You mention wanting to be incentivized to research things, and also that a particular danger to the community is writers optimizing for engagement at the expense of other things.
It seems like a possible partial remedy for this would be a mechanism for the readership to make their desires known in a centralized place. Right now, a hypothetical writer William, if they want to craft content the community wants, would be best served by doing a review of past posts in search of things which are consistently popular. If they are lucky and clever, they may even be able to infer a niche which hasn’t been filled—a gap in some topic, or perhaps a missing topic altogether—that would be welcome. This is time-consuming and presumably error-prone. Perhaps more importantly, it seems likely to produce content which is similar to what has come before. (Disclaimer: I have never made a top-level post, so if there is a different, quicker, more accurate process, please let me know.)
If instead the community could vote to say “We would like more posts on Machine Learning” or “We want posts on what Dr. X’s latest psychology research means about consciousness”, this would create an easily visible incentive to research and an incentive to explore specific topics (which may steer writers away from optimizing for comments, although the comments will likely follow). It adds complexity to the site, but I think it may be worth an experiment.
A visible community vote on what we would like to see more of might get a flurry of people to cross the lurker/poster divide, but when I picture myself seeing that feature I wind up thinking about it as a way I could ask (“vote”) for something I wanted the particularly prolific or especially insightful writers here to talk about. Imagine ten thousand lurkers voting for a Project Hufflepuff update or something like that. A variation that might incentivize new writers might be an open vote, with what kind of posts each user wants placed somewhere notable on their profile. I ran across TheZvi’s You’re Good Enough post a few weeks ago, and that’s likely to be the kick I needed to start blogging long form again. (Status: Two half-written ~3k word posts. If I don’t have a blog I can point people at by the 15th of October, I will admit that it wasn’t enough of a kick.)
On that post, TheZvi offered to read things that were written because of their post, and knowing I have at least one guaranteed reader makes writing a lot easier for me. Commenters often want engagement of some sort. Stating at the end of a post that you precommit to reading the first ten on-topic comments and responding to them all with a comment of your own or the first ten blog posts responding to your own post that people link you and commenting on those posts seems like it might incentivize people to write the kind of responses you want them to write. This would allow the people who write a lot and who large parts of the community read to steer the conversation more; whether this is good or bad is a reasonable question but the notion isn’t obviously terrible. It would at least create a variety of topics budding writers could be directed at; a single outcome from a LessWrong topic vote might result in a dozen new posts about that one topic, while a different “this is the kind of content I want” statement from the widely read authors would be more likely to result in three or four posts on each of their topics.
I don’t think this would require any technical changes, and I think it would also be a worthwhile experiment.
Interesting idea, I like it! Seems like something that could be tested by just having a Request for Articles post, and have people post + upvote requests via comments.
Personally, I’d like to see a post on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
You mention wanting to be incentivized to research things, and also that a particular danger to the community is writers optimizing for engagement at the expense of other things.
It seems like a possible partial remedy for this would be a mechanism for the readership to make their desires known in a centralized place. Right now, a hypothetical writer William, if they want to craft content the community wants, would be best served by doing a review of past posts in search of things which are consistently popular. If they are lucky and clever, they may even be able to infer a niche which hasn’t been filled—a gap in some topic, or perhaps a missing topic altogether—that would be welcome. This is time-consuming and presumably error-prone. Perhaps more importantly, it seems likely to produce content which is similar to what has come before. (Disclaimer: I have never made a top-level post, so if there is a different, quicker, more accurate process, please let me know.)
If instead the community could vote to say “We would like more posts on Machine Learning” or “We want posts on what Dr. X’s latest psychology research means about consciousness”, this would create an easily visible incentive to research and an incentive to explore specific topics (which may steer writers away from optimizing for comments, although the comments will likely follow). It adds complexity to the site, but I think it may be worth an experiment.
A visible community vote on what we would like to see more of might get a flurry of people to cross the lurker/poster divide, but when I picture myself seeing that feature I wind up thinking about it as a way I could ask (“vote”) for something I wanted the particularly prolific or especially insightful writers here to talk about. Imagine ten thousand lurkers voting for a Project Hufflepuff update or something like that. A variation that might incentivize new writers might be an open vote, with what kind of posts each user wants placed somewhere notable on their profile. I ran across TheZvi’s You’re Good Enough post a few weeks ago, and that’s likely to be the kick I needed to start blogging long form again. (Status: Two half-written ~3k word posts. If I don’t have a blog I can point people at by the 15th of October, I will admit that it wasn’t enough of a kick.)
On that post, TheZvi offered to read things that were written because of their post, and knowing I have at least one guaranteed reader makes writing a lot easier for me. Commenters often want engagement of some sort. Stating at the end of a post that you precommit to reading the first ten on-topic comments and responding to them all with a comment of your own or the first ten blog posts responding to your own post that people link you and commenting on those posts seems like it might incentivize people to write the kind of responses you want them to write. This would allow the people who write a lot and who large parts of the community read to steer the conversation more; whether this is good or bad is a reasonable question but the notion isn’t obviously terrible. It would at least create a variety of topics budding writers could be directed at; a single outcome from a LessWrong topic vote might result in a dozen new posts about that one topic, while a different “this is the kind of content I want” statement from the widely read authors would be more likely to result in three or four posts on each of their topics.
I don’t think this would require any technical changes, and I think it would also be a worthwhile experiment.
Interesting idea, I like it! Seems like something that could be tested by just having a Request for Articles post, and have people post + upvote requests via comments.
Personally, I’d like to see a post on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
What are you looking for on a post of CBT? I’ve got a bit of information on it.