Ideally, the forum team would consciously trade off between growth and average post quality [emphasis added]
I disagree. I think the metric I care about is “quality of the average post that a person reads.”
The Forum will have a long tail of posts that are written by newbies just exploring some area for the first time, or are kinda confused, or are bad takes, etc. Many of these posts are net positive! I’m rather in favor of people having their learning experiences in public. Many times the comments on those posts are good places to recapitulate the best of EA. The good news is that most of those posts don’t get much karma or readership. I’m sure you can think of posts that you don’t like that got lots of karma. There’s a complex conversation to be had there, I hope Lizka will post her draft on that soon. But I’m talking more about the much more common post that sits at 0-20 karma. There are lots of them. But they’re by and large pretty harmless. I don’t want my metric to be reducing them.
I don’t know how many people use RSS feeds, but they interact somewhat poorly with this, because the algorithmic post prioritization does not affect RSS readers.
I don’t mean for me personally—I just mean it will bias the web analytics, because low-karma posts will look like they make up a smaller fraction of impressions than in reality (assuming most RSS feed users do not apply such a cutoff).
I disagree. I think the metric I care about is “quality of the average post that a person reads.”
The Forum will have a long tail of posts that are written by newbies just exploring some area for the first time, or are kinda confused, or are bad takes, etc. Many of these posts are net positive! I’m rather in favor of people having their learning experiences in public. Many times the comments on those posts are good places to recapitulate the best of EA. The good news is that most of those posts don’t get much karma or readership. I’m sure you can think of posts that you don’t like that got lots of karma. There’s a complex conversation to be had there, I hope Lizka will post her draft on that soon. But I’m talking more about the much more common post that sits at 0-20 karma. There are lots of them. But they’re by and large pretty harmless. I don’t want my metric to be reducing them.
Totally, this is what I had in mind—something like the average over posts based on how often they are served on the frontpage.
I don’t know how many people use RSS feeds, but they interact somewhat poorly with this, because the algorithmic post prioritization does not affect RSS readers.
Not sure if this fully helps but you can use a karma cutoff for the RSS feed
I don’t mean for me personally—I just mean it will bias the web analytics, because low-karma posts will look like they make up a smaller fraction of impressions than in reality (assuming most RSS feed users do not apply such a cutoff).