I don’t know if this has been discussed before, but what’s the argument against the standard response-bumps-thread model? You’ve got active threads falling off the first page while threads that haven’t successfully started a discussion are just sitting there.
Thread-bumping also allows for the creation of long-term threads—threads that might not be worth turning into stickies but are worthy of being resurrected many times when somebody has something new to contribute to them. “Your Favorite Rationality-Related Books”, just as an example. Somebody creates it, people throw in a few names, then it sinks off the bottom of the page. A few weeks later somebody reads something new and wants to tell everyone about it so they post to the Book thread. It jumps back up to the top of the page and more people who didn’t see it the first time round add their suggestions, and it sinks again. Over months and years contributions build up until you have a really useful resource for people looking for a good rationality book. That’s the kind of thing I mean by a long-term thread.
While I’m at it, other fora usually have discussion sections broken into broad areas of interest—say Economics, Ethics, AI etc. (maybe even Politics) - and people post within the appropriate section. That might be a model to consider.
Finally, I think that if people want LW to be anything like a community, you need to consider making some sort of space for people to get to know each other and bond socially. The open threads don’t cover that, comments there are still expected to be related to the site’s purpose. I mean a random chat space where people can go to bitch about the weather or argue about whether Kirk was a better captain than Picard. I honestly believe it would improve the quality of the real discussions too. Social bonds incentivize civility. If we were all perfectly rational discussants that wouldn’t be necessary but none of us are. So why not take a tip from evolution?
I don’t know if this has been discussed before, but what’s the argument against the standard response-bumps-thread model? You’ve got active threads falling off the first page while threads that haven’t successfully started a discussion are just sitting there.
Thread-bumping also allows for the creation of long-term threads—threads that might not be worth turning into stickies but are worthy of being resurrected many times when somebody has something new to contribute to them. “Your Favorite Rationality-Related Books”, just as an example. Somebody creates it, people throw in a few names, then it sinks off the bottom of the page. A few weeks later somebody reads something new and wants to tell everyone about it so they post to the Book thread. It jumps back up to the top of the page and more people who didn’t see it the first time round add their suggestions, and it sinks again. Over months and years contributions build up until you have a really useful resource for people looking for a good rationality book. That’s the kind of thing I mean by a long-term thread.
While I’m at it, other fora usually have discussion sections broken into broad areas of interest—say Economics, Ethics, AI etc. (maybe even Politics) - and people post within the appropriate section. That might be a model to consider.
Finally, I think that if people want LW to be anything like a community, you need to consider making some sort of space for people to get to know each other and bond socially. The open threads don’t cover that, comments there are still expected to be related to the site’s purpose. I mean a random chat space where people can go to bitch about the weather or argue about whether Kirk was a better captain than Picard. I honestly believe it would improve the quality of the real discussions too. Social bonds incentivize civility. If we were all perfectly rational discussants that wouldn’t be necessary but none of us are. So why not take a tip from evolution?