Ignoring for the moment whether or not that was a high quality post or a post that we want to be on lesswrong, I strongly disapprove of upvoting low quality or unwanted posts simply to be nice to someone.
Exactly. The voting system has an important role on this website. We should not abuse it because of something unrelated to its original role, because then it will be more difficult to use.
This said, we definitely should be friendly to 80,000 Hours, and here are a few quick ideas how to do it, without abusing the article voting system:
put a 80,000 Hours banner on LW homepage;
put a link to 80,000 Hours on the right side of LW screens;
put an RSS feed of 80,000 Hours on the right side of LW screens (like Overcoming Bias has now);
integrate RSS feed of 80,000 Hours with LW “Discussion” page; at the top it could display visually separated “Articles from friendly sites”, for example top 3 articles from each;
create an “Announcement” area on LW homepage where people from 80,000 Hours can put their message of limited length.
Each of these ideas (and you can think about some new ones) would provide 80,000 Hours visibility on LW homepage, without asking LW readers to compromise the LW voting system. Link to friends are OK—just not in the LW article queue.
We could use this discussion to brainstorm the best way to promote 80,000 Hours (and other friendly sites) on LW.
I think we should. Personally, I was put off for years from joining Less Wrong when it split off from Overcoming Bias because everytime I looked the home page was nothing but meetup announcements.
I wasn’t an active reader during the split—life had intervened. Indeed, for a while there I incorrectly believed Overcoming Bias had renamed itself Less Wrong following a redesign.
Local Meetup announcements are useful information promoting something we want that appears nowhere else. But I would still support them not being on discussion page if there was another space for them.
I strongly disapprove of upvoting low quality or unwanted posts simply to be nice to someone
I agree. Upvoting low quality posts is not what I am recommending. I maintain that the post in question was not low quality, but a generous invitation well suited to our community, and that dismissing it as an ad was a bad response.
Advertisements can offer useful things. The free CDs given out by AOL can be erased and used to store data. Less Wrong is not a place to get “generous invitations”, it’s a place to read information and arguments to do with rationality. An invitation to a black tie dinner is a thoughtful gesture, but asking “What the heck is this doing on Less Wrong”? is an appropriate response to such a gesture.
The free CDs given out by AOL can be erased and used to store data.
I don’t think this is true. It’s cheaper and more reliable to stamp a few million CD-ROMs from a master than it is to get each of them spinning, fire a laser at them, and then make them stop spinning.
Ignoring for the moment whether or not that was a high quality post or a post that we want to be on lesswrong, I strongly disapprove of upvoting low quality or unwanted posts simply to be nice to someone.
Exactly. The voting system has an important role on this website. We should not abuse it because of something unrelated to its original role, because then it will be more difficult to use.
This said, we definitely should be friendly to 80,000 Hours, and here are a few quick ideas how to do it, without abusing the article voting system:
put a 80,000 Hours banner on LW homepage;
put a link to 80,000 Hours on the right side of LW screens;
put an RSS feed of 80,000 Hours on the right side of LW screens (like Overcoming Bias has now);
integrate RSS feed of 80,000 Hours with LW “Discussion” page; at the top it could display visually separated “Articles from friendly sites”, for example top 3 articles from each;
create an “Announcement” area on LW homepage where people from 80,000 Hours can put their message of limited length.
Each of these ideas (and you can think about some new ones) would provide 80,000 Hours visibility on LW homepage, without asking LW readers to compromise the LW voting system. Link to friends are OK—just not in the LW article queue.
We could use this discussion to brainstorm the best way to promote 80,000 Hours (and other friendly sites) on LW.
Should we apply the same logic to local LW meetup announcements? If not, what is different?
I think we should. Personally, I was put off for years from joining Less Wrong when it split off from Overcoming Bias because everytime I looked the home page was nothing but meetup announcements.
Interesting—I don’t remember meetup announcements until a couple of years after the split.
I wasn’t an active reader during the split—life had intervened. Indeed, for a while there I incorrectly believed Overcoming Bias had renamed itself Less Wrong following a redesign.
Local Meetup announcements are useful information promoting something we want that appears nowhere else. But I would still support them not being on discussion page if there was another space for them.
Redesigning the article categories would be useful. “Main” and “Discussion” are not enough for the amount and structure of articles we have now.
A possible solution is “Top Articles”, “Articles”, “Forum”—the last category for meetups and recurrent topics.
People have complained before about the post list being overwhelmed with meetup announcements.
I agree. Upvoting low quality posts is not what I am recommending. I maintain that the post in question was not low quality, but a generous invitation well suited to our community, and that dismissing it as an ad was a bad response.
Advertisements can offer useful things. The free CDs given out by AOL can be erased and used to store data. Less Wrong is not a place to get “generous invitations”, it’s a place to read information and arguments to do with rationality. An invitation to a black tie dinner is a thoughtful gesture, but asking “What the heck is this doing on Less Wrong”? is an appropriate response to such a gesture.
I don’t think this is true. It’s cheaper and more reliable to stamp a few million CD-ROMs from a master than it is to get each of them spinning, fire a laser at them, and then make them stop spinning.
Me neither.