I downvoted this because it’s encouraging negativity with no benefit as far as I can tell. A list of underrated posts is theoretically useful because people could follow the links and read them, but what would you do with a list of overrated posts?
If there are strong but not widely publicized criticisms of highly upvoted posts, it might make sense to have those criticisms more widely publicized (so people don’t just take those things at face value). But this feels like a special case of your point, where it’s really the criticisms that are underrated.
I suspect there are many such criticisms, and that they tend not to get found, especially with older posts. Say that a post from 2017 has a subtle flaw that isn’t discovered until 2019. A comment pointing out the flaw probably gets buried under 50 other comments before anyone pays attention. A post directly responding to a 2-year-old post takes hours to write, and probably gets less attention than a new post with equal effort.
I looked at the top 10 posts from 2017; most of them have no criticisms or highly upvoted comments from the last year, and none of them have highly-upvoted criticisms. We’ve come far enough since 2017 that even if these posts were high-quality at the time, there should still be caveats for today’s readers, and I can’t find any.
Thanks. I didn’t look closely at the review project before, but it seems to be much of what I need. I wish there were some longer-term review system where we would continue putting LW1 and diaspora era content in a current context.
I downvoted this because it’s encouraging negativity with no benefit as far as I can tell. A list of underrated posts is theoretically useful because people could follow the links and read them, but what would you do with a list of overrated posts?
If there are strong but not widely publicized criticisms of highly upvoted posts, it might make sense to have those criticisms more widely publicized (so people don’t just take those things at face value). But this feels like a special case of your point, where it’s really the criticisms that are underrated.
I suspect there are many such criticisms, and that they tend not to get found, especially with older posts. Say that a post from 2017 has a subtle flaw that isn’t discovered until 2019. A comment pointing out the flaw probably gets buried under 50 other comments before anyone pays attention. A post directly responding to a 2-year-old post takes hours to write, and probably gets less attention than a new post with equal effort.
I looked at the top 10 posts from 2017; most of them have no criticisms or highly upvoted comments from the last year, and none of them have highly-upvoted criticisms. We’ve come far enough since 2017 that even if these posts were high-quality at the time, there should still be caveats for today’s readers, and I can’t find any.
You might be interested in the 2018 Review, which spurred discussion of this sort, both as reviews on the posts and in new posts that were replies.
Thanks. I didn’t look closely at the review project before, but it seems to be much of what I need. I wish there were some longer-term review system where we would continue putting LW1 and diaspora era content in a current context.
You would downvote them in order to make the sorted-by-karma archives more useful! (See the tragically underrated “Why Artificial Optimism?”)