Proposal: consolidate meetup announcements before promotion
The Less Wrong feed is getting crowded with meetups rather than substantive posts. Hopefully, this should be fixed in the redesign, but one way to work around it in the meanwhile would be to make top-level posts announcing several meetups at once.
Folk would post meetups under the ‘NEW’ category, and each week or even every several days one of the meetup organizers could edit her post to announce all the meetups since the last consolidated post. This would greatly reduce the cluster while still getting meetups in the main feed. On the other hand, it would reduce average warning time before meetups, and the additional activation energy might deter some meetups.
If you have thoughts on the workability of this scheme, or an adjustment to make it workable, please comment below.
[HT: Anna Salamon]
- Upcoming meet-ups: Buenos Aires, Minneapolis, Ottawa, Edinburgh, Cambridge, London, DC by (13 May 2011 20:49 UTC; 44 points)
- Upcoming meet-ups: Auckland, Bangalore, Houston, Toronto, Minneapolis, Ottawa, DC, North Carolina, BC... by (21 May 2011 5:06 UTC; 12 points)
- Upcoming meet-ups: Bangalore, Minneapolis, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Houston, Dublin by (28 May 2011 1:52 UTC; 9 points)
Could this just follow the form of the “Rationality Quotes” threads, where one person posts a “Meetups for the Week of 5/01-5/07″, and then the only top level comments that are allowed are ones posting a particular meetup?
Since the purpose of the promoted posts is in actually announcing the meetups, there is no need to visibly announce the meetups prior to posting the to-be-promoted announcement post. So I suggest the following procedure:
A “staging” post is created in the discussion area (maybe in the main section, maybe even promoted) that specifies (1) the time period for which it’ll be collecting meetup announcements and (2) the announcement posting day. For example, if posted today, it could capture 16-22 May, with deadline 8 May.
Up till the posting day, meetup announcements are collected as top-level comments to the staging post.
On the posting day, all announcements are collected as a new post in the main section, and this post is promoted.
An advantage of individual meetup posts is having the location in the title, so people who live in the area will recognize it as relevant to themselves and click through and read it.
Also, it is good to have a comment section for each meetup.
Titles like “Toronto, London, Budapest meetups-June” could work for this.
Wouldn’t a comment thread work just as well?
I was just thinking about how generating a post like that could be automated, and thought: Why not just make a meetup announcement section, with a meetup announcement widget visible in the main section? “Meetup Date” should be an attribute of a meetup announcement, and the widget should show all future meet ups (ordered by meetup date/post date?) This would get meetup announcement out of the main post lists, but keep them visible on the main site.
For site redesign, go to the thread calling for redesign suggestions, linked in the OP. This is just an interim proposal.
Probably won’t work without someone being designated responsible for writing the aggregation posts.
The moderators could do it, with posters adding text to their posts requesting it.