Personally, I expect this would worsen my experience because it would fragment comments. I’m not going to go to LW to read comments for SSC. I prefer to read comments, if any, on SSC itself.
In general, for most of the people, all they are going to notice (if anything) is a slight decrease in quality of on-site comments, so just a handful of people desiring this does not mean that it’s net positive for Scott’s readership at large.
Split comment-threads would also reduce cross-pollination of ideas. It’s good that LessWrong readers currently bring their ideas in contact with some people who only have vague background awareness of LW at SSC. It’s a challenge in practising explaining things well, provides feedback, and spreads useful ways of thinking.
So this would be personally undesirable for me and also has some clear negative externalities on others.
To be clear, I don’t have the time to do it personally, I’d just do it for any posts I’d particularly enjoy reading discussion on or discussing. So if someone else feels it’s a good idea and Scott’s cool with it, their doing it would be the best way to make it happen.
On fragmentation, I find Raemon’s comment fairly convincing:
2) Maybe it’ll split the comments? Sure, but the comments there are already huge and unwieldy (possibly more-than-dunbar’s number worth of commenters) so I’m actually fine with that. Discussion over there is already pretty split up among comment threads in a hard to follow fashion.
Hey Tom, thanks for volunteering to do this.
Personally, I expect this would worsen my experience because it would fragment comments. I’m not going to go to LW to read comments for SSC. I prefer to read comments, if any, on SSC itself.
In general, for most of the people, all they are going to notice (if anything) is a slight decrease in quality of on-site comments, so just a handful of people desiring this does not mean that it’s net positive for Scott’s readership at large.
Split comment-threads would also reduce cross-pollination of ideas. It’s good that LessWrong readers currently bring their ideas in contact with some people who only have vague background awareness of LW at SSC. It’s a challenge in practising explaining things well, provides feedback, and spreads useful ways of thinking.
So this would be personally undesirable for me and also has some clear negative externalities on others.
To be clear, I don’t have the time to do it personally, I’d just do it for any posts I’d particularly enjoy reading discussion on or discussing. So if someone else feels it’s a good idea and Scott’s cool with it, their doing it would be the best way to make it happen.
One possibility to avoid fragmenting the conversation would be to wait to link to link to a post at SSC until the comments have died down over there.
On fragmentation, I find Raemon’s comment fairly convincing: