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gwern comments on [Link] More Right launched - Less Wrong
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Comments (101)
The average comment isn't too great on LW either.
And whatever feedback you have received, you would have received even more feedback. Nupedia vs Wikipedia - wait, is that example so excellent that you don't even know what Nupedia is? Closer to home, then: OB published everything sent to it, yet Eliezer discovered when LW was turned on that this 'trivial inconvenience' was inhibiting countless posts and submissions.
For example, I've told you on IRC how I think the tribalism post is bullshit, but I have zero interest in writing up an email and sending it off and the email either never being seen or at best quoted.
And you've based this on careful experimentation, of course.
There's a large difference between "mostly awful" and "not too great".
This is the iron law of blogs and web forums: the quality of the average comment is always well below that of the average post.
This so-called iron law does not hold (and has never held) for Hacker News (which is 6.2 years old).
Could you give a quick summary here? I'd be interested in seeing it, since at a glance the post seemed reasonable to me.
I don't especially want to defend my criticism, but my basic point was that quoting reams of material on tribal warfare does nothing at all towards addressing the LW 'tribalism' view of personal identity & group solidarity as fundamentally motivated cognition and is a giant non sequitur, and his attempt to contextualize the Byzantine isn't much better because pointing out that factions latched onto the mobs is like saying there is no such thing as xenophobia or nationalism because in China the xenophobic nationalist mobs protesting Korea or Japan are manipulated by the government and shut down when necessary - if people really are easily manipulated and propagandized as part of group conflict, you would expect various factions to exploit this.
More concisely, the article presents a long and elaborate rebuttal to the name "tribalism" without actually discussing the concept of tribalism at all. It also points out the fancy in Eliezer's fanciful example at great length.
Thanks. That's a succinct and strong set of criticisms.
Apparently these editors have decided that rather than getting as much activity as possible, they're willing to settle for smaller amounts of activity if it means they don't have to deal with all the shit you get by moderating after the fact. I can't fucking blame them the tiniest bit.
Ever moderated anything? (Curious.) And that is far, far, far from the only unpleasant experience I've ever had as a moderator.
I moderate gwern.net obviously, a few subreddits,
#lesswrong, and worked on Wikipedia for >6 years & 100k edits and as an administrator in addition to adminning the Haskell wiki for several years and currently the LW wiki. Any of that count?Based on priors for expected shit? The Wikipedia part and the subreddits, maybe - it depends on whether you're identifiable to them as the one responsible, or just another face in the crowd of moderators. Haskell might be too technical although I would also expect it to attract nonconformists. I don't know how gwern.net works.
I think I've dealt with enough shit on Wikipedia - over the Bogdanov affair, if nothing else, maybe you've heard of it? - to be able to tell you that you brought a lot of this shit on your own head, which was my original point before we began swinging moderator-dicks around.
Shit has increased by maybe 20% since l'affaire B. I think this may be partially due to the poor design of LW which makes deletions visible. I'm really impressed by Facebook's lovely user experience - when I get a troll comment I just click the x, block the user and it's gone without a trace and never recurs.
What I'd really like to do is to be able to move whole comment threads to a /meta subreddit, thereby banishing them from the flow of productive discussion without destroying information. Then it would also be easy and safe to give all posters the ability to banish comments from their posts, including comments complaining about their moderation and so on, and not have to worry about it if they didn't want to. I don't know if we'll ever have the programming resources for that.
Maybe, but it's probably also going to be the userbase causing an extremer form of the Streisand effect. I mean, deleting comments? You might as well wave a red flag and say 'hey nerdy libertarian free-speech guys - please pattern-match onto censorship to be righteously opposed, thanks!' Facebook is a different interface, but also a different userbase with a different set of expectations.
I've certainly learned my lesson about the Streisand effect. With respect to everything else, I think I can manage to not care where they scream so long as they're not doing it anywhere it's visible to an LW user who doesn't make a special effort to see it.
Thank Cthulhu for small favors.
Since you've mentioned this before, here's an offhand idea for how to maybe get some: put an announcement on the sidebar or banner asking for developers (and maybe noting that LW is open source - so it's ok to ask people to work for free), that's visible on every page and that links to a page with your list of wanted features and instructions for how to get involved. There could be a bunch of potential developers that don't even know LW needs them, since the subject has only come up in some comment threads. Maybe you guys have already thought of this or know of a reason it wouldn't work, just wanted to put it out there.
How gnarly is the reddit/lesswrong codebase? $5000 worth sounds terrifying to one with a shaky, Learn Python the Hard Way knowledge of programming and very basic familiarity with html, css and sql. But I'm probably going to be taking 4 hours a day five days a week for a month this summer to try and make myself hirable as a junior programmet this summer and work that valuable would make an awesome portfolio piece, paid or not. It would certainly make one a shoo in for Hacker School.
Some people who work professionally with Python found it too difficult. I tried to find someone who would be able to make a few small changes so that I can use it for my website... but at this moment I believe that rewriting the whole thing from scratch would be at least 10 times easier.
...it's probably gnarlier than a month of work when you've just read one book on Python, I'm afraid.
Responding to a deleted comment is a bit weird. Knowing what was there beforehand, you could have quoted some of the non-objectionable part.
I so love your sarcasm when it is directed at someone else.
Trivial inconvenience is a feature not a bug. I mentioned it explicitly when arguing for this system to be adopted for the early days of the blog. I may be wrong, but I think it acts as a filter for those who can't be bothered to expend the small amount of effort in reply. This correlates with a less useful reply.
This is not an encyclopedia gwern.
Yet, it is a group blog. Why, that sounds like my other example...
The one post I sent to OB was rejected. (Which it deserved to be, since in retrospect it was pretty poor.)