The goal is really to balance the forces that move LessWrong towards a news-driven and politics-driven direction, with the need to sometimes have to talk about urgent and political stuff, at least with people who have context. I am worried that if we make all that stuff visible by default to logged-in users, this will skew the balance too much in the direction of having things be news-driven and political, and we end up in a bad attractor. I also like the general principle of “these topics aren’t forbidden on the site, but when you write about them, you can generally expect to only get people who have been around a lot and have more context on your culture to read them and discuss them with you, instead of being exposed to tons of people who don’t really know what’s going on”.
The other thing is that I don’t really like it when the frontpage changes without making it explicit what happened. Like, I wouldn’t expect logging in to change the frontpage algorithm, so it feels a bit bad to make that happen, and makes the site feel a bit less understandable and transparent. This isn’t a huge deal, but it is a consideration that I do think is somewhat important.
Ok, here’s the thing that doesn’t quite make sense. You’re mostly concerned about specific topics (like politics) not being visible. But this issue is being solved by hiding all personal blog posts. Clearly there could be a large number of personal blog posts that are not about the sensitive topics.
Now that you have tags, I think a better solution is to show all personal blog posts unless they have certain tags (like politics). Which solves the problem more directly. (Edit: I guess that opens the door for some users to add politics tags to a lot of posts to hide them from the front page… Hmm. May be these tags are reserved for trusted users.)
Also, yeah, definitely people should be able to say that their post shouldn’t appear on the front page. That’s totally fine.
There are three reasons why a post might be a personal blogpost instead of a frontpage post:
It’s about a topic we intentionally want to limit discussion on
It’s about a niche topic that’s only interesting to a very small fraction of the LW audience
The author wanted it to not show up on the frontpage
It seems that for all three of those, the reasons, it makes sense to limit visibility. I don’t think there are personal blogposts that don’t fit into any of the above three categories.
The goal is really to balance the forces that move LessWrong towards a news-driven and politics-driven direction, with the need to sometimes have to talk about urgent and political stuff, at least with people who have context. I am worried that if we make all that stuff visible by default to logged-in users, this will skew the balance too much in the direction of having things be news-driven and political, and we end up in a bad attractor. I also like the general principle of “these topics aren’t forbidden on the site, but when you write about them, you can generally expect to only get people who have been around a lot and have more context on your culture to read them and discuss them with you, instead of being exposed to tons of people who don’t really know what’s going on”.
The other thing is that I don’t really like it when the frontpage changes without making it explicit what happened. Like, I wouldn’t expect logging in to change the frontpage algorithm, so it feels a bit bad to make that happen, and makes the site feel a bit less understandable and transparent. This isn’t a huge deal, but it is a consideration that I do think is somewhat important.
Ok, here’s the thing that doesn’t quite make sense. You’re mostly concerned about specific topics (like politics) not being visible. But this issue is being solved by hiding all personal blog posts. Clearly there could be a large number of personal blog posts that are not about the sensitive topics.
Now that you have tags, I think a better solution is to show all personal blog posts unless they have certain tags (like politics). Which solves the problem more directly. (Edit: I guess that opens the door for some users to add politics tags to a lot of posts to hide them from the front page… Hmm. May be these tags are reserved for trusted users.)
Also, yeah, definitely people should be able to say that their post shouldn’t appear on the front page. That’s totally fine.
There are three reasons why a post might be a personal blogpost instead of a frontpage post:
It’s about a topic we intentionally want to limit discussion on
It’s about a niche topic that’s only interesting to a very small fraction of the LW audience
The author wanted it to not show up on the frontpage
It seems that for all three of those, the reasons, it makes sense to limit visibility. I don’t think there are personal blogposts that don’t fit into any of the above three categories.
What about threads like “Open & Welcome Thread”? I had a bit trouble finding it today.
A way to make these would be to make a second version of the Personal Blog, which shows on the main page.
Or entirely different tag, “Community Post”? Available for trusted members. Though it would probably be the same as “Open Threads” tag.
Thanks, that’s good context. I’ll post if I think of anything.