Do you use the Forum? (Probably, considering.) Do you have feelings about the Forum?
If you send me a PM, one of the CEA staffers running the Forum (myself or Aaron) will set up a call call where you can tell me all the things you think we should do.
Iâm wondering about the possibility to up-vote oneâs own posts and comments. I find that a bit of an odd system. My guess would be that someone up-voting their own post is a much weaker signal of quality than someone up-voting someone elseâs post.
Also, it feels a bit entitled/âboastful to give a strong up-vote to oneâs own posts and comments. Iâm therefore reluctant to vote on my own work.
Hence, Iâd suggest that one shouldnât be able to vote on oneâs own posts and comments.
By default your comments are posted with a regular upvote on them posts with a strong upvote on them. The fact that itâs default seems to me to lower my concern about boastfulness. Although I do think itâs possible the Forum shouldnât let you change away from those defaults. When I observed someone strong-upvoting their comments on LW, I found it really crass.
As to why not change the default, I do think that you by default endorse your comments and posts. This provides useful info to people, because if youâre a user with strong upvote power, your posts and comments enter more highly rated. This provides a small signal to new users about who the Forum has decided to trust. And it makes it less likely that youâll see a dispiriting â0â next to your comment. OTOH, we donât count self-votes for the purposes of calculating user karma, so maybe by consistency we shouldnât show it.
Although I do think itâs possible the Forum shouldnât let you change away from those defaults.
I am in favor of these defaults and also in favor of disallowing people to change them. I know of two people on LW who have admitted to strong-upvoting their comments, and my sense is that this behavior isnât that uncommon (to give a concrete estimate: Iâd guess about 10% of active users do this on a regular basis). Moreover, some of the people who may be initially disinclined to upvote themselves might start to do so if they suspect others are, both because the perception that a type of behavior is normal makes people more willing to engage in it, and because the norm to exercise restrain in using the upvote option may seem unfair when others are believed to not be abiding by it. This dynamic may eventually cause a much larger fraction of users to regularly self-upvote.
So I think these are pretty strong reasons for disallowing that option. And I donât see any strong reasons for the opposite view.
1) Should comments and posts by default start out with positive karma, or should it be 0?
2) Should it be possible for the author to change the default level of karma their post/âcomment starts out with?
This yields at least four combinations:
a) Zero initial karma, and thatâs unchangeable.
b) Zero initial karma by default, but you could give up-votes (including strong up-votes) to your own posts, if you wanted to.
c) A default positive karma (which is a function of your total level of karma), which canât be changed.
d) A default positive karma, which can be increased (strong up-vote) or decreased (remove the default up-vote). (This is the system we have now.)
My comments only pertained to 2), whether you should be able to change the default level of karmaâe.g. to give strong up-votes to your own own posts and comments. On that, you found it âcrassâ when someone did that. You also made this comment:
This provides useful info to people, because if youâre a user with strong upvote power, your posts and comments enter more highly rated. This provides a small signal to new users about who the Forum has decided to trust. And it makes it less likely that youâll see a dispiriting â0â next to your comment.
This rather seems to relate to 1).
As stated, I donât think one should be able to change the default level of karma. This would rule out b) and d), and leave a) and c). I have a less strong view on how to decide between those two systems, but probably support a).
I agree with you and Pablo that Iâd rather see it unchangeable. My prioritization basically hinges on how common it is. If Pabloâs right and itâs 10%, that seems concerning. Iâve asked the LW team.
Did you know you can see strong self upvotes for all users?
You can see the this at the user level (how much they do this in total) and Iâm 80% sure you can see this at the comment/âpost level for each user.
This might mitigate your concerns and the related activity might finally produce a report where I am ranked #1.
There is a 70% chance someone else will do this and explain how, making the next paragraph irrelevant:
Moving slightly slowly because this takes actual work to ensure quality (or Iâm just being annoyingly coy), if someone makes a $200 counterfactual donation to an EA charity specified by me (that meets the qualifications as a 501c3 charity in an EA cause area and donated to by senior EA grantmakers), I will produce this report and send it you (after I get back from a major conference that is going on in the next 7 days).
