For me, promoted posts on Main are what should be our "public facade" blog, things worth reading for outsiders who don't have much time. Putting a post in Main instead of Discussion is just a clunky way of saying it should be promoted.
I don't know how much more attention promoted posts actually get, and I'm not sure it's worth the trouble (they may even get less attention because of regulars who check discussion but not main because stuff is rarely posted in main). The bastard category of "in main but not promoted" doesn't have a reason to exist (except maybe for Karma reasons?).
promoted posts on Main are what should be our "public facade" blog, things worth reading for outsiders who don't have much time.
This is the most meaningful distinction. It answers the Why of Main. All the other rules are just heuristics for How.
When we forget the purpose, the debate goes astray towards: "make it, uhm, what it is now, just a bit different, you know, better".
The thing I don't get is why LessWrong defines itself as a "community blog" but then—unlike every other blog I have ever read—presents visitors with a (basically) static page when they go to lesswrong.com. If this is a consular ship, then where is the ambassador? To get to the actual blog you're supposed to click Main, which is just weird. If lesswrong.com/promoted is the 'main' thing then why isn't it the thing I first see when I visit lesswrong.com?
I think that the Main/Discussion distinction is obsolete, and should be done away with. I think that there are a lot of neat ways to present posts to people, and that we could use the tagging system more effectively, and that meetups shouldn't be in Discussion, and so on.
I also think that this will not change without devoted programmer-hours, and that it may be better to do a fundraising campaign for programmer-time for new features than discuss policy changes.
The distinction has confused me from the beginning. There is no clear workflow. At first, when I decided whether to post to Main or Discussion, it seemed that I had to choose based on ego. I ended up just posting everything to Discussion to let the powers-that-be promote it if they want to.
Why not just say that everything goes initially to Discussion, and the better items are boosted to Main?
Also, it was not clear to me how things are moved from Discussion to Main. As far as I can tell, Eliezer and a small group of anonymous admins decide. That's quite reasonable, but this policy should be clearly stated.
As I suggested before, Main should be automatically generated based on post karma (e.g. 20+ karma posts should be auto-promoted). Sort of like Reddit front page. There is little reason to have two sections. No need to worry about suitability for Main ever again. The only downside I can think of is that Eliezer and others apparently only subscribe to Main, so they will not see new quality posts right away.
Upvotes don't work as a sole measure because easy content rises faster - just look at what happens in reddit. Even in smaller sub-reddits, top content is never best content.
Weight votes based on who voted.
I don't think that would work, because the reason that easy content rises faster is not because the people voting are unable to judge quality.
The upvote grading system is pass / fail...it inherently favors content which is just barely good enough to earn the upvote, and is otherwise processed as easily, quickly, and uncontroversially as possible.
Under my model of why easy content rises, Eliezer_Yudkowsky-votes would be just as susceptible to the effect as any newbie LW user's votes...that is, unless high profile users exerted a conscious effort to actively resist upvoting content which is good yet not substantial.
What's worse, you could become a high karma user simply by posting "easy content". That's what happens on Reddit.
On Lesswrong, the readers have a distaste for mindless content, so it doesn't proliferate, but all this means is that the "passing" threshold is higher. So you might (just as an example) still end up with content which echoes things that everyone already agrees with - that's not obviously unsubstantial in a way that would trigger down-votes but it is still not particularly valuable while still being easily...
One problem I have with this proposal is that Discussion isn't for low-quality content (this seems to be a common misconception), it's for a different type of content. Making Discussion into the land of less popular posts seems like it eliminates potential utility.
I am not sure exactly what the problem is, but something must be wrong if even Eliezer seems reluctant to post here anymore (preferring Facebook of all things instead).
Ha ha!
You know, I'd previously assumed it was just him being busy, but now I wonder about those Facebook posts. I assume he doesn't put near as much energy into them as Yvain puts into Slate Star Codex, but still.
