This is my sense as well, but I figured I would leave this one up, since I wasn’t confident, and if actually good and valuable discussion happens, then there is a good chance I will change my mind on this.
My take is something like “it’d be better to have an open section, but for various reasons the open section is not going to be top priotity for awhile, and meanwhile, we have a pretty decent proxy for ‘what is valuable enough to be on the front page’*, which is karma. If people don’t think this is that valuable, it’ll quickly fall away, and if it turns out to be filling an important niche, it’ll stick around (or, the people who care about it can know to look for it)”
How would the ongoing open section work? Drawing a distinction between a more serious section and a less serious one has the problem that eventually almost no one will post in the more serious one—Main/Discussion on LW, for example. (I had this problem when I had a blog: I’d set up a sideblog and then stop posting on the main blog. I went through about four cycles of that before I stopped entirely.) But I don’t think there was a problem of everything drifting from Discussion to open threads, nor do I think such a problem would have arisen—it felt like there was much more of a distinction between Discussion and open threads than there was between Main and Discussion.
I would prefer to not have open threads. this feels like a hack to work around the site not having an ongoing open section, and it clutters up the ui.
This is my sense as well, but I figured I would leave this one up, since I wasn’t confident, and if actually good and valuable discussion happens, then there is a good chance I will change my mind on this.
+1 for being empirical!
My take is something like “it’d be better to have an open section, but for various reasons the open section is not going to be top priotity for awhile, and meanwhile, we have a pretty decent proxy for ‘what is valuable enough to be on the front page’*, which is karma. If people don’t think this is that valuable, it’ll quickly fall away, and if it turns out to be filling an important niche, it’ll stick around (or, the people who care about it can know to look for it)”
How would the ongoing open section work? Drawing a distinction between a more serious section and a less serious one has the problem that eventually almost no one will post in the more serious one—Main/Discussion on LW, for example. (I had this problem when I had a blog: I’d set up a sideblog and then stop posting on the main blog. I went through about four cycles of that before I stopped entirely.) But I don’t think there was a problem of everything drifting from Discussion to open threads, nor do I think such a problem would have arisen—it felt like there was much more of a distinction between Discussion and open threads than there was between Main and Discussion.