On the whole, I really like the search engine. But one small bug you may want to fix is that occasionally the wrong results appear under âUsersâ. For example, if you type âWill MacAskillâ, the three results that show up are posts where the name âWill MacAskillâ appears in the title, rather than the user Will MacAskill.
EDIT: Mmh, this appears to happen because a trackback to Luke Muehlhauserâs post, âWill MacAskill on Normative Uncertaintyâ, is being categorized as the name of a user. So, not a bug with the search engine as such, but still something that the EA Forum tech team may want to fix.
Oh the joys of a long legacy of weird code. Iâve deleted those accounts, although Iâm sad to report that our search engine is not smart enough to figure out that âWill MacAskillâ should return âWilliam_MacAskillâ
Yeah, you can add lots of additional fields. It also has like 100 options for changing the algorithm (including things like changing the importance of spelling errors in search, and its eagerness to correct them), so playing around with that might make sense.
With a configuration change, the search engine now understands that karma is important in ranking posts and comments. (It unfortunately doesnât have access to karma for users.)
Curious what the problem with the current search engine is? Agree that itâs important to be able to find forum posts via Google, which is currently an EA Forum specific issue, but improvements to the search likely also affect LessWrong, so I am curious in getting more detail on that.
Posts are not listed in order of relevance. You need to know exact words from the post youâre searching for in order to find itâpreferably exact words from the title.
For example, if I wanted to find your post from four days ago on long term future grants and typed in âgrantsâ, your post wouldnât appear, because your post uses the word âgrantâ in the title instead.
For example, if I wanted to find your post from four days ago on long term future grants and typed in âgrantsâ, your post wouldnât appear, because your post uses the word âgrantâ in the title instead.
FYI, this was a very helpful concrete example.
On reflection your reasoning is false thoughâitâs not because the post uses the word âgrantâ. If I search âgrantâ I get almost identical results, certainly the first 6 are the same. If I search âltf grantsâ I get the right thing even though neither âltfâ or âgrantsâ is in the title. I also think that itâs not like there arenât a lot of other posts you could be searching for with the word âgrantâ - it isnât just random other posts, there are *many* posts withing ~2x karma that have that word in the title.
Still, I share a vague sense that something about search is not quite right, though I canât put my finger on it.
(Edit: This was written before Khorton edited a concrete example into their comment)
Interesting. I havenât had many issues with the search. I mostly just wanted it to have more options that I can tweak (like restricting it to a specific time period and author). If you know of any site (that isnât a major search engine provider) that has search that does better here, I would be curious to look into what technology they use (we use Algolia, which seems to be one of the most popular search providers out there, and people seem to generally be happy with it). It might also be an issue of configuration.
Speaking to the google search results â Itâs pretty hard to just rise up the google rankings. Weâve done the basic advice: the crawled page contains the post titles and keywords, made sure google finds the mobile view is satisfactory. Itâs likely there more we can do but itâs not straightforward. Complicating matters is that during the great spampocalypse in May, we were hit with a punitive action from google, because we were polluting their ranking algorithm with spam links. You may remember a time when there were no results linking to posts at all. We fixed it, but itâs possible (and Iâd guess likely) that weâre still getting dinged for that. Unfortunately, google gives us no way of knowing.
NB: Weâre now done planning Q4. Suggestions are still valuable, but consider holding off on further comments for a bit, we have a final draft of a post thatâs about to give a lot more context. Of course, if youâve got a useful comment youâd otherwise forget about, I donât mind continuing to answer.
What happens when you do that is that now your url bar in your browser points to this post, with a fancy standalone version of the comment above the post. Unfortunately, because the post doesnât actually change, you arenât navigating to a new page and your scroll stays where it is. Itâs a new feature from LessWrong, Iâve filed a bug report with them.
