Isn’t that because on classic forums replying on an old thread brings it up to the top, as everything’s sorted by most recent reply by default? I can understand that norm there for that reason but obviously it doesn’t apply to LW.
I keep wondering if there’s some way to increase this, even. E.g. an opt-in context-specific LLM suggestion engine, which looks at what you’re writing and suggests related historical LW content.
LW regularly surfaces years-old posts in my “For You” feed, most of which I haven’t read, with a surprisingly high hit rate of “I’d like to check this out”, e.g. ten seconds of scrolling down shows John Wentworth’s 7 year old The Missing Math of Map-Making, a few more seconds of scrolling shows DirectedEvolution’s 5 year old Build Your Number Sense, etc. Kudos to the LW team and I wish other forums did this.
I’d really like a button I can push to tell the site “remind me of this post in N months/years, when [I’ll be able to ask OP about how it went]/[it’ll be obvious whether this post was right]/[I’ll be able to ask OP if they still believe what they said]”.
( . . . also the Annual Review arguably kind of covers some of this?)
I… don’t think people on LW regularly leave comments on old posts. It is rare, and usually only on top posts like the Sequences or Best of LessWrong.
The expected number of eyes seeing those comments is just too small. Of course, you can comment and then crosspost it elsewhere, though I don’t see many people do that.
I skimmed a couple page of that feed x 3 times over different time of day. It is hard to say whether it is positive or negative evidence that people regularly leave comments because there is still no data on how often people read older posts. Though, for the record, the ratio of comments on new vs old posts is higher than I expected, at like 1 in 5-10. I thought people are going to be at least 4x less likely to comment on old posts from expecting fewer engagements but this seems wrong.
One of my favorite things about LW that you don’t see on other similar-ish forums is that people regularly leave comments on years-old posts.
on many forums, this is actively strongly discouraged (“necroing”)
Isn’t that because on classic forums replying on an old thread brings it up to the top, as everything’s sorted by most recent reply by default? I can understand that norm there for that reason but obviously it doesn’t apply to LW.
I keep wondering if there’s some way to increase this, even. E.g. an opt-in context-specific LLM suggestion engine, which looks at what you’re writing and suggests related historical LW content.
LW regularly surfaces years-old posts in my “For You” feed, most of which I haven’t read, with a surprisingly high hit rate of “I’d like to check this out”, e.g. ten seconds of scrolling down shows John Wentworth’s 7 year old The Missing Math of Map-Making, a few more seconds of scrolling shows DirectedEvolution’s 5 year old Build Your Number Sense, etc. Kudos to the LW team and I wish other forums did this.
I’d really like a button I can push to tell the site “remind me of this post in N months/years, when [I’ll be able to ask OP about how it went]/[it’ll be obvious whether this post was right]/[I’ll be able to ask OP if they still believe what they said]”.
( . . . also the Annual Review arguably kind of covers some of this?)
There’s the !remindme bot for reddit, I imagine LW could implement something similar.
I… don’t think people on LW regularly leave comments on old posts. It is rare, and usually only on top posts like the Sequences or Best of LessWrong.
The expected number of eyes seeing those comments is just too small. Of course, you can comment and then crosspost it elsewhere, though I don’t see many people do that.
Well, N=1, but I leave comments regularly on old posts.
Also, if you look at https://www.greaterwrong.com/?sort=active there are some posts from 2022 − 2025, so it happens regularly, maybe rarely per post tho.
I skimmed a couple page of that feed x 3 times over different time of day. It is hard to say whether it is positive or negative evidence that people regularly leave comments because there is still no data on how often people read older posts. Though, for the record, the ratio of comments on new vs old posts is higher than I expected, at like 1 in 5-10. I thought people are going to be at least 4x less likely to comment on old posts from expecting fewer engagements but this seems wrong.
I think this is a good sign that lots of the posts here are timeless. I can look at a post from ~10 years ago and in lots of cases its:
A book review, specifically for a generally-relevant book, not merely a book which came out recently
A forecast, specifically a forecast which is specific enough to grade
A piece of philosophy which is actually disconnected from the zeitgeist at the moment
General post quality also helps here.