Really liked the content of the post. But also somehow felt that some of the language ended up being a bit too… I guess “crass” for me?
I am usually working in an open workspace, and the language of the post made me feel like I wanted to quickly scroll by and to avoid having other people look at my screen while I was reading the post. This definitely had a serious impact on my reading experience, and made it very hard for me to engage properly with the post.
I am not sure what to do about this. I would probably end up feeling uncomfortable in a world where posts like this would fill the frontpage, and do find that the marginal post like this has a large impact on the degree to which I feel comfortable surfing the page in public, which is the vast majority of times I would visit the page. So, not sure. I am close to downvoting this post because of this, because I do think more content like this would have a large impact on my use of the page, but also feel a sense that this is just my personal preference and other people might feel very differently here. I will not vote on this post for now, but am interested in other people’s input on this question.
I support NSFW filters that are opt-in-able, because I don’t want other people to feel uncomfortable browsing LW. However I appreciate this style of writing. It reads as more natural to me, and is therefore easier for me to parse. And if I personally had an interesting insight I wanted to share, I’d rather not have to worry about signalling class here.
I’ll also note that I had a strong emotional reaction against the “anti-vulgarity” posts here, because I’ve had people explicitly tell me I need to change the way I talk if I want my ideas taken seriously (in a casual, non-work-related setting), in ways that made it obvious that they were trying to gain social status over me and not actually trying to be helpful (I do not at all think that is what is going on here). But I will note that a handful of people supporting anti-vulgarity policies makes me feel like I don’t belong, even though I don’t think I ever posted in vulgar or natural speech on LW. I do not necessarily endorse this emotional reaction, just pointing out that it occurred.
I also somehow missed the content-warning at the beginning. Probably because it didn’t have a paragraph break after the “related to” section, and so I parsed it as part of the “related to” section. So I guess this is a small piece of feedback on making sure there is a full paragraph break there.
Longterm I’d resolve this with tags for NSFW, Sex, and/or Vulgar Language, which can get filtered from Front Page (possibly with some base filters people have the option of turning off)
That was the source of the “apprehension” I listed above (a prediction based on the title that it would go that way) and while I found it non-problematic, I also note that I was reading alone in a private room. I estimate with 80% confidence that had I been reading at work or around other not-close-friend acquaintances, I would have had an experience that resonates with yours.
I was somewhat leery about putting this post on the front page, but eventually decided to since it had useful rationality content and there was not a clear guideline about NSFW content on LW (as there is about e.g. culture war stuff). I placed a content warning at the beginning to help people who might not want to read it avoid it. The title is something I’m unsure about changing: generally, I prefer to write titles that make it quite obvious if the article is about something people might want to avoid, but on the other hand I certainly don’t want to make LW’s frontpage something people feel uncomfortable browsing in public.
It occurs to me that by “crass” you might mean “number of swear words”, in which case I can easily fix it if people object by editing the LW version of any post to be swear-word-free.
I think the swear words made a reasonably large difference for me, and editing them out would have improved my reading experience a good bit.
(To be specific: “pussy” is clearly a swear word for me, “sex” is not. This line also irked me: “”I say grow that shit like a jungle, give ’em something strong to hold onto, let it fly in the open wind”)
Also, I note that it’s a problem (in terms of ability to opt out/my occasional attempts to apply rationality to sex not ruining everyone’s ability to browse LW in public) that even if I put it on my personal LW blog the *comments* would still appear in the recent comments feed. (Perhaps I should direct the people on Thing of Things who want to discuss their shower habits over here. :) )
For the feature list we could have the option to have comments on some posts not appear in recent comments, and/or allow people making comments the option to have their comment not appear on the recent comments page. I remember someone (I think it was you but I’m not 100%) noting that they raised their comment-threshold because comments would clutter up recent comments; if we could opt out of that we could give positive-feedback and other low-signal-but-worth-sending comments while making the recent comments feed better.
I think in the long run comments on personal posts shouldn’t show up on the frontpage, unless they hit a certain karma threshold, and authors should be able to prevent comments to be posted to the frontpage at all. For now the comments on the frontpage are one of the primary ways people discover posts that are posted to people’s personal blogs, so I think until we have better discoverability I would want to leave the default as is.
Really liked the content of the post. But also somehow felt that some of the language ended up being a bit too… I guess “crass” for me?
I am usually working in an open workspace, and the language of the post made me feel like I wanted to quickly scroll by and to avoid having other people look at my screen while I was reading the post. This definitely had a serious impact on my reading experience, and made it very hard for me to engage properly with the post.
