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CronoDAS comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong
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So, apparently LessWrong feels unfriendly. This is something I've heard several times, so I'll accept it as correct. (I don't get that feeling myself, but I wouldn't expect to notice it anyway.) What are some Internet forums that don't feel unfriendly, and what do they do there that we don't do on LessWrong? Talk about ourselves and our lives - "small talk", in other words?
I do feel like LW is cold, and I'd rather not say "unfriendly", which to me sounds explicitly hostile, but it's non-friendly. Commenting here feels like Coming to Work, not like hanging out with friends. You know, where I need to remember to mind all of my manners. Seeing the orange envelope fills me with panic, as I am sure there is someone there just waiting to chew me out for violating some community norm or just being Wrong.
Truthfully, I think it is the lack of "small talk" that makes it feel unfriendly to me. It has the air of, "we're not interested in you personally, we're here to get things done". I want things to be personal. I want to make friends.
Ravelry, mentioned above. It primarily serves as a place for swapping info about needlework patterns. There's some criticism inherent in such a project (e.g. "I found a mistake in the pattern you posted") but it's mostly about mutual admiration and support. It's not especially comparable to LW, though, since it doesn't aim to be about writing or discussion.
I value the honest truth-seeking and argument that happens here, but I don't think that has to exclude warmth.
My first-ever LW comment was not well-thought-out, and I got a curt "That makes no sense because _" response. Currently that kind of thing wouldn't affect me as much, but at the time it stung. Someone else stepped in with the "Welcome to Less Wrong" post that made it feel friendlier, which was good.
Another early experience that had me thinking "These people are jerks" was reading the Bayesian Judo post from the Sequences, which seemed to be about how to embarrass people at parties by proving your superior intellect even after they tried to disengage from the conversation.
I worry sometimes that I may be reinforcing this sort of problem. I can be welcoming when I'm mindful, but a number of times I've found myself posting comments (such as here,) which would be culturally acceptable in an exchange between established members, but may be too hard on someone who can't fall back on the knowledge that they're still accepted and respected as a community member.
On the one hand, we don't want to drive down our standards as a community, but on the other hand, if we expect newcomers to be up to at least the average level of established members here, we'll be filtering out a lot of the people who stand to actually learn from participating.
It is- I've been on here for ~2 years (lurking, then signed up) and often refrain from commenting, simply because I fear being thought of as a complete idiot. I am slowly getting more comfortable, but I still feel (mildly) anxious when posting. Yes, even this post.
On another note, I have noticed that this anxiety has dropped pretty dramatically in the last two years (the thought to post barely even crossed my mind, back then), and this is due in part to being exposed to this community. I've also noticed, though this may or may not be related, that my (female) friends think I've become more "cold" (their words) in the last year or so, but my male friends say they can more easily relate to me, now. It could just be maturity, but LW has been a major influencing factor in my life.
Yes, I have been lurking for a similar amount of time, but I still am very reluctant to make comments or posts. I think the reason for me is that I am unsure of my rationality skills, and don't like feeling the status lowering that would come from potential comments criticizing or correct me.
Yes, this is a problem with myself, but yes, more friendliness would make it easier for me to comment.
It kinda stinks when you feel like on one hand, you "shouldn't" be afraid of commenting and should "grin and bear" any criticism because you're "supposed" to or something, but on the other hand it feels like it lowers your status and that hurts.
Fortunately, it doesn't have to be that way. First of all, it's okay that you haven't yet mastered rationality - that's why we're here. Say you comment and make a basic rationality mistake. I'm going to have a better idea of your actual abilities (not necessarily lesser, just more precise), but no judgement or shaming - it's just an opportunity to help you along. And if you take it well and learn from it, you gain massive respect in my book - and I don't think I'm atypical in this regard.
Heck, I used to be a lot more blunt and probably seemed unfriendly to a lot of people when I'd point out mistakes. Even then no one lost points in my book for making mistakes or not knowing something. The points were all won/lost by how people respond to criticism.
I don't want to tell you that it's "a problem with you" or that you need to feel a certain way, I just want you to know that people are a lot less hostile than it can seem - especially if you're willing to own your mistakes and correct them :)
I believe that's more-or-less the desired behavior for newbies.
Thank you for speaking up.
You're welcome. Now that I've spoken I appear to be on a roll.
Worth noting that in my little anchoring experiment the mindless critical comments were downvoted much more harshly than the mindless positive comments.
The discussions on e.g. Flickr often consist solely of comments like "Awesome pic! Great colours, looking forward to your next contribution." or "I like your style, please post more!"... To me, this represents the prototype of internet friendliness - not that I would like it to see it here, not that it couldn't be easily faked, but one just cannot deny that it sounds encouraging. There is even no need to talk about ourselves or to say anyting substantial at all, just signal friendliness the most obvious way, it works.
