It seems slightly bad that you can vote on comments under the Quick Takes and Popular Comments sections without needing to click on the comment and without leaving the frontpage.
This is different than posts where in order to vote, you have to actually click on the post and leave the main page (which perhaps requires more activation energy).
I’m unsure, but I think this could result in a higher frequency of cases where Quick Takes and comments go viral in problematic ways relative to posts. (Based on my vague sense from the EA forum.)
This doesn’t seem very important, but I thought it would be worth quickly noting.
I feel like Quick Takes and Popular Comments on the EA forum both do a good job of showing me content I’m glad to have seen (and in the case of the EA forum that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen) and of making the experience of making a shortform better (in that you get more and better engagement). So far, this also seems fairly true on LessWrong, but we’re presumably out of equilibrium.
Overall, I feel like posts on LessWrong are too long, and so am particularly excited about finding my way to things that are a little shorter. (It would also be cool if we could figure out how to do rigour well or other things that benefit from length, but I don’t feel like I’m getting that much advantage from the length yet).
My guess is that the problems you gesture at will be real and the feature will still be net positive. I wish there were a way to “pay off” the bad parts with some of the benefit; probably there is and I haven’t thought of it.
Yeah, I was a bit worried about this, especially for popular comments. For quick takes, it does seem like you can see all the relevant context before voting, and you were also able to already vote on comments from the Recent Discussion section (though that section isn’t sorted by votes, so at less risk of viral dynamics). I do feel a bit worried that popular comments will get a bunch of votes without people reading the underlying post it’s responding to.
It seems slightly bad that you can vote on comments under the Quick Takes and Popular Comments sections without needing to click on the comment and without leaving the frontpage.
This is different than posts where in order to vote, you have to actually click on the post and leave the main page (which perhaps requires more activation energy).
I’m unsure, but I think this could result in a higher frequency of cases where Quick Takes and comments go viral in problematic ways relative to posts. (Based on my vague sense from the EA forum.)
This doesn’t seem very important, but I thought it would be worth quickly noting.
I feel like Quick Takes and Popular Comments on the EA forum both do a good job of showing me content I’m glad to have seen (and in the case of the EA forum that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen) and of making the experience of making a shortform better (in that you get more and better engagement). So far, this also seems fairly true on LessWrong, but we’re presumably out of equilibrium.
Overall, I feel like posts on LessWrong are too long, and so am particularly excited about finding my way to things that are a little shorter. (It would also be cool if we could figure out how to do rigour well or other things that benefit from length, but I don’t feel like I’m getting that much advantage from the length yet).
My guess is that the problems you gesture at will be real and the feature will still be net positive. I wish there were a way to “pay off” the bad parts with some of the benefit; probably there is and I haven’t thought of it.
Yeah, I was a bit worried about this, especially for popular comments. For quick takes, it does seem like you can see all the relevant context before voting, and you were also able to already vote on comments from the Recent Discussion section (though that section isn’t sorted by votes, so at less risk of viral dynamics). I do feel a bit worried that popular comments will get a bunch of votes without people reading the underlying post it’s responding to.