I was hesitant on this one, but I looked at last month’s posts and saw a lot of them with few votes and little engagement, which made me more sympathetic to the concern about the frontpage. Maybe it’s a viable idea with some safeguards:
I think a limitation to application against “new users” mitigates some of the downside risk as long as that definition is operationalized well. In particular, people use throwaways to post criticisms, and the newness of an account should not necessarily establish a “new user” for purpose of this policy. I think mods are capable of figuring out if a throwaway post shows enough EA knowledge, but they should err on the side of letting throwaway criticism posts through to the frontpage. For certain critical posts, the decision to demote should be affirmed by someone independent of CEA.
The risk of being demoted to Personal Blog could be a significant demotivator for people investing the time to write posts.
You could mitigate this by being very clear and objective about what will trigger classification and then applying the stated criteria in a conservative fashion. But based on your stated goals, I think you may have a hard time defining the boundaries with enough objective precision.
You could also invite people to submit 1-2 paragraph pitches if they were concerned about demotion, and establish a safe harbor for anyone who got a thumbs-up on their pitch. But that approach risks being a little too censorious for my tastes, as the likely outcome of a decision not to pre-clear is that the author never completes their idea into a post.
If something is getting any meaningful number of upvotes or comments after being consigned to Personal Blog as lower-quality content, you probably made a mistake that should be reverted ASAP. (When thinking what the thresholds for reversal should be, the much lower visibility of Personal Blogs should carry significant weight.)
I would be hesitant to reject more content—people selecting to show Personal Blog posts presumably know what they are getting themselves into and have implicitly decided to opt out of your filtering efforts.
Thanks Jason! Luckily, which posts get categorized as “Personal blog” is public information (I think it’s easiest to skim via the All posts page), so I would be happy for people to check our work and contact us if you think we’ve made a mistake. If you take a look now, you’ll see that very few posts have been moved there so far, and I don’t expect the rate to change very much going forward.
2. My guess is that the vast majority of new users don’t even know what “Personal blog” means, so I’m not sure how demotivating it will be to them. As I mentioned in another comment, my guess is that getting downvoted is more demotivating for new users.
3. I think that’s a good idea, and I’d be happy for users to flag these as mistakes to the moderators, or just DM me directly and I can return a post to the Frontpage if I agree (I have the final say as head moderator).
I was hesitant on this one, but I looked at last month’s posts and saw a lot of them with few votes and little engagement, which made me more sympathetic to the concern about the frontpage. Maybe it’s a viable idea with some safeguards:
I think a limitation to application against “new users” mitigates some of the downside risk as long as that definition is operationalized well. In particular, people use throwaways to post criticisms, and the newness of an account should not necessarily establish a “new user” for purpose of this policy. I think mods are capable of figuring out if a throwaway post shows enough EA knowledge, but they should err on the side of letting throwaway criticism posts through to the frontpage. For certain critical posts, the decision to demote should be affirmed by someone independent of CEA.
The risk of being demoted to Personal Blog could be a significant demotivator for people investing the time to write posts.
You could mitigate this by being very clear and objective about what will trigger classification and then applying the stated criteria in a conservative fashion. But based on your stated goals, I think you may have a hard time defining the boundaries with enough objective precision.
You could also invite people to submit 1-2 paragraph pitches if they were concerned about demotion, and establish a safe harbor for anyone who got a thumbs-up on their pitch. But that approach risks being a little too censorious for my tastes, as the likely outcome of a decision not to pre-clear is that the author never completes their idea into a post.
If something is getting any meaningful number of upvotes or comments after being consigned to Personal Blog as lower-quality content, you probably made a mistake that should be reverted ASAP. (When thinking what the thresholds for reversal should be, the much lower visibility of Personal Blogs should carry significant weight.)
I would be hesitant to reject more content—people selecting to show Personal Blog posts presumably know what they are getting themselves into and have implicitly decided to opt out of your filtering efforts.
Thanks Jason! Luckily, which posts get categorized as “Personal blog” is public information (I think it’s easiest to skim via the All posts page), so I would be happy for people to check our work and contact us if you think we’ve made a mistake. If you take a look now, you’ll see that very few posts have been moved there so far, and I don’t expect the rate to change very much going forward.
2. My guess is that the vast majority of new users don’t even know what “Personal blog” means, so I’m not sure how demotivating it will be to them. As I mentioned in another comment, my guess is that getting downvoted is more demotivating for new users.
3. I think that’s a good idea, and I’d be happy for users to flag these as mistakes to the moderators, or just DM me directly and I can return a post to the Frontpage if I agree (I have the final say as head moderator).