There has been a rash of highly upvoted quick takes recently that don’t meet our frontpage guidelines. They are often timely, perhaps because they’re political, pitching something to the reader or inside baseball. These are all fine or even good things to write on LessWrong! But I (and the rest of the moderation team I talked to) still want to keep the content on the frontpage of LessWrong timeless.
Unlike posts, we don’t go through each quick take and manually assign it to be frontpage or personal (and posts are treated as personal until they’re actively frontpaged). Quick takes are instead treated more like frontpage by default, but we do have the ability to move them to personal.
I’m writing this because of a bunch of us are planning to be more active about moving quick takes off the frontpage. I also might link to this comment to clarify what’s happening in cases of confusion.
Something feels wonky about the way quick takes are reduced features (no title, tags, worse searchability, no filtering) but a ton of the best content ends up there. I think there’s a bunch of something like feeling like you have to have an Official Post and feel vaguely bad if it doesn’t go well as a top level post, but Quick Takes feel emotionally cheap.
idk how to solve this more cleanly, but maybe this datapoint of how it feels to me is useful
if there was a thing which was more fully featured but somehow emotionally cheap that would be neat. I think friction of the top level post publishing process might be a lot of it?
maybe a way to make the datatype of shortform comments closer to posts, and a way for readers to be like “hey make this a post please” and you can easily switch it over.
oh! and the time lag between clicking yes on post and getting frontpaged, especially with the uncertainty of whether it will be, is actually a pretty large chunk of why top level posts feel emotionally weighty. this isn’t as true for EAF. having most of the whether to frontpage decisions done very rapidly would actually be a huge QOL improvement here.
Only if there was a way to convert to post, otherwise you mostly just feel bad for having classified it wrong. But if there was a way, yes, absolutely!
I agree about the long delay in frontpaging, so it’s been one of my side projects to get that time down. I’ve trained a logistic classifier to predict the eventual destination of a post, and currently mods are seeing those predictions when they process posts. If the predictions perform well for awhile, we’ll have them go live and review the classification retrospectively
I’d like to be able to see such quick takes on the homepage, like how I can see personal blogposts on the homepage (even though logged-out users can’t).
Are you hiding them from everyone? Can I opt into seeing them?
I forgot that I could choose not to filter out personal blogposts—I think I will set this to “default” from now on. Feels like there’s probably lots of decent content that I haven’t been seeing
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.)
My perception is that it’s not exactly about goodness, it’s more like, a post must conform to certain standards*. In the same way that a scientific paper must meet certain standards to get published in a peer-reviewed journal, but a non-publishable paper could still present novel and valuable scientific findings.
*and, even though I’ve been reading LW since 2012, I’m still not clear on what those standards are or how to meet them
Yeah. I think you can post anything as a personal post, and the gods of LW may take a fancy to them, as is their preview, and put them on the front page.
FYI the particular thing I care about here is less “our usual literal frontpage criteria”, and more that people doing things that seem aimed at bypassing the frontpage criteria particularly for the purpose of getting attention on a promotional thing. (which may be somewhat different than kave’s take)
There has been a rash of highly upvoted quick takes recently that don’t meet our frontpage guidelines. They are often timely, perhaps because they’re political, pitching something to the reader or inside baseball. These are all fine or even good things to write on LessWrong! But I (and the rest of the moderation team I talked to) still want to keep the content on the frontpage of LessWrong timeless.
Unlike posts, we don’t go through each quick take and manually assign it to be frontpage or personal (and posts are treated as personal until they’re actively frontpaged). Quick takes are instead treated more like frontpage by default, but we do have the ability to move them to personal.
I’m writing this because of a bunch of us are planning to be more active about moving quick takes off the frontpage. I also might link to this comment to clarify what’s happening in cases of confusion.
(not very specific to this decision)
Something feels wonky about the way quick takes are reduced features (no title, tags, worse searchability, no filtering) but a ton of the best content ends up there. I think there’s a bunch of something like feeling like you have to have an Official Post and feel vaguely bad if it doesn’t go well as a top level post, but Quick Takes feel emotionally cheap.
idk how to solve this more cleanly, but maybe this datapoint of how it feels to me is useful
if there was a thing which was more fully featured but somehow emotionally cheap that would be neat. I think friction of the top level post publishing process might be a lot of it?
maybe a way to make the datatype of shortform comments closer to posts, and a way for readers to be like “hey make this a post please” and you can easily switch it over.
oh! and the time lag between clicking yes on post and getting frontpaged, especially with the uncertainty of whether it will be, is actually a pretty large chunk of why top level posts feel emotionally weighty. this isn’t as true for EAF. having most of the whether to frontpage decisions done very rapidly would actually be a huge QOL improvement here.
Perhaps a react for “I wish this idea/sentence/comment was a post” would improve things.
Only if there was a way to convert to post, otherwise you mostly just feel bad for having classified it wrong. But if there was a way, yes, absolutely!
I agree about the long delay in frontpaging, so it’s been one of my side projects to get that time down. I’ve trained a logistic classifier to predict the eventual destination of a post, and currently mods are seeing those predictions when they process posts. If the predictions perform well for awhile, we’ll have them go live and review the classification retrospectively
Oh nice, looking forward to that!
I’d like to be able to see such quick takes on the homepage, like how I can see personal blogposts on the homepage (even though logged-out users can’t).
Are you hiding them from everyone? Can I opt into seeing them?
I forgot that I could choose not to filter out personal blogposts—I think I will set this to “default” from now on. Feels like there’s probably lots of decent content that I haven’t been seeing
It would be good to have this feature, but we don’t yet
I would strongly prefer for you to not move quick takes off the front page until there’s a way for me to opt into seeing them
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
I guess I’ll write non-frontpage-y quick takes as posts instead then :(
I had a very wrong model of what quick takes are. I was thinking like, not good enough for a post, put it in a quick take.
My perception is that it’s not exactly about goodness, it’s more like, a post must conform to certain standards*. In the same way that a scientific paper must meet certain standards to get published in a peer-reviewed journal, but a non-publishable paper could still present novel and valuable scientific findings.
*and, even though I’ve been reading LW since 2012, I’m still not clear on what those standards are or how to meet them
Yeah. I think you can post anything as a personal post, and the gods of LW may take a fancy to them, as is their preview, and put them on the front page.
It sounds like you’re talking about the standards for frontpaging rather than quick take vs post?
I’m talking about my perception of the standards for a quick take vs. post. I don’t know if my perception is accurate
Not good enough for a post, good enough for front page, apparently. :D
What did you update your model to?
FYI the particular thing I care about here is less “our usual literal frontpage criteria”, and more that people doing things that seem aimed at bypassing the frontpage criteria particularly for the purpose of getting attention on a promotional thing. (which may be somewhat different than kave’s take)