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steven0461 comments on Do we want more publicity, and if so how? - Less Wrong
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It would mitigate it, but it's not getting at what I'm really talking about. Our equivalent of Wikipedia's vandalism isn't the issue - downvotes suffice for that.
What I mean is in general the flood of people not familiar with the existing material, not reading it, asking old questions, engaging in half-arsed arguments, misinforming others, etc. A handful can be educated by the regular they run into; if 1 newbie replies cluelessly to an old comment or post of mine, I can take the time to dig up the links and refute/educate them. If 100 newbies do that to me, I might just quit LW entirely. And what if they simply contribute high quality content that drags LW far away from what I value it for? (A number of LWers feel this has already happened with all the more 'practical' stuff, and would like to see LW return to its AI/decision theory roots.)
And then there's the problem that we don't really have everything organized. There's the Sequences, but that's overwhelming (Rational Wiki comments of LW that 'read the Sequences' is our polite way of telling people to go screw themselves). The wiki is very slowly being organized, but it couldn't handle a flood.
Those sound like low-quality contributions to me. If they're net harmful, we should agree to vote them down.
Any one comment is not harmful. There are tons of those in LW already on the -2 to +2 range. What's harmful is all of them put together. The response is to either not have huge surges, or to collectively fight the surge by collectively imposing higher standards and voting much more actively.
And as with collective solutions, there are problems with defection... No individual benefits much from going through a new page and up or downvoting each comment. To quote Buffet, I think:
It isn't obvious to me that additional clueless comments are superlinearly harmful, that their harm outweighs the benefits of greater publicity, or that the problems with defection that you mention are serious enough to prevent a collective solution from working.
Can you think of other online communities that suffer or at least go through great and unpredictable change due to a high influx of new people?
The only one I can think of that's stayed relatively high-quality for a long time is Hacker News, and they actively discourage large influxes--for example, by flooding the front page with posts on Erlang internals when mentioned in the mass media.
Paul Graham also does very active experimentation with HN's reputation system, which I like: There are karma threshholds for voting down comments, higher ones for voting down posts; you cannot vote down a direct reply to your own comment; you cannot vote down a comment more than a few days old (this one wouldn't work as well here). The most radical change he's made is that only you can see the exact karma for your own comments (although comments below zero are progressively lighter shades of grey).