Re: sub-reddits
A while back, I polled the community on the possibility of subreddits. Most people said they wanted them, and I said I’d investigate.
I talked to a couple of people and eventually ended up talking to Tricycle, the developers of this site. They told me about their own proposed solution to the community organization problem, which is this new Discussion section. They said that searching the discussion section by tag was equivalent to a sub-reddit. For example, if you want a sub-reddit on consciousness, the discussion consciousness tag search is an amazing imitation
I told them I wasn’t entirely convinced by this and sent some reasons why, but I haven’t heard back from them lately and I’m not going keep pursuing this and make a big deal of it unless a large percentage of the people who wanted sub-reddits are unsatisfied.
I’ve seen tags-as-subcommunities work well on MathOverflow, but I think that’s primarily because people other than posters can control the tags, and so readers can rely on posts on their topics eventually appearing with the standard tag identifying that topic (even if the poster is new and doesn’t use the standard tags). Plus, ability to subscribe to specific tags. Together, these features allow not looking through all posts, only looking at (aggregation of posts under) specific tags.
Just enabling a few admins to edit the tags won’t work, unless said admins are very meticulous and/or interested in all the topics. This requires more “moderators” to run reliably. MathOverflow deals with that by having karma thresholds for increasing users’ access level to more admin-ish actions.
Allowing users with enough karma to add tags to posts sounds like a good idea, I’m often unsure if I’ve thought of all appropriate tags.
Edit tags, not just add. Using too many partially overlapping tags leads to tag inflation, where it’s hard to enumerate all tags you’d be interested in subscribing to.
Yes you are right. What would be the appropriate karma celling? I’m pretty sure it should be above 500 but not sure how much.
I’d set it to 1000 or so. For this to work well, there should be some way of seeing and discussing changes, like wiki history and discussion pages, or stack exchange comments (as opposed to replies). For LW, I’d start with something like stack exchange comments (a meta-comment area under a post distinguished by lightweight layout, smaller font, and shifted by bigger left margin), and add special comments that mark edits to the post and post’s tags, with a link to the diff (“Fixed paragraph spacing [diff] -- 03 March 2012 08:30:42PM by Konkvistador”).
Speaking of which a clever integration of LW and its wiki would be very beneficial.
I don’t know what that’s intended to mean.
In the sense of using the same log in profile to edit wiki articles. As well as upvotes being used to encourage quality work being put into editing the wiki.
Edit:
It seems this was envisioned in the beginning.
I’m relatively happy with the Discussion area but would prefer it if tags were a bit more prominent. My experience with Livejournal suggests that using tags for organisation is only helpful if all the posts are tagged sanely and consistently, and I haven’t really seen that here.
I think things are fine as they are—if anything, the “discussion” section may be “too cut off” from the main page, to the point where I could imagine them splitting in different communities. I don’t think that’s very likely, but I still wouldn’t want more sub-splitting.
Tags don’t seem like a sufficient imitation of sub-reddits (they don’t feel like ‘sub-communities’, and I don’t think most posters keep a list in mind of what tags exist and to what tag they should post), but since I personally don’t see the need for sub-reddits except on reddit itself, I don’t mind :)
An easily accessible list of all used tags would be handy.
Sub-reddits strike me as unlikely to work well with a community of LW’s size and activity; I can already imagine the deserted areas whose last thread was made 6 months ago. The discussion area seems to be working well.
On the other hand, I’m not sure tags are performing their full potential as organizational aids, with people forgetting them and different words and conjugations for the same concept and all. Having a modest selection of recommended or enforced tags might help (if enforced, there being an “other” option for anything that doesn’t fit).
I like the idea of recommended tags and open tagging. And possibly (if the programming burden isn’t too great) voting on tags.
Edit: Thanks to rhollerith_dot_com for pointing out that none of my arguments support subreddits over tags. I have updated, and now support tags.
Personally, I would prefer subreddits. I’m interested in more than a few things that are tangential to the main thrust of LW, but the fact is that almost anywhere else on the internet (that I’m aware of) lacks the community norms that LW has, making serious discussion unrealistic due to widespread irrationality.
On the other hand, a real danger is that by allowing subreddits you significantly lower the barrier to entry, which might result in a decrease in the signal to noise ratio. There are, for instance, many, many possible wrong posts that one could make on a number of topics (consciousness and AI, for instance), so subreddits about these topics would be especially at risk of devolving into nonsense.
On the other other hand, it’s been pointed out that the LW participants are fairly homogeneous (one might say “cult-like”). Therefore having high-quality subreddits on a number of topics would probably attract more diversity to the site.
So I’m in favor of subreddits, but we would need to be careful about subreddits at risk of being low quality. However, I certainly hope that the community norms we have here would be more than capable of dealing with this issue.
You start with “Personally, I would prefer subreddits,” but then you describe nothing that would be easier or better in a subreddit than it would be in /r/discussion/ with a tag. Well, there is one exception to what I just said: subreddits are easier for a user to understand if the user is impatient with the considerations behind the design of software and the design of online conversations.
But there are very strong reasons why some of us advocate tags—and why tags have increased in use—even though the resulting software is more difficult to understand than older designs were, so I would ask you to make an effort to understand the solution proposed by Tricycle.
Note that I am not affiliated with Tricycle. I have never even had a conversation or a correspondence with anyone at Tricycle.
Now that I think about it, I agree with you. I think in the above post I had in mind that subreddits would allow more “cohesiveness” or a greater “sense of community” among its participants. But perhaps that is nonsense or not so important.
However, which “very strong reasons” did you have in mind? I can think of only two:
1) If there were multiple subreddits, often a post might not fit squarely in a single one.
2) People might tag their posts in subreddits anyways, in which case why have subreddits?
I consider your (1) a pretty strong reason.
I have a draft of a post that gives a couple more reasons. Will you review it before I publish it?
Certainly. Also, I amended my original post to make it clear that I now support tags over subreddits.
Having thought about this a little more, here’s another reason I’m in favor in subreddits: they would keep people from seeing, or more importantly from voting down, posts which merely don’t interest them. I think there are whole topics which don’t do well because some people think “oh, this isn’t relevant to me/less wrong”—but there’s still a subcommunity here which is interested in exploring them rationally, and posts on that topic would be better served in a subreddit for that community. (I’m thinking of meditation, but I’m sure there are others.)
Or, to come at it another way, having a subreddit for a topic would allow people to explore it in more detail in posts there, without having to worry about keeping them readable for the LW mainstream. A post which is interesting and relevant to people who are curious about the rational implications of x may not be interesting and relevant to everyone who is interested in rationality at all.
To me this is a good reason not to have subreddits. It seems like a recipe for divisiveness, and people already seem to be much more relaxed about voting on Discussion posts; most of them have ratings from 0-10. So topics that aren’t relevant to LW mainstream already work fairly well when they’re left in Discussion rather than being moved to the main site.
Ideas that have been said already which I agree with and would like to express support for: A set of tagged posts does not have the same effect as a subcommunity; having a subreddit on a theme both encourages further branching out from the core topics of LW and may also encourage new people with those specific interests to join them.
I think tags could work. If there was a group of people committed to discussing a particular subject area they could establish norms about what tags to use for different topics, and make it easy to follow the discussion using tag search.
Vladimir Nesov made the important point: