Some months ago, I suggested that there could be an UI feature to automatically turn shortforms into proper posts if they get sufficent karma, that authors could turn on or off.
One potential issue is that this makes posting shortforms even more attractive, so you might see everything being initially posted as shortforms (except maybe very long effortposts) since there’s no downside to doing that. I wonder if that’s something the admins want to see.
It seems like the quality of short form writing that displaces what would otherwise have been full posts will generally be lower. But on the other hand, people might feel more willing to publish at all, because they don’t have to make the assessment of whether or not they’re good enough to be worth making a bid that other people read it.
I want a lesswrong canny—here’s vrchat’s canny for comparison. Canny (or similar systems, eg “the feature requests post”) are nice because upvoted features have no particular need of being implemented. It also means that the “why users want this” feedback channel is higher bandwidth than just guess-test-and-ask; with a central place for people to comment on features and indicate their preferences, it’s much easier for someone to go see what feature suggestions there are and add their feedback. I have several feature requests I’d add which the LW team has been hesitant about, and I think that if they made affordance for many users to comment on potential features, it would become clearer which ones are actually wanted by many people and why; and yet it would not force the LW team to implement any one feature, so requests that they’d prefer to reject or satisfy a different way would be still possible.
So, I formally request that the LW team make a feature requests post and pin it somewhere discoverable but not overly prominent, eg the top right user menu.
A persistent place to look for feedback which creates common knowledge of desired features seems likely to me (70% ish?) to make it obvious that shortform-to-post is one of the top 4 most desired features out of dozens.
Some months ago, I suggested that there could be an UI feature to automatically turn shortforms into proper posts if they get sufficent karma, that authors could turn on or off.
One potential issue is that this makes posting shortforms even more attractive, so you might see everything being initially posted as shortforms (except maybe very long effortposts) since there’s no downside to doing that. I wonder if that’s something the admins want to see.
I agree that this seems like a likely effect.
It seems like the quality of short form writing that displaces what would otherwise have been full posts will generally be lower. But on the other hand, people might feel more willing to publish at all, because they don’t have to make the assessment of whether or not they’re good enough to be worth making a bid that other people read it.
I want a lesswrong canny—here’s vrchat’s canny for comparison. Canny (or similar systems, eg “the feature requests post”) are nice because upvoted features have no particular need of being implemented. It also means that the “why users want this” feedback channel is higher bandwidth than just guess-test-and-ask; with a central place for people to comment on features and indicate their preferences, it’s much easier for someone to go see what feature suggestions there are and add their feedback. I have several feature requests I’d add which the LW team has been hesitant about, and I think that if they made affordance for many users to comment on potential features, it would become clearer which ones are actually wanted by many people and why; and yet it would not force the LW team to implement any one feature, so requests that they’d prefer to reject or satisfy a different way would be still possible.
So, I formally request that the LW team make a feature requests post and pin it somewhere discoverable but not overly prominent, eg the top right user menu.
A persistent place to look for feedback which creates common knowledge of desired features seems likely to me (70% ish?) to make it obvious that shortform-to-post is one of the top 4 most desired features out of dozens.