> twitter did something amazing with its design: on most other platforms there are “posts” and “replies,” and replies are second-class citizens, lacking most of the affordances that posts have
> on twitter everything is a tweet! (ignoring articles) when you reply or QT a tweet you are writing another tweet, which has all the affordances a full tweet has. you can attach images (including screenshots), you can QT while replying, other people can reply or RT or QT your tweet, replies and QTs show up in feeds. this makes twitter “fully recursive” in a way other platforms aren’t. someone can make a point in a top-level tweet and you can critique or build off that point in a QT which is its own top-level tweet. tweets can get replies which are so good they accumulate more RTs and QTs than the original. there’s a frictionless way discussions “grow” on twitter, budding off new discussions which bud off new discussions etc, which any platform that maintains a post / reply distinction makes harder
I think a lot of the framing of twitter is bad, but, maybe this part is actually good and LW should have had (sort of painful to change now).
(It’s always been a bit awkward that writing a really good reply sort of disappears into the void and isn’t tracked as “as important” as a post)
It’s really helpful that posts have titles and can be googled, and are written to be read without reading a whole reply chain first. Tweets are far less well-designed for reading, can’t be googled, don’t have titles, and often require reading long threads of lots quote tweets of lots of different subcultures that you don’t understand.
I also like that so much of the relevant information stays nested under the post on LessWrong, whereas on Twitter I find it much harder to systematically read various offshoot threads of a tweet
Take the lowest leaf of a thread, then systematically go up the tweets, and expand all the ones with multiple children, and keep going until they’re all expanded, and then start to read down.
Open the author’s twitter profile, view their replies, then click to open all their replies in new tabs so that I make sure to have all the subthreads
Nod, yeah I hadn’t thought through all the implications and maybe this is just crazy.
But, the sorts of thing I’m imagining:
comments have optional titles, you can basically upgrade anything into a post easily
i.e. the line between a top-level critical-comment, and EffortReply, and a Scott Alexander level “Contra So-and-So on Such and Such” was more about how much effort you put in?
many comments are heavily context dependent, but, if you choose to reply to something and want to put the effort into it being a standalone piece, you aren’t punished for not having broken out and written a top-level post.
I’d definitely want us to have way better UI for contextualizing things than twitter has (“how do?” is an open question)
I’m not sure about the UI of “what things are sans serif vs serif?” (and otherwise feeling “fancy” vs “off-the-cuff.”). One option is basically “fancy serifs or no?” is a setting.
I think it could be good to build post-level replies, where, when you get to the comment section, the post-item (i.e. just the height of like 3 lines of a comment) is sorted in the comment section by the karma of the post. So that you don’t have to choose between writing a response in a comment or in a post, but can instead do both in one motion.
agreed, the fundamental “self-recursive” model of twitter feels more complete. twitter’s UI of quickly understanding context is abysmal. fun fact, everything on Reddit is also a single data model “Post”. posts/comments are just rendered differently
I never understood how Twitter works, but now it seems to me like a tree that has only one (first? longest?) branch displayed by default… and most people are likely to reply to the leaf of the default branch, which makes most discussions linear.
(I don’t have much to say but I’d generically note: I’d suspect significant gains from medium-depth theorization here. Like, my speculative guess is: There’s various dynamics and resources and stuff at play, which are fairly obvious if you sit down to write them out; and then if you think about various one- or two-step inferences from those basics, you get interesting novel ideas about how to structure media platforms. Examples: attention, boosting, piggybacking, replying, affiliations, trust. Etc. Then ask, what is “a LW post” or “a LW comment” or “a LW quicktake” or “a tweet” or “a tweet reply” or “a QT” or “a substack post” or etc etc in these terms? What are the affordances and natural patterns of attention and information processing associated with each one? What space of possible such [media-chunk roles] does that suggest?)
I have also wanted for a way to curate comments, separate from posts.