I am not sure what to do about this. I would probably end up feeling uncomfortable in a world where posts like this would fill the frontpage, and do find that the marginal post like this has a large impact on the degree to which I feel comfortable surfing the page in public, which is the vast majority of times I would visit the page. So, not sure. I am close to downvoting this post because of this, because I do think more content like this would have a large impact on my use of the page, but also feel a sense that this is just my personal preference and other people might feel very differently here. I will not vote on this post for now, but am interested in other people’s input on this question.
I support NSFW filters that are opt-in-able, because I don’t want other people to feel uncomfortable browsing LW. However I appreciate this style of writing. It reads as more natural to me, and is therefore easier for me to parse. And if I personally had an interesting insight I wanted to share, I’d rather not have to worry about signalling class here.
I’ll also note that I had a strong emotional reaction against the “anti-vulgarity” posts here, because I’ve had people explicitly tell me I need to change the way I talk if I want my ideas taken seriously (in a casual, non-work-related setting), in ways that made it obvious that they were trying to gain social status over me and not actually trying to be helpful (I do not at all think that is what is going on here). But I will note that a handful of people supporting anti-vulgarity policies makes me feel like I don’t belong, even though I don’t think I ever posted in vulgar or natural speech on LW. I do not necessarily endorse this emotional reaction, just pointing out that it occurred.
I would much rather solve the problem of reading-in-public with clear content warnings than restricting how explicitly people talk about things.
I also somehow missed the content-warning at the beginning. Probably because it didn’t have a paragraph break after the “related to” section, and so I parsed it as part of the “related to” section. So I guess this is a small piece of feedback on making sure there is a full paragraph break there.
Longterm I’d resolve this with tags for NSFW, Sex, and/or Vulgar Language, which can get filtered from Front Page (possibly with some base filters people have the option of turning off)
Edited.
I’d like to suggest that this conversation move into Meta.
Agree. Meta is the correct place for this. I think the future the sunshine regiment probably want so move things to there a bit earlier.
Also, I will just be deleting all comments in this thread made after this comment. I don’t want to clutter up the frontpage with more meta discussion.
That was the source of the “apprehension” I listed above (a prediction based on the title that it would go that way) and while I found it non-problematic, I also note that I was reading alone in a private room. I estimate with 80% confidence that had I been reading at work or around other not-close-friend acquaintances, I would have had an experience that resonates with yours.
I’m also interested in people talking about this!
I was somewhat leery about putting this post on the front page, but eventually decided to since it had useful rationality content and there was not a clear guideline about NSFW content on LW (as there is about e.g. culture war stuff). I placed a content warning at the beginning to help people who might not want to read it avoid it. The title is something I’m unsure about changing: generally, I prefer to write titles that make it quite obvious if the article is about something people might want to avoid, but on the other hand I certainly don’t want to make LW’s frontpage something people feel uncomfortable browsing in public.
It occurs to me that by “crass” you might mean “number of swear words”, in which case I can easily fix it if people object by editing the LW version of any post to be swear-word-free.
I think the swear words made a reasonably large difference for me, and editing them out would have improved my reading experience a good bit.
(To be specific: “pussy” is clearly a swear word for me, “sex” is not. This line also irked me: “”I say grow that shit like a jungle, give ’em something strong to hold onto, let it fly in the open wind”)
Also, I note that it’s a problem (in terms of ability to opt out/my occasional attempts to apply rationality to sex not ruining everyone’s ability to browse LW in public) that even if I put it on my personal LW blog the *comments* would still appear in the recent comments feed. (Perhaps I should direct the people on Thing of Things who want to discuss their shower habits over here. :) )
For the feature list we could have the option to have comments on some posts not appear in recent comments, and/or allow people making comments the option to have their comment not appear on the recent comments page. I remember someone (I think it was you but I’m not 100%) noting that they raised their comment-threshold because comments would clutter up recent comments; if we could opt out of that we could give positive-feedback and other low-signal-but-worth-sending comments while making the recent comments feed better.
I strongly support this.
I think in the long run comments on personal posts shouldn’t show up on the frontpage, unless they hit a certain karma threshold, and authors should be able to prevent comments to be posted to the frontpage at all. For now the comments on the frontpage are one of the primary ways people discover posts that are posted to people’s personal blogs, so I think until we have better discoverability I would want to leave the default as is.