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nhamann comments on Re: sub-reddits - Less Wrong
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Edit: Thanks to rhollerith_dot_com for pointing out that none of my arguments support subreddits over tags. I have updated, and now support tags.
Personally, I would prefer subreddits. I'm interested in more than a few things that are tangential to the main thrust of LW, but the fact is that almost anywhere else on the internet (that I'm aware of) lacks the community norms that LW has, making serious discussion unrealistic due to widespread irrationality.
On the other hand, a real danger is that by allowing subreddits you significantly lower the barrier to entry, which might result in a decrease in the signal to noise ratio. There are, for instance, many, many possible wrong posts that one could make on a number of topics (consciousness and AI, for instance), so subreddits about these topics would be especially at risk of devolving into nonsense.
On the other other hand, it's been pointed out that the LW participants are fairly homogeneous (one might say "cult-like"). Therefore having high-quality subreddits on a number of topics would probably attract more diversity to the site.
So I'm in favor of subreddits, but we would need to be careful about subreddits at risk of being low quality. However, I certainly hope that the community norms we have here would be more than capable of dealing with this issue.
You start with "Personally, I would prefer subreddits," but then you describe nothing that would be easier or better in a subreddit than it would be in /r/discussion/ with a tag. Well, there is one exception to what I just said: subreddits are easier for a user to understand if the user is impatient with the considerations behind the design of software and the design of online conversations.
But there are very strong reasons why some of us advocate tags -- and why tags have increased in use -- even though the resulting software is more difficult to understand than older designs were, so I would ask you to make an effort to understand the solution proposed by Tricycle.
Note that I am not affiliated with Tricycle. I have never even had a conversation or a correspondence with anyone at Tricycle.
Now that I think about it, I agree with you. I think in the above post I had in mind that subreddits would allow more "cohesiveness" or a greater "sense of community" among its participants. But perhaps that is nonsense or not so important.
However, which "very strong reasons" did you have in mind? I can think of only two:
1) If there were multiple subreddits, often a post might not fit squarely in a single one.
2) People might tag their posts in subreddits anyways, in which case why have subreddits?
I consider your (1) a pretty strong reason.
I have a draft of a post that gives a couple more reasons. Will you review it before I publish it?
Certainly. Also, I amended my original post to make it clear that I now support tags over subreddits.