LessWrong used to have a lot of comments back in the day. I wonder if part of the issue is simply that the number of posts went up, which means a bigger surfaces for readers to be spread across. Why did the writer/reader ratio go up? Perhaps because writing posts falls into the “endorsed” category, whereas reading/writing comments feels like “time-wasting”. And as CFAR et al helped rationalists be more productive, they let activities labeled as “time-wasting” fall by the wayside. (Note that there’s something rather incoherent about this: If the subject matter of the post was important enough to be worth a post, surely it is also worth reading/commenting?)
Anyway, here are the reasons why commenting falls into the “endorsed” column for me:
It seems neglected. See above argument.
I suspect people actually read comments a fair amount. I know I do. Sometimes I will skip to the comments before reading the post itself.
Writing a comment doesn’t trigger the same “officialness” anxiety that writing a post does. I don’t feel obligated to do background research, think about how my ideas should be structured, or try to anticipate potential lines of counterargument.
Taking this further, commenting doesn’t feel like work. So it takes fewer spoons. I’m writing this comment during a pre-designated goof off period, in fact. The ideal activity is one which is high-impact yet feels like play. Commenting and brainstorming are two of the few things that fall in that category for me.
I know there was an effort to move the community from Facebook to LW recently. Maybe if we pitched LW as “just as fun as Facebook, but discussing more valuable things and adding to a searchable/taggable knowledge archive” that could lure people over? IMO the concept of “work that feels like play” is underrated in the rationalist and EA communities.
Unfortunately, even though I find it fun to write comments, I tend to get demoralized a while later when my comments don’t get comment replies themselves :P So that ends up being an “endorsed” reason to avoid commenting.
I also felt frustrated by lack of feedback my posts got, my response was to write this: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2E3fpnikKu6237AF6/the-case-for-a-bigger-audience Maybe submitting LW posts to targeted subreddits could be high impact?
LessWrong used to have a lot of comments back in the day. I wonder if part of the issue is simply that the number of posts went up, which means a bigger surfaces for readers to be spread across. Why did the writer/reader ratio go up? Perhaps because writing posts falls into the “endorsed” category, whereas reading/writing comments feels like “time-wasting”. And as CFAR et al helped rationalists be more productive, they let activities labeled as “time-wasting” fall by the wayside. (Note that there’s something rather incoherent about this: If the subject matter of the post was important enough to be worth a post, surely it is also worth reading/commenting?)
Anyway, here are the reasons why commenting falls into the “endorsed” column for me:
It seems neglected. See above argument.
I suspect people actually read comments a fair amount. I know I do. Sometimes I will skip to the comments before reading the post itself.
Writing a comment doesn’t trigger the same “officialness” anxiety that writing a post does. I don’t feel obligated to do background research, think about how my ideas should be structured, or try to anticipate potential lines of counterargument.
Taking this further, commenting doesn’t feel like work. So it takes fewer spoons. I’m writing this comment during a pre-designated goof off period, in fact. The ideal activity is one which is high-impact yet feels like play. Commenting and brainstorming are two of the few things that fall in that category for me.
I know there was an effort to move the community from Facebook to LW recently. Maybe if we pitched LW as “just as fun as Facebook, but discussing more valuable things and adding to a searchable/taggable knowledge archive” that could lure people over? IMO the concept of “work that feels like play” is underrated in the rationalist and EA communities.
Unfortunately, even though I find it fun to write comments, I tend to get demoralized a while later when my comments don’t get comment replies themselves :P So that ends up being an “endorsed” reason to avoid commenting.