Huh—it just sank in that either Open Thread-like posts, or Personal-Feed-like posts, could function as “Facebook-like shortform content.”
tldr: you could create a post for yourself on your personal blog, called “X’s Personal Feed”, where you just post comments whenever you want to write something ‘shortform’, and it’d just appear on the front page, in a fashion relatively similar to FB. This is a decent minimum-viable-product for experimenting with shortform on LW2.0.
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We’d talked about building a short-form section, that make people feel more comfortable posting “conversational content”. When I sit down to write “A Post”, it sometimes feels overwhelming, like I have to get everything perfect. I also tend to make it longer than it needs to be. Whereas when I write a facebook post, I feel more free to loosely jot down an idea, trusting that people won’t judge me as much if it’s not as well written.
This makes it easier to get ideas out there. The problem is just that we (the developers) have a lot of stuff on our plate and probably wouldn’t get to an official short-form solution for quite a while.
I previously hadn’t been super into “Open Thread” style discussions—I felt like the only people who’d see it would be, well, people who are reading Open Threads, I guess. Which seemed like a small subsection of users, and didn’t feel worth posting it.
However, because of the way we currently display comments on the front page, we totally have a built-in-tool for experimenting with shortform content—we have a feed of the latest stuff people are saying.
I personally still feel a weird aversion to Open Threads, and feel more inclined to do a “Raemon’s Personal Feed” post where I post half-baked ideas that show up in comment form. But I think either could work, and mechanically they’re exactly the same thing anyhow.
Huh—it just sank in that either Open Thread-like posts, or Personal-Feed-like posts, could function as “Facebook-like shortform content.”
tldr: you could create a post for yourself on your personal blog, called “X’s Personal Feed”, where you just post comments whenever you want to write something ‘shortform’, and it’d just appear on the front page, in a fashion relatively similar to FB. This is a decent minimum-viable-product for experimenting with shortform on LW2.0.
...
We’d talked about building a short-form section, that make people feel more comfortable posting “conversational content”. When I sit down to write “A Post”, it sometimes feels overwhelming, like I have to get everything perfect. I also tend to make it longer than it needs to be. Whereas when I write a facebook post, I feel more free to loosely jot down an idea, trusting that people won’t judge me as much if it’s not as well written.
This makes it easier to get ideas out there. The problem is just that we (the developers) have a lot of stuff on our plate and probably wouldn’t get to an official short-form solution for quite a while.
I previously hadn’t been super into “Open Thread” style discussions—I felt like the only people who’d see it would be, well, people who are reading Open Threads, I guess. Which seemed like a small subsection of users, and didn’t feel worth posting it.
However, because of the way we currently display comments on the front page, we totally have a built-in-tool for experimenting with shortform content—we have a feed of the latest stuff people are saying.
I personally still feel a weird aversion to Open Threads, and feel more inclined to do a “Raemon’s Personal Feed” post where I post half-baked ideas that show up in comment form. But I think either could work, and mechanically they’re exactly the same thing anyhow.