An earlier version of my comment read “LW or parts of it”. Edited it out for stylistic reasons and because I assumed the application to smaller domains would be clear enough in context. Guess I was wrong.
Granted, not everything I said would apply to the first proposal, the one where top-level posts are upvote-only but comments aren’t. That’s a little more interesting; I’m still leery of it but I haven’t fully worked out the incentives.
As to empirics, one thing we’re not short on is empirical data from other forums. We’re not so exceptional that the lessons learned from them can’t be expected to apply.
Apologies if that seemed like nitpick (which I try to avoid). I thought it was relevant because even if you are right, trying out the new system wouldn’t mean making LessWrong terrible, it would just mean making a small part of LessWrong terrible (which we could then get rid of). The cost is so small so that I don’t see why its shouldn’t be tried.
I think the cost is higher than you’re giving it credit for. Securing dev time to implement changes around here is incredibly hard, at least if you aren’t named Eliezer, and changes anywhere are usually harder to back out than they are to put in; we can safely assume that any change we manage to push through will last for months, and forever is probably more likely.
An earlier version of my comment read “LW or parts of it”. Edited it out for stylistic reasons and because I assumed the application to smaller domains would be clear enough in context. Guess I was wrong.
Granted, not everything I said would apply to the first proposal, the one where top-level posts are upvote-only but comments aren’t. That’s a little more interesting; I’m still leery of it but I haven’t fully worked out the incentives.
As to empirics, one thing we’re not short on is empirical data from other forums. We’re not so exceptional that the lessons learned from them can’t be expected to apply.
Apologies if that seemed like nitpick (which I try to avoid). I thought it was relevant because even if you are right, trying out the new system wouldn’t mean making LessWrong terrible, it would just mean making a small part of LessWrong terrible (which we could then get rid of). The cost is so small so that I don’t see why its shouldn’t be tried.
I think the cost is higher than you’re giving it credit for. Securing dev time to implement changes around here is incredibly hard, at least if you aren’t named Eliezer, and changes anywhere are usually harder to back out than they are to put in; we can safely assume that any change we manage to push through will last for months, and forever is probably more likely.