You make a post containing what you judge to be the best of other people’s comments on a topic or an important period like the OpenAI incident. The comments original karma isn’t shown, but people can give them new votes and the positive votes will still accrue to the writer instead of the poster.
This is because, like dialogues, writing lesswrong comments is good for prompting thought.
I don’t know about highlighting other people’s successful comments because they might not want them displayed (maybe some kind of button you click to request permission to use their comment in your own highlights post? they would only click a button to accept or reject).
I’m tentatively tempted to start doing this in a shortform.
I notice I feel like it’s fine to highlight someone’s comment? They put it on the site, so it’s not private. I’d be keeping it on the same site, not taking it somewhere else without attribution. I wouldn’t generally like my contributions moved between places or attributed to me on other pseudonyms, and maybe there’s a stronger argument here than I’m thinking.
My understanding is shortforms have next to no visibility unless people are already subscribed to a particular person’s shortform feed. That seems about right for me? If I’m interested in what say, Scott thinks the best comments are but not interested in what Ray thinks the best comments are, then I subscribe to one but not the other.
I’m not saying this is the best possible UX, I’m just noting I’m tempted to try this with the affordances I have.
Tangential question: I know how to view all the posts by karma or by other criteria. Is there a way to view all comments by karma or other criteria? It occurs to me that part of the reason I don’t usually read comment threads except on my own posts is that I don’t know where the good discussion is happening.
Apparently the most reliable way to make sure feature requests are seen is to use the Intercom.
Apart from that, I like the suggestion. There are many LW comments that warrant being turned into full posts, and this seems like a neat complementary suggestion.
If the feature was implemented, there would have to be a moderation policy requiring posters not to use this feature to pull comments you disagree with and turn them into top-level disagreements with individuals (if the original commenter wanted to do that, they could dialogue with you), nor to use it for witch hunts (“look at all the bad takes of this guy!”).
Well, you can already visit the profile of someone you disagree with and just scroll through a list of all the comments they’ve made. So maybe if it’s a public comment we don’t need to worry about the privacy aspects? When I want to make private comments on a post, I private-message the author. Public comments are for everyone to read.
Feature proposal: Highlights from the Comments, similar to Scott Alexander’s version.
You make a post containing what you judge to be the best of other people’s comments on a topic or an important period like the OpenAI incident. The comments original karma isn’t shown, but people can give them new votes and the positive votes will still accrue to the writer instead of the poster.
This is because, like dialogues, writing lesswrong comments is good for prompting thought.
I don’t know about highlighting other people’s successful comments because they might not want them displayed (maybe some kind of button you click to request permission to use their comment in your own highlights post? they would only click a button to accept or reject).
I’m tentatively tempted to start doing this in a shortform.
I notice I feel like it’s fine to highlight someone’s comment? They put it on the site, so it’s not private. I’d be keeping it on the same site, not taking it somewhere else without attribution. I wouldn’t generally like my contributions moved between places or attributed to me on other pseudonyms, and maybe there’s a stronger argument here than I’m thinking.
How do shortforms work? Doesn’t virtually nobody see them?
My understanding is shortforms have next to no visibility unless people are already subscribed to a particular person’s shortform feed. That seems about right for me? If I’m interested in what say, Scott thinks the best comments are but not interested in what Ray thinks the best comments are, then I subscribe to one but not the other.
I’m not saying this is the best possible UX, I’m just noting I’m tempted to try this with the affordances I have.
As a quick note, I think it’s pretty likely we will copy the EA Forum’s Quick Takes section: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/
I quite like how it works, and I think it gives about the right level of visibility to shortform posts.
Tangential question: I know how to view all the posts by karma or by other criteria. Is there a way to view all comments by karma or other criteria? It occurs to me that part of the reason I don’t usually read comment threads except on my own posts is that I don’t know where the good discussion is happening.
Oh boy, I can’t wait for this.
It’s done as of yesterday!
Apparently the most reliable way to make sure feature requests are seen is to use the Intercom.
Apart from that, I like the suggestion. There are many LW comments that warrant being turned into full posts, and this seems like a neat complementary suggestion.
If the feature was implemented, there would have to be a moderation policy requiring posters not to use this feature to pull comments you disagree with and turn them into top-level disagreements with individuals (if the original commenter wanted to do that, they could dialogue with you), nor to use it for witch hunts (“look at all the bad takes of this guy!”).
Well, you can already visit the profile of someone you disagree with and just scroll through a list of all the comments they’ve made. So maybe if it’s a public comment we don’t need to worry about the privacy aspects? When I want to make private comments on a post, I private-message the author. Public comments are for everyone to read.