Discussion is filled with META, MEETUP, SEQ RERUN, links to boring barely-relevant articles
The website structure needs to be changed. “Main” and “Discussion” simply do not reflect the LW content today.
We should have a separate “Forum” (or some other name) category for all the non-article discussion threads like Open Thread, Media Thread, Group Rationality Thread, and stuff like this.
Then, the “Discussion” should be renamed to “Articles” (and possibly “Main” to “Main Articles”) to make it obvious what belongs there.
Everything else should be downvoted; optionally with a comment: “This belongs to the Open Thread”. (And if the author says they didn’t know that Open Thread exists, there is something seriously wrong… about the structure of the website.)
I feel like I wrote this to the LW discussions at least dozen times...
there’s nothing interesting to talk about anymore.
I think there are interesting things here. They are just drowned in too many less interesting things.
Let’s look at the numbers: 6 articles so far on Dec 9th; 6 articles on Dec 8th; 4 articles on Dec 7th; 11 articles on Dec 6th; 8 articles on Dec 5th; and some of the articles from Dec 4th—less than one week ago—already don’t fit on the first “Discussion” page. (The exact numbers may differ depending on your Preferences settings.) The page is scrolling insanely fast. If I stopped reading LW for one week, I would have problem to catch up with all the new stuff; I would probably just skip some of that. That’s not good if we have too much stuff, but low average quality.
We don’t downvote enough. Let me explain—if someone makes a post that is not very good, but is not completely stupid or trolling also, it will almost certainly gain more upvotes that downvotes. Because it feels wrong to punish someone only for being uninteresting. But in terms of rewarding/punishing behavior, we probably should punish them. If we try to be too friendly, the site will become boring, precisely because most of the social talk is not about giving new information.
Perhaps it could help to use some timeless deciding. If you read an article, ask yourself a question: “If the next week here would be 10 new articles like this, would it make LW better or worse?” If the answer is worse, downvote it. Because although the same author will not write 10 more articles like this during the next week, other authors will.
TL;DR—I think the Eternal September is most visible on the article level, because it is not obvious what kind of content belongs here. “Discussion” is horribly misleading—we don’t want discussion-level articles. That’s what the comments and Open Threads are for.
The website structure needs to be changed. “Main” and “Discussion” simply do not reflect the LW content today.
We should have a separate “Forum” (or some other name) category for all the non-article discussion threads like Open Thread, Media Thread, Group Rationality Thread, and stuff like this.
Then, the “Discussion” should be renamed to “Articles” (and possibly “Main” to “Main Articles”) to make it obvious what belongs there.
Everything else should be downvoted; optionally with a comment: “This belongs to the Open Thread”. (And if the author says they didn’t know that Open Thread exists, there is something seriously wrong… about the structure of the website.)
I feel like I wrote this to the LW discussions at least dozen times...
I think there are interesting things here. They are just drowned in too many less interesting things.
Let’s look at the numbers: 6 articles so far on Dec 9th; 6 articles on Dec 8th; 4 articles on Dec 7th; 11 articles on Dec 6th; 8 articles on Dec 5th; and some of the articles from Dec 4th—less than one week ago—already don’t fit on the first “Discussion” page. (The exact numbers may differ depending on your Preferences settings.) The page is scrolling insanely fast. If I stopped reading LW for one week, I would have problem to catch up with all the new stuff; I would probably just skip some of that. That’s not good if we have too much stuff, but low average quality.
We don’t downvote enough. Let me explain—if someone makes a post that is not very good, but is not completely stupid or trolling also, it will almost certainly gain more upvotes that downvotes. Because it feels wrong to punish someone only for being uninteresting. But in terms of rewarding/punishing behavior, we probably should punish them. If we try to be too friendly, the site will become boring, precisely because most of the social talk is not about giving new information.
Perhaps it could help to use some timeless deciding. If you read an article, ask yourself a question: “If the next week here would be 10 new articles like this, would it make LW better or worse?” If the answer is worse, downvote it. Because although the same author will not write 10 more articles like this during the next week, other authors will.
TL;DR—I think the Eternal September is most visible on the article level, because it is not obvious what kind of content belongs here. “Discussion” is horribly misleading—we don’t want discussion-level articles. That’s what the comments and Open Threads are for.