On LessWrong, the frontpage algorithm down-weights older posts based on the time-since-posted, not the time-since-frontpaged. So, if a post doesn’t get frontpaged until a few days after posting, then it’s unlikely to get many views.
LessWrong has an autofrontpager that works a reasonable amount of the time. Otherwise, posts have to be manually frontpaged by a person. In my experience, this was always quite quick, but my most recent post was not frontpaged until 3 days after it was posted, so AFAICT it never actually appeared on the frontpage (unless you clicked “Load More”).
I think the solution is to downweight posts based on the time-since-frontpaged.
If you downweigh posts based on the time-since-frontpaged then posts get a huge boost when they have a delay of getting frontpaged (since they then first show to everyone who has personal blog enabled on their frontpage, and can accumulate karma during this time, and then when they have their effective date reset have a huge advantage over posts that were immediately frontpaged, because the karma provides a much longer visibility window).
I don’t really have a great solution to this problem. I think the auto-frontpager helps a lot, though of course only if we can get the error rate sufficiently down.
I’d be happy, if the auto-frontpager is ~instant, to get the option “delay publishing until human review” if it declines frontpage. Whether something gets ~50% less karma than it would by default is a pretty major drop in the effectiveness of what is often many hours of work, I’d be fine with waiting a day or two to avoid that usually.
Relatedly, I’ve been thinking about building a schedule-this-post-for-publication feature. If I publish a post at 10pm, it’s often better to publish the next morning for visibility. My guess is this would be useful for Inkhaven Residents who finish writing near-midnight.
If I could schedule, the frontpage review happened before publishing, and the schedule UI had “delay publishing until frontpage”[1] as a checkbox, this would be ~solved.
I’d prefer this to “delay publishing until human review”, as ~half a dozen times in the past few years I’ve appealed via Intercom and had a human-reviewed page retroactively frontpaged (usually a resource, which LW team’s priors seem to be something like ‘this won’t be maintained’ but will because I optimize a bunch for not leaving stale projects).
Or even better, at the the time when a post is frontpaged, check if will actually appear on the frontpage. If it is too old and has too little karma to be seen, then use the time-since-frontpaged.
On LessWrong, the frontpage algorithm down-weights older posts based on the time-since-posted, not the time-since-frontpaged. So, if a post doesn’t get frontpaged until a few days after posting, then it’s unlikely to get many views.
LessWrong has an autofrontpager that works a reasonable amount of the time. Otherwise, posts have to be manually frontpaged by a person. In my experience, this was always quite quick, but my most recent post was not frontpaged until 3 days after it was posted, so AFAICT it never actually appeared on the frontpage (unless you clicked “Load More”).
I think the solution is to downweight posts based on the time-since-frontpaged.
If you downweigh posts based on the time-since-frontpaged then posts get a huge boost when they have a delay of getting frontpaged (since they then first show to everyone who has personal blog enabled on their frontpage, and can accumulate karma during this time, and then when they have their effective date reset have a huge advantage over posts that were immediately frontpaged, because the karma provides a much longer visibility window).
I don’t really have a great solution to this problem. I think the auto-frontpager helps a lot, though of course only if we can get the error rate sufficiently down.
I’d be happy, if the auto-frontpager is ~instant, to get the option “delay publishing until human review” if it declines frontpage. Whether something gets ~50% less karma than it would by default is a pretty major drop in the effectiveness of what is often many hours of work, I’d be fine with waiting a day or two to avoid that usually.
That makes sense! I’ll think about it, though probably fitting that complexity into the publishing process isn’t worth it.
Relatedly, I’ve been thinking about building a schedule-this-post-for-publication feature. If I publish a post at 10pm, it’s often better to publish the next morning for visibility. My guess is this would be useful for Inkhaven Residents who finish writing near-midnight.
If I could schedule, the frontpage review happened before publishing, and the schedule UI had “delay publishing until frontpage”[1] as a checkbox, this would be ~solved.
I’d prefer this to “delay publishing until human review”, as ~half a dozen times in the past few years I’ve appealed via Intercom and had a human-reviewed page retroactively frontpaged (usually a resource, which LW team’s priors seem to be something like ‘this won’t be maintained’ but will because I optimize a bunch for not leaving stale projects).
Examples which Rafe requested when I mentioned this: the following were all marked as personal blog until I intercom’d in and asked for a re-assessment
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JsqPftLgvHLL4Pscg/new-weekly-newsletter-for-ai-safety-events-and-training
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dEnKkYmFhXaukizWW/aisafety-community-a-living-document-of-ai-safety
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vxSGDLGRtfcf6FWBg/top-ai-safety-newsletters-books-podcasts-etc-new-aisafety (nudge didn’t work for this one)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MKvtmNGCtwNqc44qm/announcing-aisafety-training
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JRtARkng9JJt77G2o/ai-safety-memes-wiki
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x85YnN8kzmpdjmGWg/14-ai-safety-advisors-you-can-speak-to-new-aisafety-com
Perhaps it could use time-since-frontpaged only if the karma is below some threshold.
Or even better, at the the time when a post is frontpaged, check if will actually appear on the frontpage. If it is too old and has too little karma to be seen, then use the time-since-frontpaged.