With more content, there’s more eyeballs, so the net effect is maybe ambiguous? But yes, it seems plausible it is negative (something something dilution).
There’s only so much attention that comes from any given user, so you can’t fix things by showing more posts
I think there might be a number of solutions that immediately come to mind that haven’t been written about, and these solutions do account for the above considerations (and sort of do a lot more).
Maybe someone will write them out[1]. But for these solutions that come to mind, it probably isn’t the best thing to just do them right away.
Note that in order to do this, for structural reasons, it might need to pull on some threads or open up one small can of worms[2].
spoilers: this is “voting federations” and “transferrable views” (views in like, the Airtable sense of a set of filters/rules/parameters that induce different presentations, is there a better word for this?). These ideas can be codified, and developed in sophisticated and transparent ways and can be really powerful and game changing
I don’t expect to write more about these ideas soon[1].
While it doesn’t seem directly related, I think this linked idea about focus posts, really helps fix most of the underlying issues around forum noise, voting and other recent issues. (The name “focus posts” is bad, someone come up with a better one).
There’s been murmurs about adjustments to the forum about voting and volume and this probably reflects broader sentiment.
Some considerations:
With more content, there’s more eyeballs, so the net effect is maybe ambiguous? But yes, it seems plausible it is negative (something something dilution).
There’s only so much attention that comes from any given user, so you can’t fix things by showing more posts
I think there might be a number of solutions that immediately come to mind that haven’t been written about, and these solutions do account for the above considerations (and sort of do a lot more).
Maybe someone will write them out[1]. But for these solutions that come to mind, it probably isn’t the best thing to just do them right away.
Note that in order to do this, for structural reasons, it might need to pull on some threads or open up one small can of worms[2].
spoilers: this is “voting federations” and “transferrable views” (views in like, the Airtable sense of a set of filters/rules/parameters that induce different presentations, is there a better word for this?). These ideas can be codified, and developed in sophisticated and transparent ways and can be really powerful and game changing
spoiler: this can of worms is—who can see the vote and view graphs for LW and the EA forum?
I don’t expect to write more about these ideas soon[1].
While it doesn’t seem directly related, I think this linked idea about focus posts, really helps fix most of the underlying issues around forum noise, voting and other recent issues. (The name “focus posts” is bad, someone come up with a better one).
They would like, literally involve computer science professors and applied math research, in addition to their design and implementation.