I feel like, realistically, people probably just subconsciously rate a given main article along each of the five dimensions you listed (and possibly other ones), and then mash all the ratings together to give a single rating along a general "good/bad" spectrum (which then falls above or below their own main "cutoff"). So a formal set of criteria for main would be nice I guess, but it seems like it would be unlikely to capture exactly what people people mean by "main-ness" anyway - in most cases it's just an intuitive judgement call. I would add, though, that one of the biggest things I look for in a main post (and I don't think I'm atypical here) is insightfulness - presenting new thoughts or ways of looking at things. Which is sooort of captured by factor 2 that you listed, but not entirely.
My impression has been that Main is for things that are in the same vein as Eliezer's sequences, while Discussion is more forum-equivalent, for whatever stuff comes to mind or seems interesting today - if you think of LW as a newspaper, Main means you're trying to be a columnist, Discussions are more letters to the editor. Another way of thinking of it is that if someone ever posted an attack piece about LW, I would imagine "That was just some guy posting in Discussion" to be a valid defence, while anything posted in Main would be fair game. (Main postings are moderated, correct?)
Personally, I don't even look at Main.
A relatively new user here, my problem is that I have a threshold to posting even in forums that don't have any kind of minimum requirements, like some subreddits on reddit. On LW this threshold is obviously higher and the only place I feel comfortable posting here are those open threads. According to this page there are about 2500 articles on LW and I haven't even read everything in the sequences, I just don't feel there is anything I can say that hasn't been said already.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing though, if you're gonna loosen those requirements the quality is probably going to drop because the kind of posts that are "quality" here aren't the first thing in people's minds when they are free to decide what they wanna post.
If you'd like to post about a topic but you aren't sure whether it's been covered, you could ask about it in an Open Thread.
We want main to be used for things that are on topic, i.e. things that refine the art of human rationality. I think the main reasons we have few posts on main are 1.) human rationality isn't a very sexy topic, and 2.) actually improving rationality is very hard.
It seems to me that the root problem is not that there are too few posts on main but rather that we aren't collectively making much new progress on the core mission of LW.
I think that Main posts should be directly related to rationality, and that posts not directly related to rationality shouldn't go in Main unless you have a really good reason to put them there, especially if you intend to write an extended series of posts. Discussion is for interesting content that isn't directly related to rationality.
That said, it's clear that there's some controversy regarding this issue. Regardless of what the Main/Discussion distinction is or what it becomes, I think we could all benefit from having clearer standards in this respect.
ChrisHallquist, I really enjoyed your posts on Taubes but this was because I'm extremely interested in nutrition. I don't think they strongly enough relate to the core of LW to have several of them in main.
I think a relevant criterion should be how likely people will still be to want to read and comment the post in five years. (ISTM it's more likely for a new comment to an old thread to be missed by everybody in Discussion than in Main, as the former's Recent Comments page is more diluted.)
Compare with http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/
...I was reminded of this recently by Eliezer's Less Wrong Progress Report. He mentioned how surprised he was that so many people were posting so much stuff on Less Wrong, when very few people had ever taken advantage of Overcoming Bias' policy of accepting contributions if you emailed them to a moderator and the moderator approved. Apparently all us folk brimming with ideas for posts didn't want to deal with the aggravation.
Okay, in my case at least it was a bit more than that. There's a
So, I think the bigger problem is not the main/discussion split. It's that, when coming to the site, one doesn't even understand that this is a forum!
I don't know if this is by design, but I was a LessWrong reader for more than a year (!) before I ventured over to the discussion section, and this was largely because I didn't see the link. I realised people were posting things because of the changing articles on the home page, but the same posts kept appearing so I figured there wasn't that much material.
It was only after meeting a few fellow LW'ers at a me...
Eliezer's rule is the real rule: the division is just about quality, as measured by voting. You might ask how closely voting follows the bullet points, but the point is just to predict the votes. Your recent posts don't belong in main because people don't like them. That's all there is to it.
Well, there is also the question of many posts you should have divided it into, but I don't think people really care that much.
Furthermore, it often seems that the "real" rules are significantly different than what the wiki says.
