This product design builds the norm of long-form, async communication. This is an important norm on these sites, although not usually made explicit.
This is an example of a norm-building technique that I call friction. The word “friction” in UX design is often used negatively, but friction is a powerful way to steer users towards desired behavior! ForumMagnum uses several frictions to build the long-form, async norm. Notice there are no realtime notifications, and timestamps are only accurate to the hour.
Quora used to advertise itself as being “long-form” and “forever” (the place where you would write THE best answer to every question, and ideally edit your answer years after making the original answer [I don’t see people constantly editing their old content on LessWrong]), but the answer ranking of each question wrecked it, because now the algorithm surfaces answers that attract more views (“feel good” answers) rather than answers that are objectively better. Because many higher-quality answers are now buried down the list of Quora answers, I move my better answers to other platforms like forum.longevitybase.org or crsociety.org
I am super-ultra attracted to long-form (want all of my content to be easily accessible by all) for reasons similar to my obsession with longevity/archiving old content, and sometimes post responses to threads that have not gotten attention in years (just to make more complete threads). People are not aware enough of this, however.
The upvoting/downvoting system penalizes people who want to post threads about threads that aren’t rationalist fad/zeitgeist-related (esp ones related to alignment that they don’t think are frontpageable, but which are still relevant for rationality (or progress studies!) and could still attract momentum/attention years down the line This is why I do not post much on LessWrong (I have extremely broad interests so I naturally end up discovering LW, but my views/opinions on what’s important are way different from those of most LW/EA, so I know my niche interests won’t get much attention here). I don’t feel the same kind of inhibition when posting content to the progress studies forum, which is smaller (small enough that you don’t care at all about upvote/downvote dynamics) and way less prone to groupthink. Effective Altruism has historically valued neglectedness, but this does not show with forum upvoting patterns...
There are many scientific areas (and people with niche interests—the castration thread on LW is uniquely great for example!) that could be discussed on LessWrong, and analyzed/vetted via CFAR/rationality/Bayes updating/superforecasting techniques, but which are not, simply because many people averse to the groupthink dynamics on LW don’t feel like LW would value their content. A long-form platform should ideally insulate them from local upvote/downvote fads (as useful as that input is). For what it’s worth, upvotes (from quality users) used to be the primary factor that drove answer rankings on Quora (back when “all the smart SV people used it”), but with Quora’s dilution, it seems almost as if people no longer care about upvotes (now that upvotes almost all come from people I don’t know, rather than people I do know, I don’t care about upvotes anymore, but I remember the golden days when I wrote answers that everyone on the Quora team upvoted...) Once you’ve been on a forum for years, how good the post is (even if edited a thousand times enough not for initial upvoters to have seen the better post) [as well as what comments it attracts] is more rewarding than how upvoted it is...
Stack Exchange is in some ways a better platform for long-form content (and makes it ultra-easy to find content that is many years old and makes it ultra-easy for people not to post duplicate threads), especially because it gives you multiple ways of organizing/ranking all your old content, making it easily accessible and for you to want to come back and edit multiple times. It just has moderators who are quick to mute/delete threads they don’t like, making it much harder to post about niche interests.
[but again, these don’t make up for how there don’t seem to be many threads where comments are made years after the original post]
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It’s also nice to reference other forum communities that have lasted for years (even if reddit was the original forum-killer).
Quora used to advertise itself as being “long-form” and “forever” (the place where you would write THE best answer to every question, and ideally edit your answer years after making the original answer [I don’t see people constantly editing their old content on LessWrong]), but the answer ranking of each question wrecked it, because now the algorithm surfaces answers that attract more views (“feel good” answers) rather than answers that are objectively better. Because many higher-quality answers are now buried down the list of Quora answers, I move my better answers to other platforms like forum.longevitybase.org or crsociety.org
I am super-ultra attracted to long-form (want all of my content to be easily accessible by all) for reasons similar to my obsession with longevity/archiving old content, and sometimes post responses to threads that have not gotten attention in years (just to make more complete threads). People are not aware enough of this, however.
https://www.quora.com/What-was-your-biggest-regret-on-Quora/answer/Alex-K-Chen (my biggest distillation from being arguably the most important user on Quora)
The upvoting/downvoting system penalizes people who want to post threads about threads that aren’t rationalist fad/zeitgeist-related (esp ones related to alignment that they don’t think are frontpageable, but which are still relevant for rationality (or progress studies!) and could still attract momentum/attention years down the line This is why I do not post much on LessWrong (I have extremely broad interests so I naturally end up discovering LW, but my views/opinions on what’s important are way different from those of most LW/EA, so I know my niche interests won’t get much attention here). I don’t feel the same kind of inhibition when posting content to the progress studies forum, which is smaller (small enough that you don’t care at all about upvote/downvote dynamics) and way less prone to groupthink. Effective Altruism has historically valued neglectedness, but this does not show with forum upvoting patterns...
There are many scientific areas (and people with niche interests—the castration thread on LW is uniquely great for example!) that could be discussed on LessWrong, and analyzed/vetted via CFAR/rationality/Bayes updating/superforecasting techniques, but which are not, simply because many people averse to the groupthink dynamics on LW don’t feel like LW would value their content. A long-form platform should ideally insulate them from local upvote/downvote fads (as useful as that input is). For what it’s worth, upvotes (from quality users) used to be the primary factor that drove answer rankings on Quora (back when “all the smart SV people used it”), but with Quora’s dilution, it seems almost as if people no longer care about upvotes (now that upvotes almost all come from people I don’t know, rather than people I do know, I don’t care about upvotes anymore, but I remember the golden days when I wrote answers that everyone on the Quora team upvoted...) Once you’ve been on a forum for years, how good the post is (even if edited a thousand times enough not for initial upvoters to have seen the better post) [as well as what comments it attracts] is more rewarding than how upvoted it is...
Stack Exchange is in some ways a better platform for long-form content (and makes it ultra-easy to find content that is many years old and makes it ultra-easy for people not to post duplicate threads), especially because it gives you multiple ways of organizing/ranking all your old content, making it easily accessible and for you to want to come back and edit multiple times. It just has moderators who are quick to mute/delete threads they don’t like, making it much harder to post about niche interests.
[but again, these don’t make up for how there don’t seem to be many threads where comments are made years after the original post]
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It’s also nice to reference other forum communities that have lasted for years (even if reddit was the original forum-killer).