We want as many people as possible to read Less Wrong. Readers don’t impact the quality of the site but they’re how you get ideas out into the ether. And making more people more rational has a net positive effect on the world.
There are barriers to people reading less wrong. Most obviously, they need to get linked to us. Then they need to be sufficiently intrigued by the home page to look around. Then, if they lack the background knowledge necessary to understand what is going on they might leave. They are less likely to leave if they can find answers to these questions here. Also, they might not be interested in the subjects. If they aren’t interested in rationality we don’t really want them. But they might be interested in rationality and just not interested in the sci-fi topics that mostly get discussed here. Also, people may think we are crazy.
Readers are also the recruiting pool for new posters and commenters. All else being equal we want more of these. More commenters increase the rate of great comments per hour and increase the power of our abduction engine. All else being equal, more commenters doesn’t increase the overall quality of comments but it will increase the quality of say, the top 100 comments per day, which improves the reading experience for those who use the karma system to sort threads (which more of us will probably do if there become too many comments to read them all). Also new blood is good. And commenting makes it more likely you will return and read.
There are barriers to readers becoming commenters and posters. The main issue is that we are really intimidating. But...
Perhaps the most important thing is maintaining the high level of discourse. We don’t want commenters saying especially dumb things, we don’t want to keep returning to covered ground, we don’t want to deal with poorly formatted or difficult to read comments.
More commenters increase the rate of great comments per hour
Yep—to the point that it’s becoming hard to keep up.
If we “fix” the issue that is holding people back from participating, we may risk creating a worse one, where overload causes people to stop participating.
One of the things I like about LW is how people have longer memories than elsewhere (it’s one thing that keeps us from returning to covered ground); we are often linking not just to past top-level posts but also to past comments.
But that requires keeping up with a lot of discussion. Even those of us who are fast readers with good memories and a “blink” capability for identifying which comments are worth reading and responding to… are only human and have limits.
I’m not sure how scalable the model is that makes the LW-of-today valuable to me, and presumably makes it valuable to others also.
The memory issue is a really good point. Perhaps as LW grows posters will have to specialize. For example, I might follow everything written about philosophy and just read the top comments/collective wisdom on physics, ev psych etc.
We want as many people as possible to read Less Wrong. Readers don’t impact the quality of the site but they’re how you get ideas out into the ether. And making more people more rational has a net positive effect on the world.
There are barriers to people reading less wrong. Most obviously, they need to get linked to us. Then they need to be sufficiently intrigued by the home page to look around. Then, if they lack the background knowledge necessary to understand what is going on they might leave. They are less likely to leave if they can find answers to these questions here. Also, they might not be interested in the subjects. If they aren’t interested in rationality we don’t really want them. But they might be interested in rationality and just not interested in the sci-fi topics that mostly get discussed here. Also, people may think we are crazy.
Readers are also the recruiting pool for new posters and commenters. All else being equal we want more of these. More commenters increase the rate of great comments per hour and increase the power of our abduction engine. All else being equal, more commenters doesn’t increase the overall quality of comments but it will increase the quality of say, the top 100 comments per day, which improves the reading experience for those who use the karma system to sort threads (which more of us will probably do if there become too many comments to read them all). Also new blood is good. And commenting makes it more likely you will return and read.
There are barriers to readers becoming commenters and posters. The main issue is that we are really intimidating. But...
Perhaps the most important thing is maintaining the high level of discourse. We don’t want commenters saying especially dumb things, we don’t want to keep returning to covered ground, we don’t want to deal with poorly formatted or difficult to read comments.
Yep—to the point that it’s becoming hard to keep up.
If we “fix” the issue that is holding people back from participating, we may risk creating a worse one, where overload causes people to stop participating.
One of the things I like about LW is how people have longer memories than elsewhere (it’s one thing that keeps us from returning to covered ground); we are often linking not just to past top-level posts but also to past comments.
But that requires keeping up with a lot of discussion. Even those of us who are fast readers with good memories and a “blink” capability for identifying which comments are worth reading and responding to… are only human and have limits.
I’m not sure how scalable the model is that makes the LW-of-today valuable to me, and presumably makes it valuable to others also.
The memory issue is a really good point. Perhaps as LW grows posters will have to specialize. For example, I might follow everything written about philosophy and just read the top comments/collective wisdom on physics, ev psych etc.
I was thinking about the scaling and attention problem, with no obvious answer except that LW might hive off related blogs.