Love this initiative! I do have a question though. It seems that people with 100+ karma have most likely figured out how to write publicly with a decent quality. So this service would simply be a bonus for them.
Isn’t it more important to enable this service for lurkers/readers on Lesswrong who haven’t yet written many posts due to the reasons you’ve mentioned?
Disclaimer: I don’t have 100+ karma and haven’t written a lot outside as well—just privately in my note taking app.
No I don’t think it’s a good assumption that most people past a 100 karma have figured out how to write publicly with decent quality (though, depends on what you consider decent).
I’m well past a 100 and I expect this to be very useful to me when I write posts.
And if we’re talking in general then even the best writers usually have proofreaders/beta-readers (take Paul graham for example, every essay he releases credits at least a few beta readers)
I do agree it might be especially important to new people that don’t have karma, though. It’ll be interesting to hear more from the team why they decided on that specific limit. My guess, though, is that they want to mostly review posts that are going to be good posts, and don’t want to get spammed with low quality requests. And the 100+ karma filter does that pretty nicely.
One middleground I can think of is you can get a limited number of posts reviewed under 100 karma (even just 1), and at 100 that limit just goes away.
Another advantage of the 100 karma minimum is it’s an easy way to select for people who are members of the community. The point of this offer is to strengthen the community, after all.
I have over 2000 karma ~all from comments, and fear of not meeting the quality bar has definitely contributed to my lack of posts. (Two in ten years, and one of them was meta about the site itself.) So I am hoping I will find it in me to try using this and see how it goes!
Anecdata: I haven’t figured out writing with decent quality or audience awareness and have been burnt multiple times. I get a cold sweat each time. It just doesn’t keep me from posting. But I can totally relate to it, love the solution, and will definitely use it.
To answer people’s questions about the 100+ karma limit:
As lsusr notes, 100 karma isn’t that much and can easily be obtained be obtained by commenting. I think that’s a very reasonable bar to ask of people before offering this service. While I do think we can build the capacity to handle a lot of requests, I expect that without the karma bar, we’d get a lot of requests from people who hadn’t yet invested much in the site (or in their draft), simply because those are the most numerous. At least to begin with, I want to reserve the service for more dedicated users (and again, 100 karma doesn’t take that much).
As per the FAQ, users with less than 100 karma are free to request the service via Intercom and we might offer the service I expect to look over any draft that anyone submits and provide some level of feedback; more if seems like it’ll result in a decent post.
Separately from this initiative, I’m thinking about schemes to create more strong writers such as writing fellowships and writing guides (lsusr’s recent post about how to write well stemmed from a conversation we had about the topic).
Yeah, I was also wondering about the minimum requirement. It seems feedback would be most useful to people writing their first posts, and there’s no limitation on making a first post, is there? In the AI Alignment Prize I tried to write feedback to everyone and it ended up being a very valuable experience, both for the participants and for me.
Love this initiative! I do have a question though. It seems that people with 100+ karma have most likely figured out how to write publicly with a decent quality. So this service would simply be a bonus for them.
Isn’t it more important to enable this service for lurkers/readers on Lesswrong who haven’t yet written many posts due to the reasons you’ve mentioned?
Disclaimer: I don’t have 100+ karma and haven’t written a lot outside as well—just privately in my note taking app.
It’s easy to get >100 karma from comments alone, without any top-level posts.
Case in point: right now your one-sentence comment has 27 karma, over one fourth of the needed amount.
Example of one: I have ~200 from comments alone, and I only very rarely comment. I’ve been on LW for a long time though.
No I don’t think it’s a good assumption that most people past a 100 karma have figured out how to write publicly with decent quality (though, depends on what you consider decent).
I’m well past a 100 and I expect this to be very useful to me when I write posts.
And if we’re talking in general then even the best writers usually have proofreaders/beta-readers (take Paul graham for example, every essay he releases credits at least a few beta readers)
I do agree it might be especially important to new people that don’t have karma, though. It’ll be interesting to hear more from the team why they decided on that specific limit. My guess, though, is that they want to mostly review posts that are going to be good posts, and don’t want to get spammed with low quality requests. And the 100+ karma filter does that pretty nicely.
One middleground I can think of is you can get a limited number of posts reviewed under 100 karma (even just 1), and at 100 that limit just goes away.
I have more than 100 karma and still get a lot of value out of feedback on posts.
Another advantage of the 100 karma minimum is it’s an easy way to select for people who are members of the community. The point of this offer is to strengthen the community, after all.
True, though growing the community can also be part of strengthening it.
I have over 2000 karma ~all from comments, and fear of not meeting the quality bar has definitely contributed to my lack of posts. (Two in ten years, and one of them was meta about the site itself.) So I am hoping I will find it in me to try using this and see how it goes!
Anecdata: I haven’t figured out writing with decent quality or audience awareness and have been burnt multiple times. I get a cold sweat each time. It just doesn’t keep me from posting. But I can totally relate to it, love the solution, and will definitely use it.
To answer people’s questions about the 100+ karma limit:
As lsusr notes, 100 karma isn’t that much and can easily be obtained be obtained by commenting. I think that’s a very reasonable bar to ask of people before offering this service. While I do think we can build the capacity to handle a lot of requests, I expect that without the karma bar, we’d get a lot of requests from people who hadn’t yet invested much in the site (or in their draft), simply because those are the most numerous. At least to begin with, I want to reserve the service for more dedicated users (and again, 100 karma doesn’t take that much).
As per the FAQ, users with less than 100 karma are free to request the service via Intercom and we might offer the service I expect to look over any draft that anyone submits and provide some level of feedback; more if seems like it’ll result in a decent post.
Separately from this initiative, I’m thinking about schemes to create more strong writers such as writing fellowships and writing guides (lsusr’s recent post about how to write well stemmed from a conversation we had about the topic).
Editing can improve quality, or it can keep quality constant while reducing writing time, which is also pretty valuable.
Maybe they are trying to focus on improving the writing of people who are most likely to continue contributing to the forum in the future?
Yeah, I was also wondering about the minimum requirement. It seems feedback would be most useful to people writing their first posts, and there’s no limitation on making a first post, is there? In the AI Alignment Prize I tried to write feedback to everyone and it ended up being a very valuable experience, both for the participants and for me.