Didn’t see the original, but it looks good now.
Gondolinian
Karma: 1,391
Stupid Questions July 2015
Open Thread, Jun. 29 - Jul. 5, 2015
Open Thread, Jun. 22 - Jun. 28, 2015
(The line spacing got all wacko, sorry about that)
That prompted me to look up how to make line breaks in Markdown syntax, which I’d been wondering about myself for a while.
Try typing two or more spaces and then hitting enter
whenever you want a new line.
Thanks for responding. Unfortunately I think that guide only works for comments? Or at least, it only works for Markdown syntax. Do you know of any way to put Markdown syntax in a Main or Discussion post?
Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015
Sorry for the late reply, and thanks for the offer! Unfortunately I wasn’t actually talking about doing it myself, just putting it out there as an idea. Good luck though; it sounds like a valuable thing for the rationality community to have.
Improbable idea for surviving heat death: computers made from time crystals. (h/t Nostalgebraist and Scott)
Keep the same upvote/downvote system for individual comments and posts, but don’t keep a total karma score for each user on their user page. Alternatively, keep a total karma score, but don’t keep a total percent-positive score. (I believe the EA forum uses the former system, and Reddit the latter, but please correct me if I’m wrong about this.) [pollid:1006]
True, but that’s only from a very limited number of sources (~4?); it doesn’t include the dozens of smaller blogs. It’s also a straight feed—no filtering out of housekeeping, meta posts, etc.--and it only shows 5 links which are quickly pushed aside by newer ones, while a section for links would keep all of them accessible and searchable.
Ideas from recent discussion regarding changes to the Promotion system:
[in progress]
Have Promotion be based on some kind of popular vote (not necessarily karma) or some other kind of community decision, instead of an Editor’s decision. [pollid:1004]
Allow posts from Discussion to be Promoted without having to first be moved to Main.
This is already possible by logging into the Username account and sending a message or reply from there, but we could do something to make it more convenient. Thanks for the idea.
ETA: One possible issue with this I see is that the anonymity might encourage people to be meaner than they would be when posting/messaging under their main account, but perhaps there are ways around this?
[pollid:1000]
Ideas from recent discussion regarding changes to the karma system and/or addition of new sections:
[in progress]
Make downvotes cost some of the downvoter’s karma. (h/t RichardKennaway and Houshalter) [pollid:997]
Only allow users with a certain amount of karma to downvote. (The actual amount can be worked out later.) (h/t ete and Houshalter) [pollid:998]
Create a new and separate from Main and Discussion section with either no karma, like the SSC discussions, or only upvotes, like Tumblr, Facebook and other social media services used by rationalists. [pollid:999]
Create a new section for links to interesting posts on external rationalist blogs. (h/t Houshalter) [I apologize for the overlap with the previous poll; I found this idea only after I’d made it.] [pollid:1001]
On second thought, I’ll risk it. (I might post a comment to it with a compilation of my ideas and my favorites of others’ ideas, but it might take me a while.)
[Informal/Colloquial] Open Survey: Ideas for Improving Less Wrong
Good point, thanks. I was already not a fan of the way the polls made the post look, so I went ahead and took them down. I could replace them with something better, but I think this thread has already gotten most of the attention it’s going to get, so I might as well just leave the post as it is.
Would you be willing to run a survey on Discussion also about Main being based on upvotes instead of a mix of self-selection and moderation? As well as all ideas that seem interesting to you that people suggest here?
I’d rather not expose myself to the potential downvotes of a full Discussion post, and I also don’t know how to put polls in full posts, only in comments. Nonetheless I am pretty pro-poll in general and I’ll try to include more of them with my ideas.
Perhaps official downvote policies messaged to a user the first time they pass that would help too.
Anything with messages could be implemented by a bot account, right? That could be made without having to change the Less Wrong code itself.
Maybe we could send a message to users with guidelines on downvoting every time they downvote something? This would gently discourage heavy and/or poorly reasoned downvoting, likely without doing too much damage to the kind of downvoting we want. One issue with this is it would likely be very difficult or practically impossible for a bot account to know when someone downvotes something without changing the LW code. (Though it probably wouldn’t require a very big change, and things could be limited to just the bot account(s).)
[pollid:989]
I knew about melatonin and red/blue light from reading people in this community. I also had a vague understanding that circadian rhythms controlled falling asleep and were based on light, but I don’t think I’d seen things spelled out as clearly as they are here. Thank you for putting this together and I do look forward to the rest of your series.