The informal credit system is a massive obstacle for a lot of posters, since they don’t know what’s been posted before and they only feel safe posting something entirely new. But that kind of thinking is motivated by concern for credit, not impact. They don’t want to step on past authors’ toes by seeming like they’re stealing credit for their ideas.
Better system: We could try to do away with the notion that if something already exists on the forum, you shouldn’t be raising the same points in a newer post. This is especially encouraged if you’ve independently thought of it (it’s like an inference verification). But once the post is up, anyone can mark a section of the post and tag it[1] as having been discussing in such and such post in the past. That way, we can trace back credit to its earliest instance on the forum, and it also connects discussions for people interested in going deep.
Credit is an important motivator to find and share ideas, but it also incentivises people to silence when they’re worried about stepping on people’s toes. We can probably do better if we try to intentionally redesign aspects of this.
Although I wouldn’t want the yellow marker, since that’s distracting while reading it. And you could require all such in-line comments to be approved by the author before they’re visible.
This could usefwly double up as a way to privately notify the author of something, e.g. a misspelling. Somesuch or something:
We could try to do away with the notion that if something already exists on the forum, you shouldn’t be raising the same points in a newer post
Big fan of your line of thinking here, although I’m not sure how easy changing the culture of something like this is. The tagging would definitely help though.
Anecdotally I have made a few comments and/or posts of which the core ideas have been basically reposted verbatim and received much more engagement (quite possibly just due to better writing from the other authors). I would have really appreciated being able to link my posts to theirs so people could see I was thinking about this stuff (self-involved, I know).
On the other side of things, there were posts I held off on writing because I assumed the things I was bringing up were trivial and I would have come off as thinking I invented something new that everyone else knew was discussed a few months or years earlier. If there was more of a culture as you are describing I think I would have made these posts much earlier and gained a lot of relevant knowledge more quickly. Moreover in some cases, it seemed like the ideas that I thought were too simple to have been missed actually had been missed, which I only realized when other people posted the same things and received a lot of positive engagement.
I’d also want to have an option to switch the marks’ visibility (and on default they should be off, to not distract from reading). With that, I wouldn’t even require author approval, it would be more like commenting, but line-specific.
So the reader particularly interested in some section could dive into the comments particularly about that section.
Also, as a further feature, you could color code different comment types, like:
yellow: fix suggestion
red: critique
blue: link to previous discussion / relevant resources
The informal credit system is a massive obstacle for a lot of posters, since they don’t know what’s been posted before and they only feel safe posting something entirely new. But that kind of thinking is motivated by concern for credit, not impact. They don’t want to step on past authors’ toes by seeming like they’re stealing credit for their ideas.
Better system: We could try to do away with the notion that if something already exists on the forum, you shouldn’t be raising the same points in a newer post. This is especially encouraged if you’ve independently thought of it (it’s like an inference verification). But once the post is up, anyone can mark a section of the post and tag it[1] as having been discussing in such and such post in the past. That way, we can trace back credit to its earliest instance on the forum, and it also connects discussions for people interested in going deep.
Credit is an important motivator to find and share ideas, but it also incentivises people to silence when they’re worried about stepping on people’s toes. We can probably do better if we try to intentionally redesign aspects of this.
This could appear as a note to the side, similar to how the shared editor now works. Imagined example:[2]
Although I wouldn’t want the yellow marker, since that’s distracting while reading it. And you could require all such in-line comments to be approved by the author before they’re visible.
This could usefwly double up as a way to privately notify the author of something, e.g. a misspelling. Somesuch or something:
Big fan of your line of thinking here, although I’m not sure how easy changing the culture of something like this is. The tagging would definitely help though.
Anecdotally I have made a few comments and/or posts of which the core ideas have been basically reposted verbatim and received much more engagement (quite possibly just due to better writing from the other authors). I would have really appreciated being able to link my posts to theirs so people could see I was thinking about this stuff (self-involved, I know).
On the other side of things, there were posts I held off on writing because I assumed the things I was bringing up were trivial and I would have come off as thinking I invented something new that everyone else knew was discussed a few months or years earlier. If there was more of a culture as you are describing I think I would have made these posts much earlier and gained a lot of relevant knowledge more quickly. Moreover in some cases, it seemed like the ideas that I thought were too simple to have been missed actually had been missed, which I only realized when other people posted the same things and received a lot of positive engagement.
I’d also want to have an option to switch the marks’ visibility (and on default they should be off, to not distract from reading). With that, I wouldn’t even require author approval, it would be more like commenting, but line-specific.
So the reader particularly interested in some section could dive into the comments particularly about that section.
Also, as a further feature, you could color code different comment types, like:
yellow: fix suggestion
red: critique
blue: link to previous discussion / relevant resources
green: just a comment
FYI: I posted that suggestion on the EA forum feature suggestion thread, and also linked your comment