It's a wiki, so you can improve it if you want ;) I revamped the LW faq significantly a while ago, including adding that portion... I was attempting to codify things as they were, not describe how things should be (although, I like the idea of using the FAQ that way as well; if this thread seems to have come to some kind consensus writing it up in the FAQ seems like a good way to codify it for posterity).
Also, while we're discussing meta-level stuff, I think the absolute #1 best improvement that could be made to LessWrong is for a prompt to come up with a comment box inviting you to explain your reasoning whenever you downvote something. Downvotes without comment are IMO extremely bad for site culture and lead to a lot of the frustration discussed earlier.
I'd like to go further and get rid of the distinction between main/promoted, main, and discussion (I'd probably keep open threads, though). Just post articles, let them get voted up or down based on whatever "the community" wants to see, and allow a few high-karma individuals to promote things they want to see on "the front page" as our face to newbies or casual readers.
I think the main/discussion divide is useful, for a good purpose that isn't immediately obvious if you are a long-time user, which is highlighting the best stuff that LessWrong has produced throughout its history for newcomers first. If they are hooked, then they keep reading until they exhaust the content of the lowest quality they find worthwhile. The people who read LessWrong the most are the people most interested in the stuff here, and therefore most willing to put up with lower-quality posts. Main/Discussion is meaningless to them, because they will ...
Near the beginning of this year Wei Dai asked why certain people don't post to LessWrong more often, and Yvain replied that:
Less Wrong requires no politics / minimal humor / definitely unambiguously rationality-relevant / careful referencing / airtight reasoning (as opposed to a sketch of something which isn't exactly true but points to the truth.) This makes writing for Less Wrong a chore as opposed to an enjoyable pastime.
But Kaj disagreed that this was the actual standard:
I agree with the "no politics" bit, but I don't think the rest are correct. I've certainly had "sketch of something that isn't quite true but points in the right direction" posts with no references and unclear connections to rationality promoted before (example), as well as ones plastered with unnecessary jokes (example).
This raises two questions: what is the real standard, and what should the standard be?
Because on the one hand, it's not clear Yvain is right, but on the other hand if he is right on the factual question, that standard seems way too high to me. It would suggest that, as John Maxwell says in the same thread, "The overwhelming LW moderation focus seems to be on stifling bad content. There's very little in place to encourage good content."
The wiki sort-of answers the factual question:
These traditionally go in Discussion:
- a link with minimal commentary
- a question or brainstorming opportunity for the Less Wrong community
Beyond that, here are some factors that suggest you should post in Main:
- Your post discusses core Less Wrong topics.
- The material in your post seems especially important or useful.
- You put a lot of thought or effort into your post. (Citing studies, making diagrams, and agonizing over wording are good indicators of this.)
- Your post is long or deals with difficult concepts. (If a post is in Main, readers know that it may take some effort to understand.)
- You've searched the Less Wrong archives, and you're pretty sure that you're saying something new and non-obvious.
But this isn't an entirely unambiguous answer: how many of the five "factors" does a post need to be in Main? Furthermore, it often seems that the "real" rules are significantly different than what the wiki says. Yvain's perception may be incorrect, but I think there were reasons why he (and presumably the people who upvoted his comment) had that perception. Also, Eliezer recently explained that:
Whenever a non-meta post stays under 5, I always feel free to move it to Discussion, especially if an upvoted comment has also suggested it. I don't always, but often do.
This makes me wonder what other poorly-publicized rules there are in this vicinity.
As for what the rules should be, I'm going to limit myself to two general suggestions:
Finally, whatever standard we settle on, I think it's really important that we make it clearer to people what it is. Aside from the obvious benefits of doing that, I've found that trying to navigate the unclear Main/Discussion distinction is itself often enough to make blogging at LessWrong feel like a chore.
Edited to add: In terms of karma I'm currently the top contributor for the past 30 days on LessWrong by a wide margin. I managed this in spite of the fact that I'm in the middle of doing App Academy and have no time (this past week has been an exception because vacation). I take this not as evidence of how awesome I am, but as evidence that way too little quality content is being posted in Main.