LESSWRONG
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All of Jim Fisher's Comments + Replies

Calibration
Jim Fisher10

I don't think I removed any archive.org links. My intention was to remove dead links, and to make it clearer which links are worth visiting. Please revert if I've made a mistake or you disagree with my intention.

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Sinclair Chen's Shortform
Jim Fisher10

Please say more! I'd love to hear examples.

(And I'd love to hear a definition of "better". I saw you read my recent post. My definition of "better" would be something like "more effective at building a Community of Inquiry". Not sure what your definition would be!)

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2Sinclair Chen
As in visually looks better. - LW font still has bad kerning on apple devices that makes it harder to read I think, and makes me tempted to add extra spaces at the end of sentences. (See this github issue) - Agree / Disagree are reactions rather than upvotes. I do think the reversed order on EAF is weird though - EAF's Icon set is more modern
How ForumMagnum builds communities of inquiry
Jim Fisher30

So the ultimate trigger to move wasn't some hifalutin' desires to apply media ecology theories to optimize for inquiry (as was my theory), but much more mundane and urgent needs to fight spam and trolls!

I found this announcement of LessWrong 2.0, which indeed mentions spam and trolls. The main innovation seems to be the delightfully named "Eigenkarma", which I think is approximated by ForumMagnum by making your vote strength approximately the log of your karma.

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How ForumMagnum builds communities of inquiry
Jim Fisher10

Oh, wow, so I'd misunderstood that one as well! Apparently, my expectation so strong that the main axis was supposed to exclude "agreement", that I actively misinterpreted the word "overall". I just discovered this announcement of "Agree/Disagree Voting" which mostly confirms that yes, overall is supposed to be overall.

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How ForumMagnum builds communities of inquiry
Jim Fisher10

Shortform: ah, so it isn't intended as zoning. More that short-form and long-form are both valuable, but each needs a separate space to exist. (This seems to be a law of online media: short-form and long-form can't naturally share the same space. Same for sync and async. See e.g. Google Wave failure. I don't entirely understand the reasons, though.)

Agree-voting: I too end up incorporating "agreement" into the "overall" vote, despite the separate axis. I think "overall" almost implies I should do that! (Perhaps if "overall" were renamed to e.g. "important"?... (read more)

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2Raemon
Overall is explicitly supposed to be overall.
How ForumMagnum builds communities of inquiry
Jim Fisher10

Thank you! ( I just submitted this reply too early by trying Cmd-Enter. I suggest that this feature is deliberately hidden to discourage its frequent use :)

Ah yes, I saw that the original LW was actually based on Reddit! It would be very interesting to see the original discussions showing the motivations for developing ForumMagnum. For example, did the Reddit-based forum lead to some undesirable norms?

I hadn't heard of Lightcone Infra. Their LessWrong page is another clue about how ForumMagnum is really developed. Sounds like they're thinking along similar... (read more)

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4Ruby
The LW1.0 was a fork of the Reddit codebase, I assume because it was available and had many of the desired features. I wasn't there for the decision to build LW2.0 as a new Forum, but I imagine doing so allowed for a lot more freedom to build a forum that served the desired purpose in many ways. Something in your framing feels a bit off.  Think of "ForumMagnum" as an engine and LessWrong, EA Forum as cars. We're the business of "building and selling cars", not engines. LW and EA Forum are sufficiently similar to use the same the engine, but there aren't Forum Magnum developers, just "LW developers" and "EAF developers". You can back out an abstracted Forum Magnum philosophy, but it's kind of secondary/derived from the object level forums. I suppose my point is against treating it as too primary.
6Viliam
One big motivation for switching from Reddit codebase was that we had a dedicated spammer we couldn't stop. Imagine someone creating hundreds of accounts, upvoting himself, downvoting people he didn't like. The existing moderation tools were insufficient; fighting this one person wasted a lot of moderator time. We needed solutions in code. But the Reddit code was very difficult to understand and modify, despite having a lot of software developers in this community. Ultimately, it was easier to rewrite from scratch, even if that took months (or years? not sure) of work. Adding new features that we always wished (plus a few more were weren't sure about but wanted to try) was also nice. But the opportunity costs were high. I think it was the spammer who changed the perception of rewriting the code from "would be nice to have" to "we must do this, or this community dies". EDIT: A few rules (I don't remember the rules exactly) were specifically designed against this kind of attack. Not just one person creating hundreds of accounts, which probably could be detected by using the same IP address or some other heuristics, but imagine hundred new people joining at the same time. e.g. because LW was linked from some belligerent online community. So, for example, the votes of existing members are stronger than the votes of new members. Making new accounts can temporarily be turned off. I suspect that moderators also have some automated tools for checking suspicious behavior of new users.
Announcing the LessWrong Curated Podcast
Jim Fisher129

As of 28 July, this podcast has dramatically declined in quality. Instead of human narration, it is now "Narrated for LessWrong by TYPE III AUDIO". It's a text-to-speech model that has far too many problems for this to be listenable. The prior human narration was excellent, e.g. the effort put into describing images.

Please revert this change, or move it to a different podcast!

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2David James
I listened to part of “Processor clock speeds are not how fast AIs think”, but I was disappointed by the lack of a human narrator. I am not interested in machine readings; I would prefer to go read the article.
4Raemon
Thanks for the feedback.  I do definitely agree human vs machine should be separate podcasts. The decision to have the auto-reading is pretty different from the decision to have individual posts get custom human narration (we're a bit more funding crunched now and it was less obviously worth it for every individual curated post. but the automated stuff is cheaper and easier to just do for a large swath of posts). But we'll keep feedback like this in mind when deciding how much to prioritize each of them.