I think a good next step to get more in contact with this, would be for someone to write a “highlights from the comments” post for the last month. See how good they are, how many there are, how much context is needed, and whether it’s a good reading experience. I might curate it if it’s a good reading experience.
As a counterpoint, I think the rise of shortform on LessWrong has partially led to more stuff being written and partially led to more stuff that would have been posts written in a way that is less searchable, less linkable (in practice), less polished, and generally less supportive of ongoing discourse.
I have definitely published fewer posts since the shortform feed started up on the front page.
The more more we raise profile of comments the more they’ll displace posts as the medium of communication.
can you operationalize this more so we can bet on it?
Certainly there’s a bunch more shortform since we’ve made room for shortform. The question is has this displaced posts, by the same people writing it? (as opposed to turned more random Constellation lunch-room hot takes into things that were public-at-all)
But btw, part of my proposal vague ideation here is that comments can have titles. Most comments don’t, by default, but if you end up writing an effortcomment you can give it a title. And, ideally, make them more natural to link to.
can you operationalize this more so we can bet on it?
Sure!
In the years before shortforms were on the front page, Eli published more LessWrong posts (on average) than the years when shortforms were on the front page.
This is an unfair operationalization, perhaps, but it does hew directly to the evidence that makes me believe the claim!
@Eli Tyre I’m not sure when you’re counting “the quick takes started changing things” but it seems like yourposting has basically been pretty constantly except for a brief more intense period in 2019/2020.
(you don’t seem to have any writing here before 2017 although I’m a bit surprised and not sure if you had a second account)
We did have the Popular Comments section. For some reason I didn’t like the popular comments section – it often was showing comments that were kind of tribal.
FYI, I haven’t actually gotten the UI to be that great yet, but, I’ve tried out version of the site that renders comments and posts together, clustered by time period:
In practice, atm, the “Today” section has a fair number of comments (because the posts haven’t been super upvoted yet). Then they mostly shift to posts (and if you click “load more”, some upvoted quick takes).
But, this might change over time, if people got basically as much opportunity to see and upvote comments as they did posts.
Just implement transclusion, like we do on Gwern.net. I do the equivalent of transcluding tweets all the time. (In fact, I would show you how I do transclude tweets on Gwern.net but it’s a bit tricky to dig up a ‘natural’ example, especially since Twitter long ago broke Nitter which was how we were getting clean snapshots to transclude, so they’re rare than they should be.)
You provide some selector options to govern how much of a target URL to transclude: see the docs for https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/master/js/transclude.js Thus, a user can transclude the ‘annotation’ version of a URL, which would include the header like “Ben Pace | May 12, 2026 2:33PM …”, or it could just transclude the ‘body’, ‘I have also wanted...good reading experience.’, or anything inside it which has IDs etc.
This isn’t an end-to-end example, but sometimes there’s a discussion in the comments of someone’s post, and a very related comment on a short form. I can make a new comment that links to the old comment, but sometimes what I actually want is to drop the old comment (along with all of it’s associated children) into the new discussion.
Like, the comment should exist in two places on LessWrong, and any comments are visible in both places.
Then there’s one unified conversation, on that narrow point, instead of two related conversations.
I’m not strongly claiming that this is overall a good idea.
QiaochuYuan tweets:
> twitter did something amazing with its design: on most other platforms there are “posts” and “replies,” and replies are second-class citizens, lacking most of the affordances that posts have
> on twitter everything is a tweet! (ignoring articles) when you reply or QT a tweet you are writing another tweet, which has all the affordances a full tweet has. you can attach images (including screenshots), you can QT while replying, other people can reply or RT or QT your tweet, replies and QTs show up in feeds. this makes twitter “fully recursive” in a way other platforms aren’t. someone can make a point in a top-level tweet and you can critique or build off that point in a QT which is its own top-level tweet. tweets can get replies which are so good they accumulate more RTs and QTs than the original. there’s a frictionless way discussions “grow” on twitter, budding off new discussions which bud off new discussions etc, which any platform that maintains a post / reply distinction makes harder
I think a lot of the framing of twitter is bad, but, maybe this part is actually good and LW should have had (sort of painful to change now).
