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CarlShulman comments on [META] Karma for last 30 days? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I really don't see this. It looks like the main clause of decline is that spontaneous top-level postings are not enough to make up for the loss of the enormous subsidy of a good writer posting as a full-time job. 3 examples of hellish troll-feeding would be nice.
I think LW's high standards make the activation energy for writing new posts really high. I have lots of ideas for new posts, but when it comes to actually writing them, I think to myself "is this really something LW wants to read", "is this going to make me look like an idiot", etc. I've written a few reddit self posts in the past few weeks, and it was interesting to notice how much lower my activation energy was for submitting to reddit than to LW. It's almost as though I have an ugh field around writing LW posts.
Sure, you probably want people to have this high activation energy to a certain extent; it's a good way to keep the quality high. But if we want more spontaneous top-level postings, maybe we should experiment with trying to shift the activation energy parameter downwards a bit and looking for a sweet spot.
For example, one idea is to frame the moderation system as more of a filtering system than a punishment/reward system: "It's OK to write a lame post, because if you do, it'll just get voted down and no one will read it."
Another idea is to recognize that a given user's prediction of how much LW will like their post is probably going to be terrible, and tell people that if you never get voted down, you're not submitting enough.
I think the punishment of getting voted down is way more salient for me than the reward of getting voted up, and maybe I'm not the only one who's wired this way.
Would you mind sharing your reddit username? I generally like your writing and conclusions, and I'd hate to miss out on the long tail of them that may fall just below the LW margin.
Hey, thanks! I prefer to keep my reddit account mostly divorced from my real identity though, and I don't think LW would find the self posts I mentioned especially interesting.
I will likely write a bunch for LW at some point, but currently I'm focusing on other stuff.
Why don't SI people post more paper drafts and other writings here for discussion? Seems like a cheap way to both help improve the SNR here and give SI more ideas and feedback.
That's not rationality content. AI content is sort of grandfathered in because of the SI sponsorship and Eliezer's posting on it, but most of the LW audience is attracted by the rationality content, I think.
I thought AI content is considered on-topic here more because there is a strong argument, based on our current best understand of rationality, that we should make a significant effort to push the Singularity and hence the entire future of the accessible universe in a positive direction. I guess it's understandable that you might not want to overplay this and end up alienating people who are more interested in other rationality topics, but we seem still far from that point, judging from the relative lack of complaints and recent voting on AI and Singularity-related posts.
I don't know how much paper content CFAR is planning to produce, but it would escape this objection.
I've been doing just that, and it often has been done by others - for example, Luke & Anna's "Intelligence Explosion: Evidence and Import" was posted several times, I believe. They may have improved the SNR, but I can't say there seem to be very much feedback or ideas...
I'm thinking of these papers which were posted here only after they were finished and published. Also this one which I posted here because Carl didn't. Also Paul Christiano posting stuff on his own blog instead of LW.
That's strange. I find LW feedback useful on my posts, and assumed that would be the case for others. Can you give an example of a post that didn't gather useful feedback and ideas?
Well, look at your own links.
As for my own feedback, I keep a public list in http://www.gwern.net/Links#fn2 Going backwards through the last 3:
I guess it wasn't clear, but I was suggesting that if those papers had been posted here while they were still in draft form (as opposed to "finished and published"), they would have received more discussions since people would have more incentives to participate and potentially influence the final output.
As for your posts, I think the reason for lack of useful feedback is that they are mostly summaries of many academic papers and it's hard to give useful feedback without spending a lot of time to read those papers which nobody has an sufficient incentive to.
I got some comments for my drafts. There were some valuable suggestions in both threads which I incorporated, but I had hoped for a little more feedback.
If you post more drafts in the future, I think it would help to add more context: Who is the target audience? What are you hoping to accomplish with the papers? (If we knew that we might care more about helping you to improve them.) Do they contain any ideas that are new to LW?
Thanks, that's a good suggestion.
Thank you. I haven't noticed an increasing problems with trolls and/or extremely low quality posts. Some of the worst seemed to be sincere posts by people with mental problems. I don't know whether there's a serious problem of LW potentially becoming a crank magnet.
That would've been hard to find, but thankfully Gabriel did the work to find one example. Thanks Gabriel!
If you go to Configurations and Amplitude and scroll down... then you'll suddenly find this really amazingly huge thread, much much larger than anything around it. What is this wonderful huge thread, you wonder? Why, it's this:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/pd/configurations_and_amplitude/6bwo
Finding this kind of conversation dominating Recent Comments, much less Top Comments, is something I find dishedonic and I don't think it helps the site either.
I saw that at the time. But as Vladimir_Nesov says, they seem rare enough to not much impair my reading experience. What is your estimate of their frequency per year or per month?
I thought you had something different in mind, but if it is this, I don't understand in what way is the solution of charging only for immediate replies to bad comments unsatisfactory. When I proposed this variant of the feature in the ticket, the thread you cited was exactly of the kind I was thinking about.
On the other hand, threads like this are rare, so (1) you seem to exaggerate their impact and (2) a month that you've suggested in the ticket won't be enough to see whether the direct-reply-fee solution helps, as we only get a few of these in a year.