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shminux comments on Which subreddits should we create on Less Wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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What happened to holding off proposing solutions?
Main is useless to me as is. As I mentioned a few times before, it should be replaced/supplemented by a "highly rated"/"greatest hits"/"best of LW" section, whether generated automatically based on post's karma or updated manually once a day or so.
Also, instead of/in addition to subreddits, you can create a list of approved tags/keywords a poster is forced to select one or more from, which trigger notifications to these busy people, or to anyone else who subscribes to notifications.
Seconding both proposals.
About tags: I like them more than subreddits because you can have several tags on a post, adding new tags doesn't fragment the audience, and you can add tags to existing content retroactively. For example, tags on MathOverflow work really well.
Seconded.
Especially given how this is orthogonal to splitting things up into subreddits.
There exist many "best of" lists, manual and algorithmic.
"Promoted" is a "best of" list; you probably just don't like the taste of the promoters (eg, meetups). The front page "featured" articles are best of the archives. Much of main is moved from discussion by the author in response to audience encouragement (but another part of main is going to be demoted to discussion). There is a list of top scoring articles of the week or month or other periods [1]. Hot is a smoothing of the trade-off between recency and votes, but the version for main is busted; anyhow, it doesn't let you control how recent you want the posts, the way "top" does.
[1] click on "filter" to choose another period.
These might be good substitutes in theory, but it's possible that they are not prominent enough on the site to be good practical substitutes, insomuch as people just don't know about them. That would probably be quickly and easily fixed by editing front page / sidebar HTML, but as it stands.
More generally, I (and I gather others) find LW somewhat kludgey, un- or outright counterintuitive, and time-consuming to familiarise oneself with. As such, responses like 'There's a workaround for that, you know' are not entirely satisfying.
Replacing Main with Best of LW might work, though it would require more programming work.
The trouble with tags is that it's hard to make sure people use them properly and consistently.
That's why you don't let users invent tags of their own but enforce a unified premade dictionary.
Also I know at least one website which lets people with sufficiently high karma retag posts of others -- that should be helpful with fixing problems.
Then it's still hard to make sure people use them properly and consistently; even with admin-specified tags, those tags can be applied inconsistently by post authors such as to deflate the specificity of the tags or shift their meaning.
I think maybe the reason Luke is specifically suggesting changing the subreddit partition is because this requires a one-off, upfront, unusually small (compared to other LW improvements) investment of time. High-karma folk (re)tagging is riskier because it puts an ongoing burden on a small number of people, introduces more opportunity for drama and disruptive disagreement, and very probably introduces other issues.
Isn't that risk equally present with subreddits (i.e., people choosing the wrong subreddit)?
Second this. Stuff happens on Discussion now, and in the Open Threads - this may be the phenomenon where the leading edge is the one with the lowest barrier to entry. Main is scary.
Of course, lower barrier to entry also means more garbage. Hence the up and down things.
In addition to all the other yay-sayers I want to express my approval too. "Main" is useful for high-quality content but it is useless with its current distinction between "promoted" and not. "Discussion" is full of stuff I do not care about or only very little, as is the case with "Main". Tags + "Best of" solve both problems nicely. For the tags take a predefined dictionary and users with high karma count have the ability to re-tag.
That way I can subscribe to the topics I actually care about and do not have to read about meetups on the other end of the world or some nuance of effective giving of money I simply do not have.
Oh and nice catch of the holding off solutions stuff.
Tags would be nice to have, but it sounds like they'd be much, much more expensive to implement, so I'm not getting my hopes up. Unless someone knows of an implementation built on reddit code?
LW already has tags, e.g. this post is tagged "meta". They're just not very prominent in the UI.