Noted. I’m not planning to revert the change, but I will try and track this cost.
FWIW, I think you might suffer less from this than you think. I believe every quick take I removed from the frontpage today was made after a post on the topic had been made, and, in most or all cases, after the post had been officially moved to personal.
(EDIT: or, perhaps, the conclusion I should draw from my previous paragraph is that adding this feature won’t help you that much, because the distribution of tag filters among the user base will mean few enough people see and upvote the quick take that it won’t appear on the frontpage for you)
If this is solely about patching the hack of, eg, “make a political post, get moved to personal blog, make a quick take with basically the same content so you retain visibility” I am much less bothered. Is that the main case you have/intend to do this?
There is a strong force in web forums to slide toward news and inside-baseball; the primary goal here is to fight against that. It is a bad filter for new users if a lot of that they see on first visiting the LessWrong homepage is discussions of news, recent politics, and the epistemic standards of LessWrong. Many good users are not attracted by these, and for those not put off it’s bad culture to set this as the default topic of discussion.
(Forgive me if I’m explaining what is already known, I’m posting in case people hadn’t heard this explanation before; we talked about it a lot when designing the frontpage distinction in 2017⁄8.)
Noted. I’m not planning to revert the change, but I will try and track this cost.
FWIW, I think you might suffer less from this than you think. I believe every quick take I removed from the frontpage today was made after a post on the topic had been made, and, in most or all cases, after the post had been officially moved to personal.
(EDIT: or, perhaps, the conclusion I should draw from my previous paragraph is that adding this feature won’t help you that much, because the distribution of tag filters among the user base will mean few enough people see and upvote the quick take that it won’t appear on the frontpage for you)
If this is solely about patching the hack of, eg, “make a political post, get moved to personal blog, make a quick take with basically the same content so you retain visibility” I am much less bothered. Is that the main case you have/intend to do this?
There is a strong force in web forums to slide toward news and inside-baseball; the primary goal here is to fight against that. It is a bad filter for new users if a lot of that they see on first visiting the LessWrong homepage is discussions of news, recent politics, and the epistemic standards of LessWrong. Many good users are not attracted by these, and for those not put off it’s bad culture to set this as the default topic of discussion.
(Forgive me if I’m explaining what is already known, I’m posting in case people hadn’t heard this explanation before; we talked about it a lot when designing the frontpage distinction in 2017⁄8.)
I hadn’t heard/didn’t recall that rationale, thanks! I wasn’t tracking the culture setting for new users facet, that seems reasonable and important