “recent posts”, but it’ll go through the sequences one by one.
Possibly we could just move the “promoted” functionality into the sidebar… I have to admit I never actually click on anything in the header… but I click a lot on Right-hand navigation.
No reposting so no double-ups and karma stays where it is, it’s just a different way of featuring existing posts.
Hmm.. if this drew data from an outside source (like the link to OB does, a feed maybe?) we could avoid going too deep into the code. This could be little more than a template edit plus a feed hosted somewhere else. Interesting.
An alternative that I’ve seen some long-running web comics offer is to provide a personalised RSS feed of old postings that will supply a subscriber with all of the material, at a user-selected number per day.
That’s pretty cool, and I have wanted to build a generic system like that for this exact reason (the sequences). I stopped having such an intense desire after finding rssreplay.heroku.com , but I think a big part of the issue here is taking the whole group through a specific pace, so that there is a social experience involved to make the whole re-reading more fun.
Might be a silly question, but why is a bot doing this better than just creating a new account and someone manually cutting and pasting the posts: surely that would only take a few minutes work per article at most?
Nothing more than saving us the manual work, and perhaps offering a little more continuity since humans (especially me) are not particularly consistent about routine tasks. The alternative is indeed to do it like the rationality quotes threads, make it a community effort. But why make people do a computer’s work if they don’t have to?
Time to crunch some numbers: ~250 sequences posts at 5 minutes each makes 20 hours of work in reposting the sequences manually.
Since you reckon this could be done by two people in a day, I guess that’s less than 20 hours’ work: added to the fact that writing the bot is almost certainly more fun than copy-pasting the sequence, it looks like the bot gets my vote.
Just to pick a nit, I am under the impression that there are much more than 250 posts in the sequences given that Eliezer posted daily for about two years. (Of course we could stop speculating and count, but I can’t be bothered) That would move the estimation much more in favour of a bot, but if its only feature is to save 40-50 hours, maybe there is something else we could do that simply isn’t doable by humanpower.
Not only that, but 20 hours in one stretch is much easier than 20 hours stretched over however many months… making sure of a consistency that invariant with mood, sleeping-in and natural disasters… bots are much better at the latter.
A bot to do the reposting of the sequences to the discussion section.
I had written about bringing back the sequences, which was well received. The best way to implement that without messing with the LW codebase is to make a scraper to extract the data from the wiki and a bot to post in the discussion area on a regular basis.
I predict this should be doable by a couple of people working for a day.
The benefit would be that it would allow new members to read the sequences in a fun way, and the more experienced of us to re-examine the sequences in light of having absorbed most of the material and the insights that came after. In the spirit of the lens that sees its flaws, I expect us to find places that the sequences could be improved, in light of the sequences themselves.
I don’t like the idea of straight reposts.
Eliezer deserves a hell of a lot more karma for his sequences than he’s got. A bot reposting them would give the bot the karma.
There is a lot of useful discussion on the existing posts in comments. That would be lost.
You’d split incoming visitors between the two different versions of the post, depending on where they came to it from. People could thus easily miss out on relevant discussion / discussions could be fragmented.
Less of an issue here, but not having a canonical URL for the articles bugs me. Everything else aside, it penalises page rank on the search engines if links are split between different urls.
I think this would be much better done with a code change for the site, allowing editors to pick a featured article that sits at the top of the main page. My estimate would be 1 day for someone familiar with the source, maybe 2 for someone unfamiliar. Of course those estimates should be at least doubled to 2 / 4 days.
While I’m unfamiliar with the code myself, display code for the current featured article should be simple. The other, harder parts of the task would be an interface to allow editors to choose a featured article (but not necessarily that complicated, you might be able to take a url for instance and then editors could find it with a simple search), and storing the current featured article.
It woudnt be a straight repost. It would be a summary with a link. People will be directed to the original and encouraged to upvote that. As for the discussion, I am of two minds: yes it would be good to add to the existing, but there is something too be said for having a blank canvas.
But all this is moot. Nobody with commit privileges is around, and even if the changes were made (which will need to touch the database too btw), it would be a crapshot as to whether they would actually be applied. While I agree that code modifications would be ideal, as far as I am concerned, the better is the enemy of the good.
Well, how about rather than reposting, we just add a “featured sequence post of the day” section, or something. It’ll look just like “recent posts”, but it’ll go through the sequences one by one.
Possibly we could just move the “promoted” functionality into the sidebar… I have to admit I never actually click on anything in the header… but I click a lot on Right-hand navigation.
No reposting so no double-ups and karma stays where it is, it’s just a different way of featuring existing posts.
Hmm.. if this drew data from an outside source (like the link to OB does, a feed maybe?) we could avoid going too deep into the code. This could be little more than a template edit plus a feed hosted somewhere else. Interesting.
An alternative that I’ve seen some long-running web comics offer is to provide a personalised RSS feed of old postings that will supply a subscriber with all of the material, at a user-selected number per day.
That’s pretty cool, and I have wanted to build a generic system like that for this exact reason (the sequences). I stopped having such an intense desire after finding rssreplay.heroku.com , but I think a big part of the issue here is taking the whole group through a specific pace, so that there is a social experience involved to make the whole re-reading more fun.
Might be a silly question, but why is a bot doing this better than just creating a new account and someone manually cutting and pasting the posts: surely that would only take a few minutes work per article at most?
Nothing more than saving us the manual work, and perhaps offering a little more continuity since humans (especially me) are not particularly consistent about routine tasks. The alternative is indeed to do it like the rationality quotes threads, make it a community effort. But why make people do a computer’s work if they don’t have to?
Time to crunch some numbers: ~250 sequences posts at 5 minutes each makes 20 hours of work in reposting the sequences manually.
Since you reckon this could be done by two people in a day, I guess that’s less than 20 hours’ work: added to the fact that writing the bot is almost certainly more fun than copy-pasting the sequence, it looks like the bot gets my vote.
Just to pick a nit, I am under the impression that there are much more than 250 posts in the sequences given that Eliezer posted daily for about two years. (Of course we could stop speculating and count, but I can’t be bothered) That would move the estimation much more in favour of a bot, but if its only feature is to save 40-50 hours, maybe there is something else we could do that simply isn’t doable by humanpower.
Not only that, but 20 hours in one stretch is much easier than 20 hours stretched over however many months… making sure of a consistency that invariant with mood, sleeping-in and natural disasters… bots are much better at the latter.