When I go on LessWrong, I generally just look at the quick takes and then close the tab. Quick takes cause me to spend more time on LessWrong but spend less time reading actual posts.
On the other hand, sometimes quick takes are very high quality and I read them and get value from them when I may not have read the same content as a full post.
Interesting. I am concerned about this effect, but I do really like a lot of quick takes. I wonder whether maybe this suggests a problem with how we present posts.
I think the biggest problem with how posts are presented is it doesn’t make the author embarrassed to make their post needlessly long, and doesn’t signal “we want you to make this shorter”. Shortforms do this, so you get very info dense posts, but actual posts kinda signal the opposite. If its so short, why not just make it a shortform, and if it shouldn’t be a shortform, surely you can add more to it. After all, nobody makes half-page lesswrong posts anymore.
This. The struggle is real. My brain has started treating publishing a LessWrong post almost the way it’d treat publishing a paper. An acquaintance got upset at me once because they thought I hadn’t provided sufficient discussion of their related Lesswrong post in mine. Shortforms are the place I still feel safe just writing things.
It makes sense to me that this happened. AI Safety doesn’t have a journal, and training programs heavily encourage people to post their output on LessWrong. So part of it is slowly becoming a journal, and the felt social norms around posts are morphing to reflect that.
I’d love to see the reading time listed on the frontpage. That would make the incentives naturally slide towards shorter posts, as more people would click and it would get more karma. Feels much more decision relevant than when the post was posted.
Get an LLM to generate a TLDR of the post and after the user finishes reading the post, have a pop-up “Was opening the post worth it, given that you’ve already read the TLDR?”.
When I go on LessWrong, I generally just look at the quick takes and then close the tab. Quick takes cause me to spend more time on LessWrong but spend less time reading actual posts.
On the other hand, sometimes quick takes are very high quality and I read them and get value from them when I may not have read the same content as a full post.
Interesting. I am concerned about this effect, but I do really like a lot of quick takes. I wonder whether maybe this suggests a problem with how we present posts.
Quick takes are presented inline, posts are not. Perhaps posts could be presented as title + <80 (140?) character summary.
I think the biggest problem with how posts are presented is it doesn’t make the author embarrassed to make their post needlessly long, and doesn’t signal “we want you to make this shorter”. Shortforms do this, so you get very info dense posts, but actual posts kinda signal the opposite. If its so short, why not just make it a shortform, and if it shouldn’t be a shortform, surely you can add more to it. After all, nobody makes half-page lesswrong posts anymore.
This. The struggle is real. My brain has started treating publishing a LessWrong post almost the way it’d treat publishing a paper. An acquaintance got upset at me once because they thought I hadn’t provided sufficient discussion of their related Lesswrong post in mine. Shortforms are the place I still feel safe just writing things.
It makes sense to me that this happened. AI Safety doesn’t have a journal, and training programs heavily encourage people to post their output on LessWrong. So part of it is slowly becoming a journal, and the felt social norms around posts are morphing to reflect that.
In some ways the equilibrium here is worse, journals have page limits.
I’d love to see the reading time listed on the frontpage. That would make the incentives naturally slide towards shorter posts, as more people would click and it would get more karma. Feels much more decision relevant than when the post was posted.
Naive idea:
Get an LLM to generate a TLDR of the post and after the user finishes reading the post, have a pop-up “Was opening the post worth it, given that you’ve already read the TLDR?”.