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John_Maxwell_IV comments on [Meta] The Decline of Discussion: Now With Charts! - Less Wrong
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Trike should be able to check this. My guess is that the site has a lot higher view rate than 2-3 years ago, from both casual and registered users, but maybe they do not vote as often as before (or are more negative than before?), keeping the average karma/post steady.
Also, does the median karma per post match the mean, or is the latter skewed by high-karma outliers?
I have access to LW google analytics. Traffic on LW has trended down since its peak in 2012, but not as steeply downwards as Discussion posts... perhaps a 15% drop.
My pet theory is the same as the one I've always offered: the LW user moderation is too heavy-handed, writing LW posts isn't that much fun, and there's a culture of "how dare you write that post" (e.g. "was this really appropriate for (Main|Discussion)? it really should have gone in (Discussion|an Open Thread)" is a common refrain). And there's become a kind of deflationary phenomenon where what was once appropriate for Main becomes appropriate for Discussion becomes appropriate for an open thread (e.g. this was a featured post in the early days of LW; nowadays a link with explanatory text is frequently an open thread post). I think we should try (a) telling people in threads like these they should write up interesting post ideas if they have them (to save LW!) and (b) go friendly/easy on those who do write posts.
Note that something like this has been discussed as a problem since 2011.
The nice thing about user moderation in the form of voting is that it's easy to throw a lot of content at the forum and see what sticks... it will get filtered automatically. So why not do that?
After I look at the old Main or Discussion, I mostly remember the best posts and am hesitant to post lower quality stuff. Not sure if this is a common sentiment.
Consider that your internal estimate of the quality of the post you will make is noisy. For example, I did not expect this to become my most popular post, and I did not anticipate all the negative feedback I received on this post (also potentially interesting to note: although that second post ended at +5, I think it was lower than 0 at times and overall I felt pretty punished for writing it).
Oh, I agree that my estimate of how my post would be rated is piss-poor, judging by how my comments are rated. I was talking about how I personally feel about their quality vs how I personally feel about the quality of the best posts. Maybe I'll dig through my drafts and post something after a slight polishing, just to see what happens.
Sounds excellent!