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I think the subreddits should only be created after enough articles for given category were posted (and upvoted).

Agreed. This is why I shut off main and forced everything into discussion--I don't think we know enough about how LW will be used to partition things ahead of time. (I'm also pretty skeptical of doing a subreddit split on topics instead of on rules.)

Upvoting and downvoting should be limited to users already having some karma; not sure about exact numbers, but I would start with e.g. 100 for upvoting, and 200 or 300 for downvoting. This would prevent the most simple ways to game the system, which in its current form is insanely fragile -- a single dedicated person could destroy the whole website literally in an afternoon even without scripting. This is especially dangerous considering how much time it takes to fix even the smallest problems here.

Currently the limits are 10 for both upvoting and downvoting. We've already seen some innocent bystanders hit.

I think you're underestimating the difficulty in getting up to 100 karma. (One comment made a while ago is that the fragility of the voting system--especially when it comes to serial downvoters--happens in part because of how infrequently good users vote. It is problematic when we exclude people with good taste who don't contribute much, because that means the base of good votes to overcome is even shallower.)

See comment in full context

Lesswrong Potential Changes

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Mar 19, 2016

I have compiled many suggestions about the future of lesswrong into a document here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hH9mBkpg2g1rJc3E3YV5Qk-b-QeT2hHZSzgbH9dvQNE/edit?usp=sharing

It's long and best formatted there.

In case you hate leaving this website here's the summary:

Summary

There are 3 main areas that are going to change.

Technical/Direct Site Changes

1. new home page
2. new forum style with subdivisions
  1. new sub for “friends of lesswrong” (rationality in the diaspora)
3. New tagging system
4. New karma system
5. Better RSS
Social and cultural changes
1. Positive culture; a good place to be.
2. Welcoming process
3. Pillars of good behaviours (the ones we want to encourage)
4. Demonstrate by example
5. 3 levels of social strategies (new, advanced and longtimers)
Content (emphasis on producing more rationality material)
1. For up-and-coming people to write more
  1. for the community to improve their contributions to create a stronger collection of rationality.
2. For known existing writers
  1. To encourage them to keep contributing
  2. To encourage them to work together with each other to contribute

Less Wrong Potential Changes

Summary

Why change LW?

How will we know we have done well (the feel of things)

How will we know we have done well (KPI - technical)

Technical/Direct Site Changes

Homepage

Subs

Tagging

Karma system

Moderation

Users

RSS magic

Not breaking things

Funding support

Logistical changes

Other

Done (or Don’t do it):

Social/cultural

General initiatives

Welcoming initiatives

Initiatives for moderates

Initiatives for long-time users

Rationality Content

Target: a good 3 times a week for a year.

Approach formerly prominent writers

Explicitly invite

Place to talk with other rationalists

Pillars of purpose
(with certain sub-reddits for different ideas)

Encourage a declaration of intent to post

Specific posts

Other notes

Why change LW?

Lesswrong has gone through great times of growth and seen a lot of people share a lot of positive and brilliant ideas. It was hailed as a launchpad for MIRI, in that purpose it was a success. At this point it’s not needed as a launchpad any longer. While in the process of becoming a launchpad it became a nice garden to hang out in on the internet. A place of reasonably intelligent people to discuss reasonable ideas and challenge each other to update their beliefs in light of new evidence. In retiring from its “launchpad” purpose, various people have felt the garden has wilted and decayed and weeds have grown over. In light of this; and having enough personal motivation to decide I really like the garden, and I can bring it back! I just need a little help, a little magic, and some little changes. If possible I hope for the garden that we all want it to be. A great place for amazing ideas and life-changing discussions to happen.

How will we know we have done well (the feel of things)

Success is going to have to be estimated by changes to the feel of the site. Unfortunately that is hard to do. As we know outrage generates more volume than positive growth. Which is going to work against us when we try and quantify by measurable metrics. Assuming the technical changes are made; there is still going to be progress needed on the task of socially improving things. There are many “seasoned active users” - as well as “seasoned lurkers” who have strong opinions on the state of lesswrong and the discussion. Some would say that we risk dying of niceness, others would say that the weeds that need pulling are the rudeness.

Honestly we risk over-policing and under-policing at the same time. There will be some not-niceness that goes unchecked and discourages the growth of future posters (potentially our future bloggers), and at the same time some other niceness that motivates trolling behaviour as well as failing to weed out potential bad content which would leave us as fluffy as the next forum. there is no easy solution to tempering both sides of this challenge. I welcome all suggestions (it looks like a karma system is our best bet).

In the meantime I believe being on the general niceness, steelman side should be the motivated direction of movement. I hope to enlist some members as essentially coaches in healthy forum growth behaviour. Good steelmanning, positive encouragement, critical feedback as well as encouragement, a welcoming committee and an environment of content improvement and growth.

While at the same time I want everyone to keep up the heavy debate; I also want to see the best versions of ourselves coming out onto the publishing pages (and sometimes that can be the second draft versions).

