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Mark_Friedenbach comments on Crossing the experiments: a baby - Less Wrong
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Comments (90)
Wow, tough crowd. If you don't want to hear about it then go somewhere else.
Congrats Stuart. Having a kid is an epic, life-changing event. She will quickly consume your life, and it will be worth every minute. Savor this time when they're young!
Isn't every negative reception in some way pre-emptive? Clearly a single post that's off topic is easy to just ignore, but if no negative incentive is given, the number of off-topic posts will increase, and if this continues, eventually "go[ing] somewhere else" would be like having to watch your feet at all times to make sure you don't step on something sharp. It would be too distracting, and would detract heavily from the value of the forum.
The slippery slope argument rarely generalizes. Stuart is one of the most prolific contributors to this community, with one of the highest karma scores. Do you think he doesn't know what's appropriate? If Eliezer posted his baby pictures, would the complaints be as loud?
This is a community of rationalists. I hope they'd be discerning enough to know when a reprimand is needed, and when it is not.
As a matter of mere fact it probably wouldn't be, but it should be.
Eh. It's one of the very most important events in the life of one of our best contributors. There might be a better venue for this, but I don't think it's a big deal, because I don't foresee us tumbling down a slippery slope made of baby. It's useful to us to know about central life-changes in the top LW writers, and 'I had a baby' is one of the most informationally compact, least slippery-slope-prone bits of information to find out.
Plus it encourages us to build stronger social ties to other LessWrongers, and to consider what this is all for. The only extremely obvious reason not to make a post like this is that it might lead to unpleasant arguments about the relevance of the post.
If there's a clear problem with Stuart's post, it's that it has a deliberately misleading title and introduction, so it's harder for people who aren't interested in personal stuff to know to skip it.
Meh. If some random stranger posted their baby pictures, is it okay for the complaints to be more loud?
As a feedback mechanism your proposed procedure suffers from being slow, unspecific, and drastic. It's impossible to improve the quality of posts by quietly going elsewhere, because the author of an off-topic post cannot see your reaction; all that will happen is that, two years later, the forum begins to seem kind of dead because all the veterans are gone; but who knows why? "The Internet, she moves in mysterious ways," you say, shrugging your shoulders. It is not as though you can pinpoint any particular post that caused any particular non-participant to non-participate. So you may as well update us all on what your kid is doing now. It's a pity we don't have some means of rapidly indicating that a post is off-topic, badly-thought-out, or otherwise of inferior quality; say, some kind of thumbs-up/thumbs-down button, and maybe even a method for giving more specific feedback so the author can figure out exactly what was unpopular about the post. Hey, maybe you could implement something like that and get rich when everyone wants your software to run high-quality forums!
The natural state of every online forum is a Facebook/Tumblr/Twitter feed. It takes constant work to keep away from that.
Thanks!