Just for the sake of feedback, I think this makes me personally less inclined to post the ideas and drafts I have been toying with because it makes me feel like they are going to be completely steamrolled by a flurry of posts by people with higher status than me and it wouldn’t really matter what I said.
I don’t know who your target demo here is and it sounds like “flurry of posts by high status individuals” might have been your main intention anyways. However, please note, that this doesn’t necessarily help you very much if you are trying to cultivate more outsider perspectives.
In any case, you’re probably right that this will lead to more discussion and I am interested to see how it shakes out. I hope you’ll write up a review post or something to summarize how the event went because it’s going to be hard to follow that many posts about different topics and the corresponding they each generate.
It’s not entirely clear to me how this shakes out. I agree it is the case that posts cannibalize attention from each other to some extent, so you posting at the same time as a popular post could detract attention from yours. However, when people are on the Forum to read one thing they often click around on other stuff when they are done/get bored, meaning that you get more attention when posting during a popular time.
For example, in this graph you can see that, at least for the past ~year, when there is a spike in attention on community posts (usually caused by an exogenous scandal), we see a much smaller but still positive spike in attention to noncommunity posts, implying that the people who came for the popular thing tend to spend a (smaller, but still net positive) amount of time reading less popular stuff.
My guess is that it’s weakly beneficial for you to post when something else popular is going on, but I’m not sure.
(Also pragmatically I expect that people are going to procrastinate, so if you post in the next ~week you probably won’t have much competition.)
I wonder—conditioned on several less well-known people expressing intent to post and preference for a special setup—whether it would be worthwhile to announce Fortnite Annex (June 26 to 29?) dedicated to less well-known voices, who could of course choose Main Fortnite if they preferred. Or you could identify ~2 specific days during Fortnite on which you ask the more well-known people not to release their posts. People could get some of the intended benefit by posting early, but that strategy doesn’t give them much lead time at all.
I definitely see how having, say, a Will MacAskill post drop an hour after a less well-known person’s post could lead to the latter poster feeling (and maybe being) overshadowed.
Can I encourage you to organize this, if you think it would be useful? Seems like the kind of thing which should be grassroots organized anyway, and it sounds like you have a better vision for it than I do.
I’m not convinced it would be net positive this time in the absence of several less well-known people expressing intent to post and preference for a special setup. I think there would be some downsides to each way the idea could be implemented a few days prior to start, so I’d wanted to see specific evidence that less well-known people would be more likely to post before endorsing a special setup this time.
Documenting the vision, my theory was that setting aside time for lesser-known voices (which basically means asking the well-known voices not to post at certain times) would mitigate concerns by less well-known voices that their contributions would “be completely steamrolled by a flurry of posts by people with higher status.” (quoting Jacob, the original commenter above).
I agree that the effects here shake out in different directions—though I hypothesize that the positive effect on a engagement with a given post comes more from general awareness of something bringing people to the Forum (e.g., there’s a new scandal, it’s Strategy Fortnight, etc.). In contrast, I speculate that the negative “cannibalizing” effect comes more from specific posts (look, there are fresh posts by X, Y, and Z with active engagement). Thus, I speculate that—by judicious management of post timing—we could capture much of the positive effect of the special event bringing in readers while mitigating the effect of prominent voices crowding other voices out. Of course, I could be wrong!
After thinking about it some more, it would probably be best to set aside space for lesser-known voices either at the beginning of an event or in a multi-day interlude in the middle of the event. Setting aside time at the very end of the event risks people having already had their fill of strategy talk; setting random days aside offers relatively limited isolation. However, most people who just learned about Strategy Fortnight wouldn’t be ready to publish in the first few days, and I think it’s too late to ask people who have already agreed to write for the event not to publish their post for a multi-day period.
So I think the best ways to test/implement the idea are off the table for this go-round.
This makes sense, but it’s also likely that the comments (and other engagement) on any one post from a high status individual is many times over that from the median forum post. So it’s unclear how this nets out. OTOH, these posts being clumped might also mean they compete for attention.
