The discussion section has sucked all the interesting topics away from the main page. What remained is a not very good advice column with a rationalist flavor. The last promoted article that interested me was posted on Jan 18, and the last non-promoted such article was on Feb 14 (not counting Stuart’s posts, which are interesting but more of the “thinking out loud” variety). So I can safely stop checking “Recent Posts” for a month, or two months if I’m restricted to seeing promoted posts only. In the discussion section, on the other hand, there’s been tons of interesting stuff over the last month.
Yeah, there’s definitely some imbalance that’s stripping the main page of content. I think it’s pretty conclusive that the intermediate ‘top-level-articles-not-promoted’ category should just be abandoned and articles should be promoted directly from discussion. But anything that requires code modifications should be ruled out as a reasonable prediction for the short/medium term.
I think it’s pretty conclusive that the intermediate ‘top-level-articles-not-promoted’ category should just be abandoned and articles should be promoted directly from discussion.
This is a great idea IMO. The easiest way to implement it now is by just removing the option of posting to the toplevel. Make everyone post everything to discussion. Editors already have the power to move selected articles to the toplevel and promote them. Doesn’t seem to require much programming, though I’m not an expert on the LW codebase.
I think it’s pretty conclusive that the intermediate ‘top-level-articles-not-promoted’ category should just be abandoned and articles should be promoted directly from discussion.
This would raise the pressure on authors in discussion section, which is undesirable, and eliminate the explicit category of carefully crafted on-topic articles that don’t get promoted, which I believe is also undesirable.
The discussion section has sucked all the interesting topics away from the main page. What remained is a not very good advice column with a rationalist flavor. The last promoted article that interested me was posted on Jan 18, and the last non-promoted such article was on Feb 14 (not counting Stuart’s posts, which are interesting but more of the “thinking out loud” variety). So I can safely stop checking “Recent Posts” for a month, or two months if I’m restricted to seeing promoted posts only. In the discussion section, on the other hand, there’s been tons of interesting stuff over the last month.
Yeah, there’s definitely some imbalance that’s stripping the main page of content. I think it’s pretty conclusive that the intermediate ‘top-level-articles-not-promoted’ category should just be abandoned and articles should be promoted directly from discussion. But anything that requires code modifications should be ruled out as a reasonable prediction for the short/medium term.
This is a great idea IMO. The easiest way to implement it now is by just removing the option of posting to the toplevel. Make everyone post everything to discussion. Editors already have the power to move selected articles to the toplevel and promote them. Doesn’t seem to require much programming, though I’m not an expert on the LW codebase.
There is currently a bug where links to comments in discussion section die when the article moves to the main site.
This would raise the pressure on authors in discussion section, which is undesirable, and eliminate the explicit category of carefully crafted on-topic articles that don’t get promoted, which I believe is also undesirable.
I find the discussion section way less scary to post to. Mind you, I’ve so far posted a link and a question.