(It’s always been a bit awkward that writing a really good reply sort of disappears into the void and isn’t tracked as “as important” as a post)
It’s really helpful that posts have titles and can be googled, and are written to be read without reading a whole reply chain first. Tweets are far less well-designed for reading, can’t be googled, don’t have titles, and often require reading long threads of lots quote tweets of lots of different subcultures that you don’t understand.
I also like that so much of the relevant information stays nested under the post on LessWrong, whereas on Twitter I find it much harder to systematically read various offshoot threads of a tweet
Yeah. My typical twitter interactions are either:
Take the lowest leaf of a thread, then systematically go up the tweets, and expand all the ones with multiple children, and keep going until they’re all expanded, and then start to read down.
Open the author’s twitter profile, view their replies, then click to open all their replies in new tabs so that I make sure to have all the subthreads
agreed, but these problems are UI problems. not a critique of the concept of being “fully recursive” that LW is not
Nod, yeah I hadn’t thought through all the implications and maybe this is just crazy.
But, the sorts of thing I’m imagining:
comments have optional titles, you can basically upgrade anything into a post easily
i.e. the line between a top-level critical-comment, and EffortReply, and a Scott Alexander level “Contra So-and-So on Such and Such” was more about how much effort you put in?
many comments are heavily context dependent, but, if you choose to reply to something and want to put the effort into it being a standalone piece, you aren’t punished for not having broken out and written a top-level post.
I’d definitely want us to have way better UI for contextualizing things than twitter has (“how do?” is an open question)
I’m not sure about the UI of “what things are sans serif vs serif?” (and otherwise feeling “fancy” vs “off-the-cuff.”). One option is basically “fancy serifs or no?” is a setting.
I think it could be good to build post-level replies, where, when you get to the comment section, the post-item (i.e. just the height of like 3 lines of a comment) is sorted in the comment section by the karma of the post. So that you don’t have to choose between writing a response in a comment or in a post, but can instead do both in one motion.
agreed, the fundamental “self-recursive” model of twitter feels more complete. twitter’s UI of quickly understanding context is abysmal. fun fact, everything on Reddit is also a single data model “Post”. posts/comments are just rendered differently
I never understood how Twitter works, but now it seems to me like a tree that has only one (first? longest?) branch displayed by default… and most people are likely to reply to the leaf of the default branch, which makes most discussions linear.
Is this approximately correct?
(I don’t have much to say but I’d generically note: I’d suspect significant gains from medium-depth theorization here. Like, my speculative guess is: There’s various dynamics and resources and stuff at play, which are fairly obvious if you sit down to write them out; and then if you think about various one- or two-step inferences from those basics, you get interesting novel ideas about how to structure media platforms. Examples: attention, boosting, piggybacking, replying, affiliations, trust. Etc. Then ask, what is “a LW post” or “a LW comment” or “a LW quicktake” or “a tweet” or “a tweet reply” or “a QT” or “a substack post” or etc etc in these terms? What are the affordances and natural patterns of attention and information processing associated with each one? What space of possible such [media-chunk roles] does that suggest?)
a “convert to post” button that linkposts a comment into being a post would be pretty cool
I have sometimes wanted to “retweet” lesswrong comments, or alias them so that they can show up, in full, in multiple places on the site.
I have also wanted for a way to curate comments, separate from posts.
I think a good next step to get more in contact with this, would be for someone to write a “highlights from the comments” post for the last month. See how good they are, how many there are, how much context is needed, and whether it’s a good reading experience. I might curate it if it’s a good reading experience.
As a counterpoint, I think the rise of shortform on LessWrong has partially led to more stuff being written and partially led to more stuff that would have been posts written in a way that is less searchable, less linkable (in practice), less polished, and generally less supportive of ongoing discourse.
