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Konkvistador comments on Call For Agreement: Should LessWrong have better protection against cultural collapse? - Less Wrong
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We have had way too many meta threads recently.
Yes. It's starting to remind me of talk pages of Wikipedia's policy and guideline pages, the scariest time sink I've ever seen where people spend megabytes of words in meta-, meta-meta-, and meta-meta-meta-discussions about things any sane person would hardly give a damn about, such as whether to write “3 September” or “September 3”. (One of the biggest regrets in my life is the huge amount of time I wasted in there.)
I'm starting to wonder whether it might be useful to have a 'Meta' section, which is separate from Discussion (and Main) for meta threads of all kinds.
Then when that gets filled with meta threads about the Meta section we can create the Meta Meta section.
If people would just start the title with "Meta:", people would be warned up front. Some people here have already done this, and it is a common technique with a long pedigree on mailing lists.
I see the same thing being done with Meetup:.
Is this already suggested in the Wiki or FAQ?
Okay, I understand, because of this comment, why the thread was voted down. Thanks Konkvistador.
If a thread isn't specific to a person's interests, why does it need to be voted down? Do people feel obligated to read every single thread or something? Do you assume that all of you will have the exact same interests, and the same amount of interest in each? I do not understand the practice of thumbing down a thread because it's a different topic from what you wanted.
You could have easily written the same content and got about as much feedback in one of the many recent threads. Perhaps this one.
If there are a lot of uninteresting threads posted, they will make the interesting threads drop down faster, reducing the amount of attention those threads get.
I consider this is a design defect of the forum software that limits scalability. Or if not a design defect, just a mismatch between design and use.
Blog software just was not designed for sustained discussion or filtered discussion. Just catch some eyeballs and let them spout off. That's what it enables. It's the same annoyance everywhere.
I'll repeat my old geezer lament - TRN and other usenet readers were vastly superior for discussion lists compared to web forum software and blog software in general use.
Strongly agree. It's hard to believe that the online community could lose so much functionality by accident, but it really happened.
I wonder if evolution has lost very valuable traits because there was no use for them for a while. Probably so.
Tentative theory: TRN worked really well for making long discussions readable. However, a great many of the newsgroups that used it were unmoderated. The culture of usenet was such that many unmoderated newsgroups worked pretty well, especially if you used TRN or somesuch.
When browsers happened, there were advantages-- like color, page design, audio, and video. Before browsers, there were telnet screens-- small, monochrome screens which only displayed monospaced ASCII text. People used to do ASCII art, of which not much remains but smilies.
I'm not sure that TRN would have worked in a browser without JavaScript since the page needed to be refreshed for every comment, and information about each comment you downloaded needed to be stored.
So, there was an interregnum during which people had to get by on forums (a method of organizing discussion which doesn't seem to have grown in popularity, though it's possible I'm missing something), and usenet developed an ugh field because of the lack of moderation. (There was protection against spam and DOS trolling, but as with hobbits in the Shire, the typical user had no idea that a large amount of volunteer labor was protecting them.)
So, when it became possible for TRN to be transferred to the web, not only would it require a large amount of really boring coding (and possibly a redesigned user interface-- the original required learned a bunch of single-letter commands), but it has an ugh field because of the unmoderated groups.
I think the prime movers were economic and operational.
The economics of the web changed. Usenet was a cost center, not a profit center. Once you could monetize your content, many higher quality providers on usenet probably moved to blogs. Even where sites have web forums, the incentives are to catch eyeballs, not facilitate discussion, and they often will seek to control content on their site to maximize those eyeballs.
I used to post some at Sam Harris' site. One day he pontificated on the self evident desirability of pumping more money into government schools. I was heartened when a number of libertarians lit into his self righteous certainties, and let him know that there were plenty of selves for whom his proposition was self evidently idiotic. Poof; the original blog post and all associated comments disappeared. Such are the wonders of moderation.
Also, with monetization, other high quality competition for eyeballs came online. You and I could pontificate back and forth, or we could listen to (or watch!) the best, brightest, and most educated in the world pontificate.
The operational changes came from a shift from central server university environments to home environments. Universities came with central admins to handle usenet server setups. It also came with the bandwidth to download all hierarchies, making them available to download in pieces by a user, who was likely on a system with TRN already installed.
I started in UNIX environments, but I've primarily used windows for at least a decade and a half. I'm sure they must be out there, but I don't think I've ever even seen a windows box with a usenet server or TRN installed.
I don't remember any web site ever implementing a TRN like interface for their forum, but it should be perfectly feasible today. You could even put little ads at the top.
What was that google discussion thing with federated servers? (Google Wave) Wasn't that even real time? Real time collaboration with wiki like features for collaboration, but trn features as well for discussion, and maybe even filtering. That would be fun. Wish there was something like that out there.
I'm not sure that monetization has a huge amount to do with the story. Usenet was populated by hobby bloggers, and there are still a lot of hobby bloggers-- many of them are the same people, but there are plenty of new hobby bloggers showing up all the time.
I'm not convinced that most of the professional bloggers are better than the best hobby bloggers.
It's plausible that the unowned character of usenet couldn't be duplicated these days, especially considering that rather few people would settle for an ascii-only medium. On the other hand, Moore's Law might make a modern usenet feasible.
In any case, as you say, individual sites could have trn, and it could be combined very nicely with an rss feed to give that "page down through your favorite newsgroups" feeling.