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wgd comments on Open Thread, June 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong
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Comments (252)
I feel like the mechanism probably goes something like:
An appropriate umeshism might be "If you've never gotten a post moved to Discussion, you're being too much of a perfectionist."
The problem, of course, is that there are very few things we can do to reverse the trend towards higher and higher post sophistication, since it's not an explicit threshold set by anyone but simply a runaway escalation.
One possible "patch" which comes to mind would be to set it up so that sufficiently high-scoring Discussion posts automatically get moved to Main, although I have no idea how technically complicated that is. I don't even think the bar would have to be that high. Picking an arbitrary "nothing up my sleeve" number of 10, at the moment the posts above 10 points on the first page of Discussion are:
Which means that in the past week (May 25 - June 1) there have been 13 discussion posts gaining over 10 points. If all of these were promoted to Main, this would be an average post rate of just under 2 per day, which is potentially just around the level which some might consider "spammy" if they get the Less Wrong RSS.
Personally, though, I would be fully in favor of getting a couple of moderately-popular posts in my feed reader every morning.
I'd be concerned about posts like "the rational rationalist's guide" being moved to main. It's an amusing post, but I really don't think it meets the standards I would want for the main blog. And it is quite highly upvoted. I think this shows that just going by upvotes may be insufficient.
I'm not particularly attached to that metric, it was mostly just an example of "here's a probably-cheap hack which could help remedy the problem". On the other hand, I'm not convinced that one post means that a "Automatically promote after a score of 10" policy wouldn't improve the overall state of affairs, even if that particular post is a net negative.
Well, if the general idea that Main-blog posts are a good read per se, even without reading comments or any Discussion threads, I'd say that of 13 posts in the list, there are:
Information-coveying medium-length posts liked by community
Very relevant in Discussion, out of context in Main
Discussion of low-level strategy. Will be useful for general audience after we know how it turned out, maybe; currently it is a status update that is shown to those who are interested in the inner workings of community.
Questions, not blog posts.
Between question and strategy discussion
An interesting external link
A set of external links
All in all, I would say that 3 of 13 clearly match my perception of idea of "Main" and 2 more match my perception of supposed reading pattern of "Main". For majority of posts, their moving to Main means somewhat redefining Main. I don't have an opinion if it is a good or a bad idea (I read both for fun and don't believe in LW core values), but I do think that majority of high-voted Discussion posts cited had a respectable reason to be in Discussion.