I have definitely published fewer posts since the shortform feed started up on the front page.
The more more we raise profile of comments the more they’ll displace posts as the medium of communication.
can you operationalize this more so we can bet on it?
Certainly there’s a bunch more shortform since we’ve made room for shortform. The question is has this displaced posts, by the same people writing it? (as opposed to turned more random Constellation lunch-room hot takes into things that were public-at-all)
But btw, part of my
proposalvague ideation here is that comments can have titles. Most comments don’t, by default, but if you end up writing an effortcomment you can give it a title. And, ideally, make them more natural to link to.Sure!
In the years before shortforms were on the front page, Eli published more LessWrong posts (on average) than the years when shortforms were on the front page.
This is an unfair operationalization, perhaps, but it does hew directly to the evidence that makes me believe the claim!
Well here is your posting history:
Year
Posts
Post wordcount
Comments
Comment wordcount
Shortform
Shortform Wordcount
Total wordcount
2017
0
0.0k
2
1.7k
0
0.0k
1.7k
2018
1
1.7k
35
0.4k
0
0.0k
2.1k
2019
12
2.2k
193
7.8k
25
4.1k
14.2k
2020
28
15.6k
147
11.1k
11
7.6k
34.3k
2021
5
3.4k
96
10.1k
14
2.7k
16.2k
2022
3
4.2k
114
14.5k
2
0.4k
19.2k
2023
3
14.8k
128
20.5k
0
0.0k
35.3k
2024
1
0.4k
227
27.0k
8
8.2k
35.6k
2025
0
0.0k
307
35.2k
9
5.9k
41.1k
2026
3
4.3k
234
25.9k
6
4.1k
34.3k
@Eli Tyre I’m not sure when you’re counting “the quick takes started changing things” but it seems like yourposting has basically been pretty constantly except for a brief more intense period in 2019/2020.
(you don’t seem to have any writing here before 2017 although I’m a bit surprised and not sure if you had a second account)
You guys started a new account for me when LessWrong 2.0 started.
I do kind of think we should be applying the frontpage/personal filter reliably to the quick takes section, so that it’s less news-y.
We did have the Popular Comments section. For some reason I didn’t like the popular comments section – it often was showing comments that were kind of tribal.
FYI, I haven’t actually gotten the UI to be that great yet, but, I’ve tried out version of the site that renders comments and posts together, clustered by time period:
https://baserates-test-git-comment-and-posts-together-lesswrong.vercel.app/all
In practice, atm, the “Today” section has a fair number of comments (because the posts haven’t been super upvoted yet). Then they mostly shift to posts (and if you click “load more”, some upvoted quick takes).
But, this might change over time, if people got basically as much opportunity to see and upvote comments as they did posts.
Just implement transclusion, like we do on Gwern.net. I do the equivalent of transcluding tweets all the time. (In fact, I would show you how I do transclude tweets on Gwern.net but it’s a bit tricky to dig up a ‘natural’ example, especially since Twitter long ago broke Nitter which was how we were getting clean snapshots to transclude, so they’re rare than they should be.)
You provide some selector options to govern how much of a target URL to transclude: see the docs for https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/master/js/transclude.js Thus, a user can transclude the ‘annotation’ version of a URL, which would include the header like “Ben Pace | May 12, 2026 2:33PM …”, or it could just transclude the ‘body’, ‘I have also wanted...good reading experience.’, or anything inside it which has IDs etc.
I’m not actually sure what you mean, can you give an end-to-end example?
This isn’t an end-to-end example, but sometimes there’s a discussion in the comments of someone’s post, and a very related comment on a short form. I can make a new comment that links to the old comment, but sometimes what I actually want is to drop the old comment (along with all of it’s associated children) into the new discussion.
Like, the comment should exist in two places on LessWrong, and any comments are visible in both places.
Then there’s one unified conversation, on that narrow point, instead of two related conversations.
I’m not strongly claiming that this is overall a good idea.