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KPier comments on Teenage Rationalists and Changing Your Mind - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (31)
I think this is a problem with recruiting in general, not just with recruiting teenagers. The more new people you get, the more clueless new people you get.
As I see it, there are a couple ways to deal with this:
First: Shoo away newcomers with lots of downvotes and advice to read the sequences. (Pros: minimizes annoyance for established members. Minuses: very smart people might sour on the site, the rest of the world will think we're obnoxious and arrogant)
Second:Establish some sort of community for new users, to bring them up to speed (there's been talk about subreddits; I would be willing to devote a significant amount of time to creating one for newbies or teens specifically if it's possible and the community thinks it's a good idea) (Pluses: more well-informed, contributing members. Minuses: time investment)
Third: Be friendly, point out links when someone is making an obvious mistake, but don't devote too much effort to helping out. This is more or less what we do currently. (Pluses: not rude or time-consuming. Minuses: signal-noise ratio, the main attraction of LessWrong for me, could get worse)
The second option, if possible, seems to be obviously the best to me. Anyone have an idea I'm not thinking of? Is my idea even technically feasible?
Community for newcomers looks like the best option, as long as some regulars curate it. Reducing quality of main forum can essentially destroy it, so it's ruled out.
Discussion section already partially plays this role, as recently there developed a norm that only high-quality posts are acceptable on main site, and low-average-quality posts get actively downvoted, while if moved to discussion, the same posts might be upvoted, since quality expectations there are different. Perhaps the main site can become LW's mathoverflow.net, while discussion site LW's math.stackexchange.com.
That's not a good solution. Most people will not go read the sequences just because someone told them. I think it pays to show them why they are wrong (using the sequences) and then direct them gently towards the sequences so they themselves could get more information.
Fourth: Add a feature where comments by users <1 year old or/and <100 karma are hidden. (Adjust numbers in settings.)
Agreed. This used to be fairly common, but I think it's mostly discouraged now. As several people have pointed out, the Sequences are in total twice as long as the entire Lord of The Rings series. As RationalWiki put it:
With regard to your proposal: Setting it up by karma seems better (I've been on for two months but I'm well over 200 karma, and I'd be mildly annoyed if most people couldn't see my comments because I'm still new) The disadvantage is that a conversation between someone below the threshold and someone above it would either be partially visible to everyone else, increasing confusion, or invisible, meaning good discussions with low-karma users would be automatically buried.
An issue with that would be people below the karma limit would be likely to stay there. If a sizable portion of LWers have the limit, then those people couldn't upvote comments of new users, making it harder for them to rise above the threshold.