This is an interesting question. It would certainly prevent a bunch of bad behavior and force people to be more intentional in their voting. Here are I think the main reasons we /â LW have talked about it but not implemented it:
a) Some people just read way more of the Forum than others. Should their votes have less weight because they must be spread over many comments?
b) I donât want users to have to think about conserving their voting resources. If they like something, I want them to vote something and move on. Karma is fun, but the purpose of the site is the content.
Iâd be interested in seeing views/â hits counters on every post and general data on traffic.
We could a) put that data on the start of every post or b) put it under a menu option under the ⊠menu. I think (a) wouldnât provide enough value to balance the cost of busying the UI, which is currently very sparse and the more valuable for it. I donât expect (b) would be used much. I donât have the data to back this up (yet! I really want to be able to easily check all of these) but I guess most people donât click on those menu buttons very often.
My guess is that itâll be hard to beat copy and pasting. Copy and pasting of styling works fairly well and is a pretty simple C-c,C-v. It works fairly well right now, with the main complaints (images, tables) being limitations of our current editor. Iâm optimistic that a forthcoming upgrade to use CKEditor will improve the situation a lot.
Mandatory field 200 characters summarizing the blogpost
This oneâs been requested a few times. My thought is that a well written post has a summary or hook in the first paragraph. Aaron is more optimistic though.
With this one and the keywords box, Iâd tend heavily towards leaving it optional but encouraged. I want to keep posting easy, and lean towards trusting the authors to know what will work with their post.
Weâre planning Q4 goals for the Forum.
Do you use the Forum? (Probably, considering.) Do you have feelings about the Forum?
If you send me a PM, one of the CEA staffers running the Forum (myself or Aaron) will set up a call call where you can tell me all the things you think we should do.
Iâm wondering about the possibility to up-vote oneâs own posts and comments. I find that a bit of an odd system. My guess would be that someone up-voting their own post is a much weaker signal of quality than someone up-voting someone elseâs post.
Also, it feels a bit entitled/âboastful to give a strong up-vote to oneâs own posts and comments. Iâm therefore reluctant to vote on my own work.
Hence, Iâd suggest that one shouldnât be able to vote on oneâs own posts and comments.
By default your comments are posted with a regular upvote on them posts with a strong upvote on them. The fact that itâs default seems to me to lower my concern about boastfulness. Although I do think itâs possible the Forum shouldnât let you change away from those defaults. When I observed someone strong-upvoting their comments on LW, I found it really crass.
As to why not change the default, I do think that you by default endorse your comments and posts. This provides useful info to people, because if youâre a user with strong upvote power, your posts and comments enter more highly rated. This provides a small signal to new users about who the Forum has decided to trust. And it makes it less likely that youâll see a dispiriting â0â next to your comment. OTOH, we donât count self-votes for the purposes of calculating user karma, so maybe by consistency we shouldnât show it.
I am in favor of these defaults and also in favor of disallowing people to change them. I know of two people on LW who have admitted to strong-upvoting their comments, and my sense is that this behavior isnât that uncommon (to give a concrete estimate: Iâd guess about 10% of active users do this on a regular basis). Moreover, some of the people who may be initially disinclined to upvote themselves might start to do so if they suspect others are, both because the perception that a type of behavior is normal makes people more willing to engage in it, and because the norm to exercise restrain in using the upvote option may seem unfair when others are believed to not be abiding by it. This dynamic may eventually cause a much larger fraction of users to regularly self-upvote.
So I think these are pretty strong reasons for disallowing that option. And I donât see any strong reasons for the opposite view.
I guess there are two different issues:
1) Should comments and posts by default start out with positive karma, or should it be 0?
2) Should it be possible for the author to change the default level of karma their post/âcomment starts out with?
