First of all, thanks for posting this, I think it’s interesting to see some analysis on this topic I actually just yesterday thought about when I looked at an old post. I don’t know if you already tried looking at this and/or whether it is even possible to do this, but I think an interesting metric would be something like “number of people who upvoted (or downvoted?) divided by number of unique people who have viewed the article”. I doubt that would perfectly fix the “old posts’ votes are underrepresented” (if, for example, there are any kind of chronological snobbery or “old news = boring news” biases). Is it possible to see how many unique users have viewed an article?
You can ask the API for “viewCount”. However, it seems to always return “null”. Not sure if this means that you aren’t allowed to query for this or if the problem is just me not getting the queries right^^
Worried about goodharting effects. I expect authors and others would start using number of views as a quality signal and start optimizing towards more views. But I, having access to that signal, am confident it really very much isn’t a good quality signal, and if LW and the EA Forum had a gradient that would incrementally just push towards more of the posts that get a lot of views, this would really destroy a lot of the value of a lot of posts.
First of all, thanks for posting this, I think it’s interesting to see some analysis on this topic I actually just yesterday thought about when I looked at an old post. I don’t know if you already tried looking at this and/or whether it is even possible to do this, but I think an interesting metric would be something like “number of people who upvoted (or downvoted?) divided by number of unique people who have viewed the article”. I doubt that would perfectly fix the “old posts’ votes are underrepresented” (if, for example, there are any kind of chronological snobbery or “old news = boring news” biases).
Is it possible to see how many unique users have viewed an article?
You can ask the API for “viewCount”. However, it seems to always return “null”. Not sure if this means that you aren’t allowed to query for this or if the problem is just me not getting the queries right^^
Yep, it’s an admin-only property. Sorry for the confusion!
Just out of curiosity: Why is this admin-only?
Worried about goodharting effects. I expect authors and others would start using number of views as a quality signal and start optimizing towards more views. But I, having access to that signal, am confident it really very much isn’t a good quality signal, and if LW and the EA Forum had a gradient that would incrementally just push towards more of the posts that get a lot of views, this would really destroy a lot of the value of a lot of posts.
Makes sense. Thanks for the detailed answer.