the sheer quantity of new content is extremely low
That depends on how much time you actually want to spend reading LW. I mean, the optimal quantity will be different for a person who reads LW two hours a day, or a person who reads LW two hours a week. Now the question is which one of these should we optimize LW for? The former seems more loyal, but the latter is probably more instrumentally rational if we agree that people should be doing things besides reading web. (Also, these days LW competes for time with SSC and others.)
Ideally, you would want to generate enough content for the person who wants to read LW two hours a day, an then promote or highlight the best 5%-10% of the content so someone who has only two hours a week can see it.
Everyone is much better off that way. The person with only two hours a week is getting much better content then if there was much less content to begin with.
If LW2 remembers who read what, I guess “a list of articles you haven’t read yet, ordered by highest karma, and secondarily by most recent” would be a nice feature that would scale automatically.
That depends on how much time you actually want to spend reading LW. I mean, the optimal quantity will be different for a person who reads LW two hours a day, or a person who reads LW two hours a week. Now the question is which one of these should we optimize LW for? The former seems more loyal, but the latter is probably more instrumentally rational if we agree that people should be doing things besides reading web. (Also, these days LW competes for time with SSC and others.)
Ideally, you would want to generate enough content for the person who wants to read LW two hours a day, an then promote or highlight the best 5%-10% of the content so someone who has only two hours a week can see it.
Everyone is much better off that way. The person with only two hours a week is getting much better content then if there was much less content to begin with.
If LW2 remembers who read what, I guess “a list of articles you haven’t read yet, ordered by highest karma, and secondarily by most recent” would be a nice feature that would scale automatically.