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jkaufman comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong
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I think this isn't a big factor. Instead people post to fb because:
low thresholds: it's socially acceptable to post anything from am odd thought you had to a big essay, and there's no expectation you polish your post or get friends to review drafts
positive comments: over the years comments on LW have gotten more and more critical, not clear why
blocking people: if there's someone who really annoys you but is well behaved enough that they meet site rules you can't ban them on LW but you can still block them on FB so you don't have to interact with them.
What keeps you off fb? I find some of my best discussions happen there these days.
(I am not ingres even though I am asking a question you asked them.)
I don't like Facebook as a venue for such things because:
I think there real value in having discussion about rationality in a way where friends who aren't rationalists come to see them. It does limit the amount of jargon that you can use, but it has real benefits.
Yup, but there is also value in having discussion about rationality that doesn't need to take such things into consideration.
AFAIK you're right about "searchable", but the timestamp of any comment on Facebook is a permalink. For example, here's a link to the earliest comment on EY's latest Facebook post.
Neat. Thanks!
Posts are linkable, comments to posts are not. (ERRATUM: they are also linkable)
Compounded with the fact that comment threading is limited to two levels and comments are loaded in small batches, making even the browser in-page search function useless, it makes following discussion with hundreds of comments impossible.
However, one of the things that Facebook does right and LW/Reddit does not, IMHO, is that votes on Facebook (well, there are only likes, actually) are public. Even if there were downvotes, making them public would make it socially harder to pull the mass downvoting sprees and other manipulations that plague LW and Reddit.
I think "plague" is too strong a word, on LW at least. Mass downvoting is an obnoxious nuisance but so far as I know there's only one person (with, admittedly, at least three identities at different times) who's done much of it. There are occasional reasons to suspect small-scale vote manipulation of other kinds (a few sockpuppets, a small voting ring) but not very often, not very severely, and so far as I know never to such an extent that there was a serious investigation, never mind anyone getting caught.
The obvious downside to public voting is that it increases the scope for downvoting to produce hostility and/or drama. Perhaps that just means an equilibrium where no one downvotes anything that isn't clearly terrible. Would that be better or worse? I'm really not sure.
(Technically, how would it work out? Surely we shouldn't retroactively make everyone's historical votes publicly visible -- they were made with the understanding that they weren't going to be. But then we have a system with two kinds of votes in: old ones that aren't publicly visible and new ones that are. That's going to complicate things.)
We already have such a system for the polls that allow you to vote annonymously and also to vote with your name.
True. But I suspect the polls are an extra thing that was added on with that feature already in place, whereas the voting mechanics are already there without provision for two kinds of vote. Modifying existing code in ways that break assumptions it may have made is always more painful than writing new code.
The existing code is likely a database that tells you whether people have voted for a specific post. Adding an additional column to that database for private/public votes shouldn't be hard.
From my hazy memory of the LW codebase, you may be making unjustified assumptions about how it stores data. The database setup is ... idiosyncratic.
(Here is an article -- with a link to more details -- about the Reddit DB architecture. LW is, I believe, forked from a version of Reddit a bit older than that article.)
I agree that public votes would likely improve the state of affairs. Public downvotes allow a person who doesn't understand why they were downvoted to ask the person directly. It also creates social accountability for the votes.
You might want to read the comment you're replying to again.
Right, my bad.
Ignoring privacy / monopoly concerns, Facebook is also remarkably inconvenient for reading long-form writing.
Twitter and Tumblr have similar problems. I thought Reddit did too, but they actually make their RSS feeds easy to find, although it's fairly annoying that they're not full-text (makes it much harder to read on a phone).
You can make it less random by viewing in chronological order. You do that either by appending "?sk=h_chr" to the main Facebook URL, or by selecting "Recent First" rather than "Top Stories" in the little dropdown near the top of the left sidebar whose name I forget.
(In case it helps remember the cryptic string of characters: "?" in a URL introduces parameters, and is followed by something of the form key=value&key=value&key=value; in this case we have only one key/value pair; "sk" presumably stands for "sort key", i.e., the attribute of a feed entry that will be used for sorting on when FB decides what to show you and in what order; I don't know why "h_"; "chr" is clearly short for "chronological".)
I am not sure whether in this mode of operation FB always shows you all the stuff you are potentially interested in in chronological order; my guess is that it still filters it in some undisclosed way. But it's at least a bit more deterministic.
(I agree with all you've said here about Facebook.)
You can save a post for later reading from the dropdown menu to the right of the byline, though you'll still need to remember to check your saved posts once in a while.
(BTW, does anybody remember how the hell you access the list of saved posts on Less Wrong? EDIT: never mind, here it is.)
One thing I have found aggravating about interacting with people on Facebook is that my interaction shows up in my social contacts' feeds.
This is fine if you have one community of friends, but gets weird if you have multiple, and downright bothersome if you want to keep them separate. In particular, I have a friend from middle school who will occasionally jump into a conversation that I enter with something unhelpful, and I cringe at the thought of someone else discovering that I'm the only mutual friend my LW friend has with my middle school friend. One solution, of course, is to unfriend everyone on FB I know who isn't a LWer. I find this unsatisfactory for many reasons. ;)