I’m pretty sure everybody’s blog software provides an RSS feed. Just configure them to provide full text, and display that on Less Wrong as a feed alongside Main and Discussion.
This doesn’t work very well. Especially on tumblr, a lot of blogs have some rationalist content and lots of non-rationalist content. An aggregator that didn’t include anything from The Unit of Caring would be sorely lacking, but one that included her entire tumblr feed would be overinclusive. And she doesn’t even use that blog for cute animal pictures.
Tags might solve most of this: in this case, the craft and the community would capture a lot of the relevant stuff. In general, people could choose a specific tag for “include this on the diaspora feed”. If the platform doesn’t support tag-specific RSS, the aggregation software could do the filtering.
But there’s another problem, that tumblr’s rss feeds are shit. When I followed Scott’s, it would occasionally attribute things to him which he was replying to, and not show his reply. (Or maybe not that exactly, but something along those lines.)
And yet another problem, that even after filtering for rationalist content, there is just too damn much of it. It needs curation.
Feed filtering is policy, not mechanism; as you say, tags for inclusion provide an acceptable way to manage this and very light on the diasporists. A curated feed alongside it (akin to Promoted) would work well too, provided someone’s willing to do so.
The issue with tumblr’s RSS feeds is mechanism, though. That’s the layer I so desperately want to burn down because it is legitimately full of Fail. Reply reference chains are currently broken almost everywhere on the Internet. But not because they can’t be done well.
This doesn’t work very well. Especially on tumblr, a lot of blogs have some rationalist content and lots of non-rationalist content. An aggregator that didn’t include anything from The Unit of Caring would be sorely lacking, but one that included her entire tumblr feed would be overinclusive. And she doesn’t even use that blog for cute animal pictures.
Tags might solve most of this: in this case, the craft and the community would capture a lot of the relevant stuff. In general, people could choose a specific tag for “include this on the diaspora feed”. If the platform doesn’t support tag-specific RSS, the aggregation software could do the filtering.
But there’s another problem, that tumblr’s rss feeds are shit. When I followed Scott’s, it would occasionally attribute things to him which he was replying to, and not show his reply. (Or maybe not that exactly, but something along those lines.)
And yet another problem, that even after filtering for rationalist content, there is just too damn much of it. It needs curation.
Feed filtering is policy, not mechanism; as you say, tags for inclusion provide an acceptable way to manage this and very light on the diasporists. A curated feed alongside it (akin to Promoted) would work well too, provided someone’s willing to do so.
The issue with tumblr’s RSS feeds is mechanism, though. That’s the layer I so desperately want to burn down because it is legitimately full of Fail. Reply reference chains are currently broken almost everywhere on the Internet. But not because they can’t be done well.