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Elo comments on Lesswrong Potential Changes - Less Wrong Discussion

17 Post author: Elo 19 March 2016 12:24PM

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Comment author: Elo 21 March 2016 12:59:33PM *  0 points [-]

these KPIs

I have a lot of KPI's because I realise some will not be effective. as we know; what gets measured gets optimised for; which is why I think having so many different measures will help make it hard to select for the wrong goals. By at least watching all of them; I expect we are likely to be able to make progress.

"benefits from reading the text, minus time spent reading the text".

Agree. But how? if you have a better metric for measuring that I would gladly try to implement it; until then - I came up with the best possible solutions I could.

subreddits

I am thinking tags might be an easer implemented and stronger solution. maybe two layers of tags; one for "content tags" and one for "sorting tags". The content tags will be anything (as per the current system). The sorting tags will be a set number of possible tags and clearly visible everywhere for sorting posts by, and posting into.

Some sorting tags will also be able to be auto-assigned i.e. +10karma score. which can then be automatically aggregated to an RSS feed.

Upvoting and downvoting

I like these ideas.

scripts for creating things like Open Thread automatically.

Yes and no; particularly no on meetups. I don't want dead meetups to appear on the meetup schedule, I was thinking an opt in email, "the last time you planned this meetup was 2 weeks ago; would you like to set one for two weeks now; reply "yes" to this email to confirm a meetup with the same location and this date and time."

A weekly thread can be automated; a monthly thread will find less use being automated. But certainly an option.


PJ eby added.

Edit: On second thought; if you want to just remove those particular KPI's or "discount their validity a lot" I can also do that.

Comment author: Viliam 21 March 2016 01:40:54PM -1 points [-]

I'm thinking, but not sure, whether watching average karma would be a good idea.

Or maybe some curve that would transform article karma, something like articles with positive karma would get "karma - 10" points, and articles with zero or negative karma would get constant "-10" points, and measuring a sum of that. (The rationale is that we subtract a few points as a cost of time spent reading; but we don't penalize the negative-karma articles too much, because skipping an article with -100 karma is just as easy as skipping an article with -5 karma.)

Comment author: Elo 21 March 2016 08:13:55PM 1 point [-]

when was the last time you skipped an article, comment or post because it was negative? (not that you are a typical user) (and maybe this is worthy of a poll in the OT)

This seems reasonable in general, aside from that minor quibble.

Comment author: gwillen 22 March 2016 09:04:56AM *  1 point [-]

As one anecdata point, I do generally skip articles with much negative karma. I read via RSS, so I just hit 'mark read' on them. LW users are not big downvoters, most of the time, so if something has more than a few downvotes, I have found that I probably don't want to read it.

And of course, comments with a score of -3 are hidden by default, so many people probably don't read them.