So the main reason LW’s Main/Discussion distinction was criticized is that the Discussion section lacks a critical mass? And would you say this is the main argument against subforums? This would be useful to know I think—when the argument is on the table we can start thinking about solutions ;)
Also, how can we make main more lenient to short questions, except by lowering the karma requirement?
Re: Fragmenting the community: Do you think this would also occur if we have subforums like ‘career’, ‘donations’, ‘causes’ etc. or rather if we had ‘poverty’, ‘animals’, ‘x-risk’?
And thanks for thinking about this intensively and putting in the time to respond to so many comments!
Hey Soeren. My main reasons for having only one forum are critical mass considerations, fragmentation considerations and useability considerations. However, even if we thought this was a desired feature, it would require significant further argumentation to decide that it was more important to develop this feature than, for example, ironing out bugs in the mobile and Firefox versions of the site.
Apart from the suggestions I made above about making the forum more lenient to short questions (moving mid-length content from the open thread to the main page, making topic-specific open-threads), I can think of a few interesting possibilities: we could have “Ask me anything”-style interviews, where people can ask short questions of a particular users. Another would be a “Ask a silly question” thread. I also think we’ll just gradually establish a norm that not everything on the front page needs to be blog-length. An incisive question can fit too.
I think ‘career’, ‘donations’, ‘causes’ is better than poverty, animals, x-risk. Good suggestion.
So the main reason LW’s Main/Discussion distinction was criticized is that the Discussion section lacks a critical mass? And would you say this is the main argument against subforums? This would be useful to know I think—when the argument is on the table we can start thinking about solutions ;)
Also, how can we make main more lenient to short questions, except by lowering the karma requirement?
Re: Fragmenting the community: Do you think this would also occur if we have subforums like ‘career’, ‘donations’, ‘causes’ etc. or rather if we had ‘poverty’, ‘animals’, ‘x-risk’?
And thanks for thinking about this intensively and putting in the time to respond to so many comments!
Hey Soeren. My main reasons for having only one forum are critical mass considerations, fragmentation considerations and useability considerations. However, even if we thought this was a desired feature, it would require significant further argumentation to decide that it was more important to develop this feature than, for example, ironing out bugs in the mobile and Firefox versions of the site.
Apart from the suggestions I made above about making the forum more lenient to short questions (moving mid-length content from the open thread to the main page, making topic-specific open-threads), I can think of a few interesting possibilities: we could have “Ask me anything”-style interviews, where people can ask short questions of a particular users. Another would be a “Ask a silly question” thread. I also think we’ll just gradually establish a norm that not everything on the front page needs to be blog-length. An incisive question can fit too.
I think ‘career’, ‘donations’, ‘causes’ is better than poverty, animals, x-risk. Good suggestion.
No problem.