first post inevitably misses some background, common knowledge, or unstated rule, and gets downvoted more than it “should” be
There are definitely (at least) two possible failure modes to fall into here. But I’m currently not that worried about newcomers getting downvoted because it empirically doesn’t happen that often (we recently set up moderator-sidebar tools that keep mods in the loop about new comments – we see all comments that end up with one-or-less karma, so we have some sense of what trends are common there).
The biggest complaint we hear about is about overly-critical comments (which I do think contributes to downvotes feeling harsher). But most of those overly-critical comments are from lower-to-mid-karma users. One of the problems I’m hoping to solve here is to avoid making “superficial criticism” a reliable way to grind karma and gain disproportionate control over the site.
Meanwhile, we have a clear case study of how LessWrong died the first time, and this was largely because the experienced users started drifting off – a process that accelerated as the overall quality of the site went down. (This is discussed in some detail on Habryka’s Strategic Overview post, with Scott Alexander’s quote being a succinct description of the problem)
Based on lots of user interviews, it seems like a top priority is making sure LW is a productive place for the top contributors to engage in discussion. This provides the core of content that continues to attract new users in the first place.
There are definitely (at least) two possible failure modes to fall into here. But I’m currently not that worried about newcomers getting downvoted because it empirically doesn’t happen that often (we recently set up moderator-sidebar tools that keep mods in the loop about new comments – we see all comments that end up with one-or-less karma, so we have some sense of what trends are common there).
The biggest complaint we hear about is about overly-critical comments (which I do think contributes to downvotes feeling harsher). But most of those overly-critical comments are from lower-to-mid-karma users. One of the problems I’m hoping to solve here is to avoid making “superficial criticism” a reliable way to grind karma and gain disproportionate control over the site.
Meanwhile, we have a clear case study of how LessWrong died the first time, and this was largely because the experienced users started drifting off – a process that accelerated as the overall quality of the site went down. (This is discussed in some detail on Habryka’s Strategic Overview post, with Scott Alexander’s quote being a succinct description of the problem)
Based on lots of user interviews, it seems like a top priority is making sure LW is a productive place for the top contributors to engage in discussion. This provides the core of content that continues to attract new users in the first place.