Personal feedback. I think that, as for a lot of people, the discovery of LW radically changed my perspective about a lot of things. I may probably say that has been one of the most important intellectual mind-shifting events that happened in my entire life. But, given the language barrier (I am Italian and I learned English from scratch late in my life) and the high quality of the content here in LW, I've always been intimidated about writing something here, since I discovered the forum in 2017. It may sound superficial (is it?) but yes, the bounty program motivated me a lot about pushing myself outside the confort zone, and I learned a lot of things in the process. So thank you for the initiative, and I really hope this will be just the beginning of a personal journey here.

Hi, I wrote the Book-Review on Spark as my first post on LessWrong. Sadly I received no comments in response to it and I would love some feedback after spending so much time writing it. I am open to any kind of feedback about it. I really enjoyed this bounty program and I will probably partecipate also in the future ones.

Bounty Idea:

Posts about open problems in rationality. Maybe specifically posts that discuss solutions or work toward a solution, but not posts that only describe the problem (That's if we think we understand them well enough to go to the solution phase). And maybe it's better if we choose a specific open problem, like Rationality Verification. Also, maybe making tags for them / improving existing tags can be included somehow.

I'd be happy to further brainstorm this idea.

Some genres of thing you might consider offering a bounty on in the future, ordered by how good of an idea I think they are:

• Detailed walkthroughs, i.e. step-by-step instructions on how to do a thing
  • Examples: signing up for cryonics, cultivating shoulder advisors, starting on Zettlekasten, running meetups
  • These posts seem ridiculously valuable to me, and also pretty hard to write, so I'd think they'd deserve a pretty large bounty
• Overviews of a contemporary research field, i.e. "if you were writing a textbook on the state-of-the-art for subject X, what would the intro chapter look like"
  • Example: state-of-the-art for aging research
  • Examples I would like to see: what does technical biosafety research look like? What are the key research directions and challenges in studying C. elegans's brain? 
    • [disclaimer: I'm planning on writing something on this second topic, so I can't guarantee my suggestion of a bounty on this is entirely self-disinterested]
• Life advice, i.e. "here's an easy thing you could try that might make your life better"
  • Lots of examples, but I'm mostly imagining something like Give it a Google
  • So many people have advice to give that probably it would be better to give a payout only to the top-N best advice posts during the bounty period. 
  • What exactly constitutes life advice? Does any rationality technique count here? 
  • Note also that this runs the risk of flooding LessWrong with billions of advice posts (because these are easy to write)
  • Probably a bad idea, oops

Another idea is to -- instead of putting a bounty on a specific genre of post -- offer to generally pay out to the top N posts submitted each week/month, to generally incentivize the creation of high-quality material of any type.

Thank you for organizing this program. I really enjoyed the book reviews. Even though I am still a bit shy in commenting and using votes, these posts encouraged me to consider writing something myself in the future.

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Thanks again for organizing this!

I wasn't sure how successful such an initiative would be in getting more content produced, but that part exceeded my expectations.

One thing to consider for future contests: Insofar as people post close to the deadline, there can be a comparatively big influx of content at once, which might cause some posts to get buried. Looking at the book review tag, there are quite a few reviews with anemic scores and hardly any comments. Is that because they're low-quality / a bad fit for LW, or because they got overlooked?

It would be a shame if the part about incentivizing more content creation succeeds, only for some good stuff to slip through the cracks and never see any reactions. And especially if contest rewards are partly based on karma scores, it's particularly important to ensure that each review is seen by enough people so it has a chance to take off.

Thanks a lot! I started writing my Selectorate Theory post 9 months ago and got to 3k words on it, but it was difficult to write and, though I still really wanted it done and published, I lost motivation to write it. So this gave me the push I needed and I can be even more sure now I'm on the other side that it wouldn't have been written without it - even if I came back to it I likely would have left it again after another 3K words or so, which would still leave me at less than half the 14K total it ended up being.