I have a feeling that for many posts that could be posted as either normal posts or as shortform, they would get more karma as shortform, for a few possible reasons:
lower quality bar for upvoting
shortforms showing some of the content, which helps hook people in to click on it
people being more likely to click on or read shortforms due to less perceived effort of reading (since they’re often shorter and less formal)
This seems bad because shortforms don’t allow tagging and are harder to find in other ways. (People are already more reluctant to make regular posts due to more perceived risk if the post isn’t well received, and the above makes it worse.) Assuming I’m right and the site admins don’t endorse this situation, maybe they should reintroduce the old posting karma bonus multiplier, but like 2x instead of 10x, and only for positive karma? Or do something else to address the situation like make the normal posts more prominent or enticing to click on? Perhaps show a few lines of the content and/or display the reading time (so there’s no attention penalty for posting a literally short post as a normal post)?
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.
There is a sort of upside to this, in that to the extent that people are more inclined to post shortforms than longforms due to the lower perceived/expected effort of the former, there is a possibility of (optional?) UX engineering to make writing longforms feel a bit more like writing shortforms, so that people who have something to write but also have a feeling of “ugh, that would be a lot of effort, I’ll do it when I’m not as tired [or whatever]” would be more inclined to write and post it.
Relatedly, every few days, I find myself writing some long and detailed message in a DM, which I would be less motivated to write in my personal notes, let alone write a blog post about it, and sometimes the message turns out to look like a first draft of a blog post.[1] How to hijack this with UX?[2]
After I started talking about it, I found out that apparently “write an article like a message to an intellectual-peer friend” is something like a folk advice.
I think posts should be displayed more like shortforms so that one isn’t limited to a title to make the argument for reading more. Ideally, it would come with a recommendation for how to put “who should read this post, and when? what do they get out of it?” info at the top of the post, within blurb length limit.
I have a feeling that for many posts that could be posted as either normal posts or as shortform, they would get more karma as shortform, for a few possible reasons:
lower quality bar for upvoting
shortforms showing some of the content, which helps hook people in to click on it
people being more likely to click on or read shortforms due to less perceived effort of reading (since they’re often shorter and less formal)
This seems bad because shortforms don’t allow tagging and are harder to find in other ways. (People are already more reluctant to make regular posts due to more perceived risk if the post isn’t well received, and the above makes it worse.) Assuming I’m right and the site admins don’t endorse this situation, maybe they should reintroduce the old posting karma bonus multiplier, but like 2x instead of 10x, and only for positive karma? Or do something else to address the situation like make the normal posts more prominent or enticing to click on? Perhaps show a few lines of the content and/or display the reading time (so there’s no attention penalty for posting a literally short post as a normal post)?
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.
And because you can read them without loading a new page. I think that’s a big factor for me.
[Tangent:]
There is a sort of upside to this, in that to the extent that people are more inclined to post shortforms than longforms due to the lower perceived/expected effort of the former, there is a possibility of (optional?) UX engineering to make writing longforms feel a bit more like writing shortforms, so that people who have something to write but also have a feeling of “ugh, that would be a lot of effort, I’ll do it when I’m not as tired [or whatever]” would be more inclined to write and post it.
Relatedly, every few days, I find myself writing some long and detailed message in a DM, which I would be less motivated to write in my personal notes, let alone write a blog post about it, and sometimes the message turns out to look like a first draft of a blog post.[1] How to hijack this with UX?[2]
After I started talking about it, I found out that apparently “write an article like a message to an intellectual-peer friend” is something like a folk advice.
Of course, also: How to hijack this with stuff other than UX?
I think posts should be displayed more like shortforms so that one isn’t limited to a title to make the argument for reading more. Ideally, it would come with a recommendation for how to put “who should read this post, and when? what do they get out of it?” info at the top of the post, within blurb length limit.