I built a tagging system, while habryka was revamping the front-page to make it easier to filter it for those tags. Part of the intent here was that Meta, Front Page, Featured and Community would be tags.
In the process of doing so, we came to a few conclusions:
Tagging systems require a fair amount of effort to be valuable. On LW 1.0, for example, there is tagging, but not a good way to use it for filtering, so most of the tagged articles are essentially wasted effort.
Most of the reason we were excited about the tagging system was to make it easier to do community-posts. Most of the reason we were excited about that was because we didn’t want the front page to end up filled up with meta-rationality/community stuff that was only useful if you were heavily involved with the social scene, and we worried that there’d be a strong incentive gradient towards that. We wanted the front-page to be content that was obviously valuable to someone who wasn’t socially connected to the LW scene.
It wasn’t actually very clear what was the border between “community” and “non-community” post—there were certain obvious exemplars (like “discussion of social norms in the rationalist social scene”), but a lot of gray-area posts.
There might be other tags that are useful, but most of them seemed to require a higher volume of site content/traffic than we currently have. (When on average we don’t get more than 3 posts a day, it’s not super useful to filter by AI, Decision Theory, Community, etc, since in the time you took to filter them you could just look at the 3 new posts and see if any of them are relevant to your interests).
This is all to say, we’re currently not planning to push the Tagging feature branch until we a) have higher volume, and b) figure out what the exact use-case people want it for, and polished it up a bit accordingly.
Instead, we’re redesigning the front page to let users toggle between a few settings, depending on your interest level.
Curated (only content that we’re confident is high quality and relevant. Changing the name from “Featured” because “Featured/Frontpage” looked too similar at a glance)
Frontpage (shows all posts that meet our Front Page moderation guidelines. )
Community (all posts, including personal blog posts)
So for the time being, the community fitler is basically saying “I’m interested in staying up to date on whatever the rationality community is talking about, and judging for myself what’s interesting.”
This seemed to solve the main problem people were actually experiencing, which is that the avenue we are currently providing for community posts (the personal blogs) weren’t easy to find unless you went hunting for them.
This is a bit different from what we’d been promising, and if turns out there’s still a strong demand for tags, we can polish up that branch and push that as well.
We’re not pushing it now because every UI element is a bit of complexity that can quickly add up and we want to be careful about adding things. If there is demand for it, I want a clearer sense of the intended use-case people are looking for.
(Regardless of whether we finish up and deploy the Tagging feature, we’d still want to redesign the front-page to make it much easier to see the personal blog posts. If it turns out there’s a high demand for a “community” tag in addition to a “easily see all new posts” view, we might change the name of the “community” view to something else. But it felt like that name roughly communicated what we wanted that view to feel like)
I’m still confused on where to post stuff that I would think of posting in the old LW’s Open Threads. For example, “What are the best pieces of writing/advice on dealing with ‘shoulds’?” would be one thing that I’d want to post in an Open Thread. I have other various little questions/requests like this.
This seems like a reasonable solution to the community discussion issue, although I suppose we’ll have to just observe to see if ends up being successful successful.
I think that the more valuable use case is not so much filtering existing posts, as allowing groups of people to form their own spaces on Less Wrong. Tags would be a nice feature at some point, but the real killer use case is allowing projects to have their own discussion spaces on LW. At the moment, everyone heads over to fb or slack becaues you can’t create your own group here.
Excited that you are working on tagging. I expect this to substantially increase the utility of this site.
Quick update:
I built a tagging system, while habryka was revamping the front-page to make it easier to filter it for those tags. Part of the intent here was that Meta, Front Page, Featured and Community would be tags.
In the process of doing so, we came to a few conclusions:
Tagging systems require a fair amount of effort to be valuable. On LW 1.0, for example, there is tagging, but not a good way to use it for filtering, so most of the tagged articles are essentially wasted effort.
Most of the reason we were excited about the tagging system was to make it easier to do community-posts. Most of the reason we were excited about that was because we didn’t want the front page to end up filled up with meta-rationality/community stuff that was only useful if you were heavily involved with the social scene, and we worried that there’d be a strong incentive gradient towards that. We wanted the front-page to be content that was obviously valuable to someone who wasn’t socially connected to the LW scene.
It wasn’t actually very clear what was the border between “community” and “non-community” post—there were certain obvious exemplars (like “discussion of social norms in the rationalist social scene”), but a lot of gray-area posts.
There might be other tags that are useful, but most of them seemed to require a higher volume of site content/traffic than we currently have. (When on average we don’t get more than 3 posts a day, it’s not super useful to filter by AI, Decision Theory, Community, etc, since in the time you took to filter them you could just look at the 3 new posts and see if any of them are relevant to your interests).
This is all to say, we’re currently not planning to push the Tagging feature branch until we a) have higher volume, and b) figure out what the exact use-case people want it for, and polished it up a bit accordingly.
Instead, we’re redesigning the front page to let users toggle between a few settings, depending on your interest level.
Curated (only content that we’re confident is high quality and relevant. Changing the name from “Featured” because “Featured/Frontpage” looked too similar at a glance)
Frontpage (shows all posts that meet our Front Page moderation guidelines. )
Community (all posts, including personal blog posts)
Meta (just meta posts)
Daily (link to the Daily page.)
So for the time being, the community fitler is basically saying “I’m interested in staying up to date on whatever the rationality community is talking about, and judging for myself what’s interesting.”
This seemed to solve the main problem people were actually experiencing, which is that the avenue we are currently providing for community posts (the personal blogs) weren’t easy to find unless you went hunting for them.
This is a bit different from what we’d been promising, and if turns out there’s still a strong demand for tags, we can polish up that branch and push that as well.
We’re not pushing it now because every UI element is a bit of complexity that can quickly add up and we want to be careful about adding things. If there is demand for it, I want a clearer sense of the intended use-case people are looking for.
(Regardless of whether we finish up and deploy the Tagging feature, we’d still want to redesign the front-page to make it much easier to see the personal blog posts. If it turns out there’s a high demand for a “community” tag in addition to a “easily see all new posts” view, we might change the name of the “community” view to something else. But it felt like that name roughly communicated what we wanted that view to feel like)
I’m still confused on where to post stuff that I would think of posting in the old LW’s Open Threads. For example, “What are the best pieces of writing/advice on dealing with ‘shoulds’?” would be one thing that I’d want to post in an Open Thread. I have other various little questions/requests like this.
This seems like a reasonable solution to the community discussion issue, although I suppose we’ll have to just observe to see if ends up being successful successful.
I think that the more valuable use case is not so much filtering existing posts, as allowing groups of people to form their own spaces on Less Wrong. Tags would be a nice feature at some point, but the real killer use case is allowing projects to have their own discussion spaces on LW. At the moment, everyone heads over to fb or slack becaues you can’t create your own group here.