(It's interesting to note how dramatically Flickr differs from Youtube in the commenter culture.)
An old friendly forum I used to frequent had lots of silliness and emoticons and exclamation marks.
Selection effects. Those who have an issue with the status quo are far more likely to complain than those who like it are to praise it.
On the other hand, people who're put off by the atmosphere and leave immediately (and I've spoken to a number of whom this was the case) are going to be saying far less, at least within the community, than people who stick around.
I try to practice Rekcorc's Rules myself, starting sentences with "Yes, "Good," "You're right," "Thanks," and other words with little content other than an (honest) recognition of the value of the person's statement.
Oddly, I've been trying to break exactly that habit in real life -- too many people seize on it as surrendering all points under discussion, and then respond to further argument like you're shooting from a white flag. The reaction is something along the lines of: "What the hell is your problem? You just said I was right!"
LW seems too sane for that, thankfully.
Good point [Self-referential humor wink]. But on the other hand, someone once complemented my manner at work (a very rare thing, and I think it was honest), for being respectful of other people's views using such techniques. And I assure you that after saying these politenesses, I go ahead to politely but assertively, even aggressively contradict people whenever I need to. [Douglas Hofstadter would be proud, self-referential wink #2.]
Perhaps we should invest in a tasteful set of greenish smileys.
I was once told that someone would upvote me iff I got rid of the smiley in my comment. (or perhaps it was an "lol")
Oh, and I've just remembered this:
-- Eric S. Raymond and Rick Moen
(I won't comment about that.)
So, how do people feel about animated emoticons?
They have their place in certain forums, LW isn't one of those forums.
I think I once saw a comment by someone stating that they had a policy of systematically downvoting all comments containing an emoticon, except exceptionally good ones.
I heard that there's a user who downvotes all comments that don't have emoticons.
o.O
(No, the point of this comment is not to test hypotheses about karma.)
Hope that wasn't me. My dislike for emoticons has somehow waned during recent years and sometimes I even use them myself when I want to be really sure that my interlocutor doesn't misinterpret me as being serious when I am not, but I am the sort of person that has commenting policies and it's not that improbable that this was one of them.
I still hate "lol" pretty passionately, however.
I'm ok with LOL, unless it's someone LOLing at their own jokes.
I don't like lol, but I don't mind it too badly when it's being used where the person would genuinely be laughing out loud. When people use it as a placeholder or punctuation, which is often the case, I regard it as I would someone who actually laughs at inappropriate points in a conversation. Not positively to say the least.
I'm noticing that I like capital LOL more than lowercase lol: this is either because LOL is an acronym, or because I've just been primed by the two of you.
That ... confuses me so much. Did you do it?
Yes.
I will openly second that the LW style feels rude to me, and the style that I've learned to write in while posting on here also feels rude.
For the person who asked for an example of a "nice" forum: The comments on TED talks always struck me as nice but instructive.
While I favor more mindfulness of being welcoming and considerate here, I am heavily opposed to the use of smilies.
The person daenerys is referring to in her comment is not me, but I just don't like them.
Yeah, I noticed that smileys are apparently pretty controversial. Is there anything specific you dislike about smileys? Are there things that make you tolerate some smileys more than others?
I generally don't like smileys that are too yellow and too big so they stretch out lines of text and don't match the color scheme and sometimes are animated and boingy, which is why I specified tastefulness and greenishness. We could also have some sort of policy where you can only use one in a row so people don't just spam smileys. But that's just my preference!
It's hard for me to say exactly what I dislike about smilies. My best approximation is that I try to parse text as if it were speech, mentally inserting things like tone and facial expression where appropriate. Smilies don't parse as speech, and I'm already mentally inserting the elements of tone that they're supposed to stand in for.
The way it affects me is rather like a person ending a sentence with
"Fweeeee!"
And when I ask "Why did you make that sound?" they say
"So you can tell I'm enthusiastic!"
If I had been taught to read in a context where smilies were effectively punctuation marks used to denote tone, I might not feel any differently about them than, say, exclamation marks. But I wasn't, and as is I can't help thinking of them as unnecessary and annoying additions to a text that should be expressive enough on its own, the way I can't help thinking of wordless emotive noises tacked on the ends of sentences as extraneous and annoying.
That makes a lot of sense. Smileys aren't very natural for text within paragraphs because paragraphs can convey tone as a whole entity. But for those of us who learned to type in chat/IM environments, smileys make a huge difference because you don't have a whole entity to reference in that situation. A conversation is a stream of statements, so if someone says "you stupid jerk!" in IM, you're expected to reply -- but in a conversation it would be clear that they really mean "you stupid jerk! =P" through tone and facial expression. So that's how people naturally become smiley-dependent.