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Vaniver comments on Lesswrong, Effective Altruism Forum and Slate Star Codex: Harm Reduction - Less Wrong Discussion
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First, not audience but content creators, but second, is this so? Did any of the really valuable contributors to LW go away because they were driven away by incessant criticism? You think Scott Alexander moved to SSC because he couldn't handle the downvotes?
The general cry here seems to be "We want more content!". Well, I don't want more content. I have a whole internet full of content. What I want is more high-quality content that I do not need to search through piles of manure to find. The great advantage of LW is that here pearls are frequent but bullshit is rare -- and I attribute this in not a small degree to the fact that you'll be punished (by downvotes and comments) for posting bullshit.
A system without downvotes encourages posting, true, but it encourages posting of everything including cat pictures and ruminations on a breakfast sandwich in three volumes. Someone has to do pruning and if you take this power away from the users, it'll fall to the moderators. I don't see why this would be better -- and people whose cat got disrespected will still be unhappy.
He did explicitly point out that this culture of criticism / high standards makes writing for LW a chore, and so he doesn't do it anymore. So, yes.
I am not advocating for the removal of downvotes; I think they serve a necessary function, and I think having some sort of pruning and sorting methodology is a core site feature. But to cultivate good content, it is not enough to just remove bad content.
Let's bring in the entire quote. Yvain said:
Note that the first three points have nothing do with criticism. The fourth point is the requirement to show evidence which still isn't criticism. And the final point I read as having to be literal and formal with little "free play" in the moving parts -- I think there is a connection with the recent series of posts by Jonah Sinick where he talks how gestalt pattern recognition is, at certain level, superior to formal reasoning (and LW expects formal reasoning).
Yeah, I still think Scott Alexander could handle the downvotes just fine.
I agree, but the suggestions offered tend to gravitate to "Let's just be nice to everyone"...
What kind of positive incentives to creators of high-quality content can LW come up with?
The thing is, the high standards on LW that Yvain refers to are precisely what makes LW content valuable. At some level, wanting to escape requirements such as airtight reasoning means you want to write stuff that doesn't have airtight reasoning.
Yes, I agree. That's why I think "more content" is the wrong yardstick. I want "more high-quality content" which you don't get by relaxing standards.
Correct, but that's fine. There is a lot of high-quality and valuable stuff that is not airtight-reasoned.