Just for the sake of feedback, I think this makes me personally less inclined to post the ideas and drafts I have been toying with because it makes me feel like they are going to be completely steamrolled by a flurry of posts by people with higher status than me and it wouldn’t really matter what I said.
I don’t know who your target demo here is and it sounds like “flurry of posts by high status individuals” might have been your main intention anyways. However, please note, that this doesn’t necessarily help you very much if you are trying to cultivate more outsider perspectives.
In any case, you’re probably right that this will lead to more discussion and I am interested to see how it shakes out. I hope you’ll write up a review post or something to summarize how the event went because it’s going to be hard to follow that many posts about different topics and the corresponding they each generate.
Thanks for the feedback!
It’s not entirely clear to me how this shakes out. I agree it is the case that posts cannibalize attention from each other to some extent, so you posting at the same time as a popular post could detract attention from yours. However, when people are on the Forum to read one thing they often click around on other stuff when they are done/get bored, meaning that you get more attention when posting during a popular time.
For example, in this graph you can see that, at least for the past ~year, when there is a spike in attention on community posts (usually caused by an exogenous scandal), we see a much smaller but still positive spike in attention to noncommunity posts, implying that the people who came for the popular thing tend to spend a (smaller, but still net positive) amount of time reading less popular stuff.
My guess is that it’s weakly beneficial for you to post when something else popular is going on, but I’m not sure.
(Also pragmatically I expect that people are going to procrastinate, so if you post in the next ~week you probably won’t have much competition.)
Thanks for setting this up, Ben.
I wonder—conditioned on several less well-known people expressing intent to post and preference for a special setup—whether it would be worthwhile to announce Fortnite Annex (June 26 to 29?) dedicated to less well-known voices, who could of course choose Main Fortnite if they preferred. Or you could identify ~2 specific days during Fortnite on which you ask the more well-known people not to release their posts. People could get some of the intended benefit by posting early, but that strategy doesn’t give them much lead time at all.
I definitely see how having, say, a Will MacAskill post drop an hour after a less well-known person’s post could lead to the latter poster feeling (and maybe being) overshadowed.
Can I encourage you to organize this, if you think it would be useful? Seems like the kind of thing which should be grassroots organized anyway, and it sounds like you have a better vision for it than I do.
I’m not convinced it would be net positive this time in the absence of several less well-known people expressing intent to post and preference for a special setup. I think there would be some downsides to each way the idea could be implemented a few days prior to start, so I’d wanted to see specific evidence that less well-known people would be more likely to post before endorsing a special setup this time.
Documenting the vision, my theory was that setting aside time for lesser-known voices (which basically means asking the well-known voices not to post at certain times) would mitigate concerns by less well-known voices that their contributions would “be completely steamrolled by a flurry of posts by people with higher status.” (quoting Jacob, the original commenter above).
I agree that the effects here shake out in different directions—though I hypothesize that the positive effect on a engagement with a given post comes more from general awareness of something bringing people to the Forum (e.g., there’s a new scandal, it’s Strategy Fortnight, etc.). In contrast, I speculate that the negative “cannibalizing” effect comes more from specific posts (look, there are fresh posts by X, Y, and Z with active engagement). Thus, I speculate that—by judicious management of post timing—we could capture much of the positive effect of the special event bringing in readers while mitigating the effect of prominent voices crowding other voices out. Of course, I could be wrong!
After thinking about it some more, it would probably be best to set aside space for lesser-known voices either at the beginning of an event or in a multi-day interlude in the middle of the event. Setting aside time at the very end of the event risks people having already had their fill of strategy talk; setting random days aside offers relatively limited isolation. However, most people who just learned about Strategy Fortnight wouldn’t be ready to publish in the first few days, and I think it’s too late to ask people who have already agreed to write for the event not to publish their post for a multi-day period.
So I think the best ways to test/implement the idea are off the table for this go-round.
Yeah, I would frame the event as “this is a topic being are going to be discussing something, now is the time to pitch in”
This makes sense, but it’s also likely that the comments (and other engagement) on any one post from a high status individual is many times over that from the median forum post. So it’s unclear how this nets out. OTOH, these posts being clumped might also mean they compete for attention.