Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2

NancyLebovitz

Open Thread, August 2010-- part 2 — LessWrong

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knb16y60

IMO, the quality of comments on Overcoming Bias has diminished significantly since Less Wrong started up. This was true almost from the beginning, but the situation has really spiraled out of control more recently.

I gave up reading the comments regularly last year, but once a week or so, I peek at the comments and they are atrociously bad (and almost uniformly negative). The great majority seem unwilling to even engage with Robin Hanson's arguments and instead rely on shaming techniques.

So what gives? Why is the comment quality so much higher on LW than on OB? My first thought is karma, but OB didn't have karma when Eliezer Yudkowsky was posting, and the comments were pretty good back then. My best guess is that the good commenters were mostly Yudkowsky fans, and they left when EY left.

However, I don't know if anyone else shares my impression about OB commenter quality, so I may be completely misguided here.

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Perplexed16y20

I don't follow OB, but your comment sent me over there to look around. What I saw was a lot of criticism from feminists regarding posts by Robin that had a strong anti-feminist odor to them. I also saw some posts on less controversial subjects that drew almost no comments at all. So the natural presumption is that those feminist commentors are not regulars, but rather were attracted to OB when a post relevant to their core interests got syndicated somewhere. If that is what you are talking about then ...

Well, sure, a registration system might have repel... (read more)

7Eliezer Yudkowsky16y

I remember there being lots of bad comments on the old OB, and I think that putting a karma system in place, and requiring registration, helped an awful lot.

9cata16y

I wasn't reading OB before LW existed, but if you look there now, it's immediately apparent that the topics represented on the front page are much, much, much more interesting to the average casual reader than the ones on LW's front page. I wouldn't be surprised if the commenters tended to be less invested and less focused as a result. (EDIT: I shouldn't say the "average casual reader," since that must mean something different to everyone. I clarified what I meant below in response to katydee; I think OB appeals to a large audience of interested laymen who like accessible, smart writing on a variety of topics, but who aren't very interested in a lot of LW's denser and more academic discussion.)

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