This yields at least four combinations:
a) Zero initial karma, and thatâs unchangeable.
b) Zero initial karma by default, but you could give up-votes (including strong up-votes) to your own posts, if you wanted to.
c) A default positive karma (which is a function of your total level of karma), which canât be changed.
d) A default positive karma, which can be increased (strong up-vote) or decreased (remove the default up-vote). (This is the system we have now.)
My comments only pertained to 2), whether you should be able to change the default level of karmaâe.g. to give strong up-votes to your own own posts and comments. On that, you found it âcrassâ when someone did that. You also made this comment:
This rather seems to relate to 1).
As stated, I donât think one should be able to change the default level of karma. This would rule out b) and d), and leave a) and c). I have a less strong view on how to decide between those two systems, but probably support a).
I agree with you and Pablo that Iâd rather see it unchangeable. My prioritization basically hinges on how common it is. If Pabloâs right and itâs 10%, that seems concerning. Iâve asked the LW team.
Making it unchangeable also seems reasonable to me, or at least making it so that you can no longer strong-upvote your own comments.
Strong-upvoting your own posts seems reasonable to me (and is also the current default behavior)
I think strong upvoting yourself should either be the default (opt-out), or impossible. It shouldnât be opt-in, because this rewards self-promotion.
Did you know you can see strong self upvotes for all users?
You can see the this at the user level (how much they do this in total) and Iâm 80% sure you can see this at the comment/âpost level for each user.
This might mitigate your concerns and the related activity might finally produce a report where I am ranked #1.
How can this list be viewed?
There is a 70% chance someone else will do this and explain how, making the next paragraph irrelevant:
Moving slightly slowly because this takes actual work to ensure quality (or Iâm just being annoyingly coy), if someone makes a $200 counterfactual donation to an EA charity specified by me (that meets the qualifications as a 501c3 charity in an EA cause area and donated to by senior EA grantmakers), I will produce this report and send it you (after I get back from a major conference that is going on in the next 7 days).
Oh, I thought you meant this was already available onlineâmy mistake!
Please fix the EA forum search engine and/âor make it easier to find forum posts through Google.
On the whole, I really like the search engine. But one small bug you may want to fix is that occasionally the wrong results appear under âUsersâ. For example, if you type âWill MacAskillâ, the three results that show up are posts where the name âWill MacAskillâ appears in the title, rather than the user Will MacAskill.
EDIT: Mmh, this appears to happen because a trackback to Luke Muehlhauserâs post, âWill MacAskill on Normative Uncertaintyâ, is being categorized as the name of a user. So, not a bug with the search engine as such, but still something that the EA Forum tech team may want to fix.
Oh the joys of a long legacy of weird code. Iâve deleted those accounts, although Iâm sad to report that our search engine is not smart enough to figure out that âWill MacAskillâ should return âWilliam_MacAskillâ
Is there a way to give Algolia additional information from the userâs profile so that it can fuzzy search it?
We could probably add a nickname field that we set manually.
Yeah, you can add lots of additional fields. It also has like 100 options for changing the algorithm (including things like changing the importance of spelling errors in search, and its eagerness to correct them), so playing around with that might make sense.
With a configuration change, the search engine now understands that karma is important in ranking posts and comments. (It unfortunately doesnât have access to karma for users.)
This doesnât fix the example I put forward, but it does make the search function more understandable and less frustrating. Thanks!
Oh, interesting. LessWrong always had that, and I never even thought about that maybe being a configuration difference between the two sites.
Curious what the problem with the current search engine is? Agree that itâs important to be able to find forum posts via Google, which is currently an EA Forum specific issue, but improvements to the search likely also affect LessWrong, so I am curious in getting more detail on that.
Posts are not listed in order of relevance. You need to know exact words from the post youâre searching for in order to find itâpreferably exact words from the title.
For example, if I wanted to find your post from four days ago on long term future grants and typed in âgrantsâ, your post wouldnât appear, because your post uses the word âgrantâ in the title instead.
FYI, this was a very helpful concrete example.
