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luminosity comments on Project Ideas for the London Hackday - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Alexandros 20 March 2011 10:44PM

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Comment author: luminosity 21 March 2011 09:12:06PM *  3 points [-]

I don't like the idea of straight reposts.

  • Eliezer deserves a hell of a lot more karma for his sequences than he's got. A bot reposting them would give the bot the karma.
  • There is a lot of useful discussion on the existing posts in comments. That would be lost.
  • You'd split incoming visitors between the two different versions of the post, depending on where they came to it from. People could thus easily miss out on relevant discussion / discussions could be fragmented.
  • Less of an issue here, but not having a canonical URL for the articles bugs me. Everything else aside, it penalises page rank on the search engines if links are split between different urls.

I think this would be much better done with a code change for the site, allowing editors to pick a featured article that sits at the top of the main page. My estimate would be 1 day for someone familiar with the source, maybe 2 for someone unfamiliar. Of course those estimates should be at least doubled to 2 / 4 days.

While I'm unfamiliar with the code myself, display code for the current featured article should be simple. The other, harder parts of the task would be an interface to allow editors to choose a featured article (but not necessarily that complicated, you might be able to take a url for instance and then editors could find it with a simple search), and storing the current featured article.

Comment author: Alexandros 21 March 2011 09:39:21PM 1 point [-]

It woudnt be a straight repost. It would be a summary with a link. People will be directed to the original and encouraged to upvote that. As for the discussion, I am of two minds: yes it would be good to add to the existing, but there is something too be said for having a blank canvas.

But all this is moot. Nobody with commit privileges is around, and even if the changes were made (which will need to touch the database too btw), it would be a crapshot as to whether they would actually be applied. While I agree that code modifications would be ideal, as far as I am concerned, the better is the enemy of the good.

Comment author: taryneast 22 March 2011 09:50:53AM 0 points [-]

Well, how about rather than reposting, we just add a "featured sequence post of the day" section, or something. It'll look just like "recent posts", but it'll go through the sequences one by one.

Possibly we could just move the "promoted" functionality into the sidebar... I have to admit I never actually click on anything in the header... but I click a lot on Right-hand navigation.

No reposting so no double-ups and karma stays where it is, it's just a different way of featuring existing posts.

Comment author: Alexandros 22 March 2011 11:33:25AM 0 points [-]

Hmm.. if this drew data from an outside source (like the link to OB does, a feed maybe?) we could avoid going too deep into the code. This could be little more than a template edit plus a feed hosted somewhere else. Interesting.

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