See jameshfisher.com. Developer, blogger, entrepreneur. London, UK.
Jim Fisher
Karma: 32
Please say more! I’d love to hear examples.
(And I’d love to hear a definition of “better”. I saw you read my recent post. My definition of “better” would be something like “more effective at building a Community of Inquiry”. Not sure what your definition would be!)
So the ultimate trigger to move wasn’t some hifalutin’ desires to apply media ecology theories to optimize for inquiry (as was my theory), but much more mundane and urgent needs to fight spam and trolls!
I found this announcement of LessWrong 2.0, which indeed mentions spam and trolls. The main innovation seems to be the delightfully named “Eigenkarma”, which I think is approximated by ForumMagnum by making your vote strength approximately the log of your karma.
Oh, wow, so I’d misunderstood that one as well! Apparently, my expectation so strong that the main axis was supposed to exclude “agreement”, that I actively misinterpreted the word “overall”. I just discovered this announcement of “Agree/Disagree Voting” which mostly confirms that yes, overall is supposed to be overall.
Shortform: ah, so it isn’t intended as zoning. More that short-form and long-form are both valuable, but each needs a separate space to exist. (This seems to be a law of online media: short-form and long-form can’t naturally share the same space. Same for sync and async. See e.g. Google Wave failure. I don’t entirely understand the reasons, though.)
Agree-voting: I too end up incorporating “agreement” into the “overall” vote, despite the separate axis. I think “overall” almost implies I should do that! (Perhaps if “overall” were renamed to e.g. “important”? “How important is this comment?”)
Possible future changes: I like your suggestions! Though (in line with the CoI research) I’d like to think about: can we measure (e.g. with split testing) whether those changes affect behavior in the right direction? Or can we draw on empirical CoI research instead of testing it ourselves?
Thank you! ( I just submitted this reply too early by trying Cmd-Enter. I suggest that this feature is deliberately hidden to discourage its frequent use :)
Ah yes, I saw that the original LW was actually based on Reddit! It would be very interesting to see the original discussions showing the motivations for developing ForumMagnum. For example, did the Reddit-based forum lead to some undesirable norms?
I hadn’t heard of Lightcone Infra. Their LessWrong page is another clue about how ForumMagnum is really developed. Sounds like they’re thinking along similar lines—media optimized for inquiry/rationality.
How ForumMagnum builds communities of inquiry
As of 28 July, this podcast has dramatically declined in quality. Instead of human narration, it is now “Narrated for LessWrong by TYPE III AUDIO”. It’s a text-to-speech model that has far too many problems for this to be listenable. The prior human narration was excellent, e.g. the effort put into describing images.
Please revert this change, or move it to a different podcast!
I don’t think I removed any archive.org links. My intention was to remove dead links, and to make it clearer which links are worth visiting. Please revert if I’ve made a mistake or you disagree with my intention.