On reflection your reasoning is false thoughâitâs not because the post uses the word âgrantâ. If I search âgrantâ I get almost identical results, certainly the first 6 are the same. If I search âltf grantsâ I get the right thing even though neither âltfâ or âgrantsâ is in the title. I also think that itâs not like there arenât a lot of other posts you could be searching for with the word âgrantâ - it isnât just random other posts, there are *many* posts withing ~2x karma that have that word in the title.
Still, I share a vague sense that something about search is not quite right, though I canât put my finger on it.
(Edit: This was written before Khorton edited a concrete example into their comment)
Interesting. I havenât had many issues with the search. I mostly just wanted it to have more options that I can tweak (like restricting it to a specific time period and author). If you know of any site (that isnât a major search engine provider) that has search that does better here, I would be curious to look into what technology they use (we use Algolia, which seems to be one of the most popular search providers out there, and people seem to generally be happy with it). It might also be an issue of configuration.
Speaking to the google search results â Itâs pretty hard to just rise up the google rankings. Weâve done the basic advice: the crawled page contains the post titles and keywords, made sure google finds the mobile view is satisfactory. Itâs likely there more we can do but itâs not straightforward. Complicating matters is that during the great spampocalypse in May, we were hit with a punitive action from google, because we were polluting their ranking algorithm with spam links. You may remember a time when there were no results linking to posts at all. We fixed it, but itâs possible (and Iâd guess likely) that weâre still getting dinged for that. Unfortunately, google gives us no way of knowing.
NB: Weâre now done planning Q4. Suggestions are still valuable, but consider holding off on further comments for a bit, we have a final draft of a post thatâs about to give a lot more context. Of course, if youâve got a useful comment youâd otherwise forget about, I donât mind continuing to answer.
I clicked on âgo to Permalinkâ for this post, because I was going to send it to a friend, but I donât think it did anything.
What I actually wanted to do was find a link to just this post (not the whole shortform) that wasnât going to change.
What happens when you do that is that now your url bar in your browser points to this post, with a fancy standalone version of the comment above the post. Unfortunately, because the post doesnât actually change, you arenât navigating to a new page and your scroll stays where it is. Itâs a new feature from LessWrong, Iâve filed a bug report with them.
Iâd be interested in seeing views/â hits counters on every post and general data on traffic.
Also quadratic voting for upvotes.
This is an interesting question. It would certainly prevent a bunch of bad behavior and force people to be more intentional in their voting. Here are I think the main reasons we /â LW have talked about it but not implemented it:
a) Some people just read way more of the Forum than others. Should their votes have less weight because they must be spread over many comments?
b) I donât want users to have to think about conserving their voting resources. If they like something, I want them to vote something and move on. Karma is fun, but the purpose of the site is the content.
We could a) put that data on the start of every post or b) put it under a menu option under the ⊠menu. I think (a) wouldnât provide enough value to balance the cost of busying the UI, which is currently very sparse and the more valuable for it. I donât expect (b) would be used much. I donât have the data to back this up (yet! I really want to be able to easily check all of these) but I guess most people donât click on those menu buttons very often.
Mandatory field 200 characters summarizing the blogpost.
Mandatory keywords box.
Better Google Docs integration.
See an upcoming post for how I feel about tagging.
My guess is that itâll be hard to beat copy and pasting. Copy and pasting of styling works fairly well and is a pretty simple C-c,C-v. It works fairly well right now, with the main complaints (images, tables) being limitations of our current editor. Iâm optimistic that a forthcoming upgrade to use CKEditor will improve the situation a lot.
Copying images from public Gdocs to the non-markdown editor works fine.
This oneâs been requested a few times. My thought is that a well written post has a summary or hook in the first paragraph. Aaron is more optimistic though.
With this one and the keywords box, Iâd tend heavily towards leaving it optional but encouraged. I want to keep posting easy, and lean towards trusting the authors to know what will work with their post.