This post has a good quality of meta. The advice mostly applies internally.
It would be nice if there was a magic number in the font attributes, supplementing size/color/etc, which modulated people’s internal quality bar, ranging from “facebook” to “academic journal”. A website could dynamically set this based on the difference between the ideal amount of engagement and the amount observed.
This seems to be a problem which crops up again and again in different forms: a discussion/location/thing gets good, and implicitly, the quality bar rises. Maybe it is because an audience showed up, or maybe it’s just because you start worrying about ruining the quality of what has gone on so far. This takes away the original sense of freedom which often produced the quality in the first place. You start a tumblr to put writing that’s not good enough for the blog. Your Twitter account gets popular and you retreat to an alt account, only to find that it gets popular, making you retreat to another alt… That’s a bit different from what you’re pointing at, but it seems related.
Realistically, how does one hang a little sign that says “community space, feel welcome to engage”? I suppose a sense that people know each other is important to this. It’s part of the reason Facebook feels easy; you are talking to your friends.
> Realistically, how does one hang a little sign that says “community space, feel welcome to engage”
I think literally just saying that at the beginning (or end) is actually pretty decent. (See my opening note for Musings on Doublecrux, which [I think not-entirely-coincidentally] got 70 comments)
LW2.0 has vague plans for a “shortform/informal” section, which might help address the issue, but honestly even if that worked it’d still leave the problem for Posts on the Front Page, where I’d like more comments to be regardless.
[Edit] Musing....
Something that occurs to me re: comment quality, though, is that if the site scales, it’s *fine* to raise the bar on what makes a “good enough comment.” For example, Slatestarcodex gets hundreds of comments each post. I wish it got less, since that’s too many to skim through. Slatestar posts on LW get… 3? (in part but I don’t think entirely because people comment on the original)
I’d prefer if LW-crossposts of Scott Alexander essays ended up in the 20-50 comment range, and stayed there, and as the number of people following on LW increased, people’s intuitive threshold for what’s-worth-posting increased so that we kept the 20-50 range.
This post has a good quality of meta. The advice mostly applies internally.
It would be nice if there was a magic number in the font attributes, supplementing size/color/etc, which modulated people’s internal quality bar, ranging from “facebook” to “academic journal”. A website could dynamically set this based on the difference between the ideal amount of engagement and the amount observed.
This seems to be a problem which crops up again and again in different forms: a discussion/location/thing gets good, and implicitly, the quality bar rises. Maybe it is because an audience showed up, or maybe it’s just because you start worrying about ruining the quality of what has gone on so far. This takes away the original sense of freedom which often produced the quality in the first place. You start a tumblr to put writing that’s not good enough for the blog. Your Twitter account gets popular and you retreat to an alt account, only to find that it gets popular, making you retreat to another alt… That’s a bit different from what you’re pointing at, but it seems related.
Realistically, how does one hang a little sign that says “community space, feel welcome to engage”? I suppose a sense that people know each other is important to this. It’s part of the reason Facebook feels easy; you are talking to your friends.
> Realistically, how does one hang a little sign that says “community space, feel welcome to engage”
I think literally just saying that at the beginning (or end) is actually pretty decent. (See my opening note for Musings on Doublecrux, which [I think not-entirely-coincidentally] got 70 comments)
LW2.0 has vague plans for a “shortform/informal” section, which might help address the issue, but honestly even if that worked it’d still leave the problem for Posts on the Front Page, where I’d like more comments to be regardless.
[Edit] Musing....
Something that occurs to me re: comment quality, though, is that if the site scales, it’s *fine* to raise the bar on what makes a “good enough comment.” For example, Slatestarcodex gets hundreds of comments each post. I wish it got less, since that’s too many to skim through. Slatestar posts on LW get… 3? (in part but I don’t think entirely because people comment on the original)
I’d prefer if LW-crossposts of Scott Alexander essays ended up in the 20-50 comment range, and stayed there, and as the number of people following on LW increased, people’s intuitive threshold for what’s-worth-posting increased so that we kept the 20-50 range.