So how will we know? By trying to reduce the ugh fields to people participating in LW, by seeing more content that enough people care about, by making lesswrong awesome.

The full document is just over 11 pages long. Please go read it, this is a chance to comment on potential changes before they happen.

Meta: This post took a very long time to pull together. I read over 1000 comments and considered the ideas contained there. I don't have an accurate account of how long this took to write; but I would estimate over 65 hours of work has gone into putting it together. It's been literally weeks in the making, I really can't stress how long I have been trying to put this together.

If you want to help, please speak up so we can help you help us. If you want to complain; keep it to yourself.

Thanks to the slack for keeping up with my progress and Vanvier, Mack, Leif, matt and others for reviewing this document.

As usual - My table of contents

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How will we know we have done well (KPI - technical)
Total comments/month
Total word count on posts/month
Total word count on comments/month

This feels wrong to me. I mean, I would like to have a website with a lot of high-quality materials. But given a choice between higher quality and more content, I would prefer higher quality. I am afraid that measuring these KPIs will push us in the opposite direction.

Reading spends time. Optimizing for more content to read means optimizing for spending more time here, and maybe even optimizing for attracting the kind of people who prefer to spend a lot of time debating online. Time spent reading is a cost, not a value. The value is what we get from reading the text. The real thing we should optimize for is "benefits from reading the text, minus time spent reading the text".

subreddits: ...

I think the subreddits should only be created after enough articles for given category were posted (and upvoted). Obviously that requires having one "everything else" subreddit. And the subreddits should reflect the "structure of the thingspace" of the articles.

Otherwise we risk having subreddits that remain empty. Or subreddits with too abstract names, or such that authors are confused where exactly which article belongs. (There will always be some difficult cases, but if the subreddit structure matches the typically written articles, the confusion is minimized.) For example, I wouldn't know whether talking about algorithms playing Prisonners' Dilemma belongs to "AI" or "math", or whether debates of procrastination among rationalists and how to overcome it are "instrumental" or "meta". By having articles first and subreddits later we automatically receive intensional definition of "things like this".

Perhaps we could look at some existing highly upvoted articles (except for the original Sequences) and try to classify those. If they can fit into the proposed categories, okay. But maybe we should have a guideline that a new subreddit cannot be created unless at least five already existing articles can be moved there.

Vaniver and others are interested in changing the voting system to something like StackOverflow’s model (privileged voting?).

Upvoting and downvoting should be limited to users already having some karma; not sure about exact numbers, but I would start with e.g. 100 for upvoting, and 200 or 300 for downvoting. This would prevent the most simple ways to game the system, which in its current form is insanely fragile -- a single dedicated person could destroy the whole website literally in an afternoon even without scripting. This is especially dangerous considering how much time it takes to fix even the smallest problems here.

EDIT:

It would be nice to have scripts for creating things like Open Thread automatically.

Explicitly invite the following people’s contribution: ...

Definitely add PJ Eby to the list. I am strongly convinced that ignoring him was one of the largest mistakes of the LW community. I mean, procrastination is maybe the most frequently mentioned problem on this website, and coincidentally we have an expert on this who also happens to speak our language and share our views in general, but instead of thinking about how to cooperate with him to create maximum value, CFAR rather spent years creating their own curriculum from the scratch which only a few selected people have seen. (I guess a wheel not invented in the Bay Area is not worth trying, despite all the far-mode talk about the virtue of scholarship.)

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I think the subreddits should only be created after enough articles for given category were posted (and upvoted).

Agreed. This is why I shut off main and forced everything into discussion--I don't think we know enough about how LW will be used to partition things ahead of time. (I'm also pretty skeptical of doing a subreddit split on topics instead of on rules.)

Upvoting and downvoting should be limited to users already having some karma; not sure about exact numbers, but I would start with e.g. 100 for upvoting, and 200 or 300 for downvoting. This would prevent the most simple ways to game the system, which in its current form is insanely fragile -- a single dedicated person could destroy the whole website literally in an afternoon even without scripting. This is especially dangerous considering how much time it takes to fix even the smallest problems here.

Currently the limits are 10 for both upvoting and downvoting. We've already seen some innocent bystanders hit.

I think you're underestimating the difficulty in getting up to 100 karma. (One comment made a while ago is that the fragility of the voting system--especially when it comes to serial downvoters--happens in part because of how infrequently good users vote. It is problematic when we exclude people with good taste who don't contribute much, because that means the base of good votes to overcome is even shallower.)

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I think you're underestimating the difficulty in getting up to 100 karma.

I don't think straight number limits like this are going to work well. Let's take two new users Alice and Bob, and stipulate that, using gaming terminology, Alice is a casual and Bob is an elitist jerk. Alice might well take a month or two or three to accumulate 100 karma in the course of her ordinary use of LW. Bob, being who he is, will minmax the process and get his 100 karma in a couple of days.

Managing the power gap between casuals and elite minmaxers is a big problem in multiplayer games and it doesn't look like an easily solved one.

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I don't think straight number limits like this are going to work well.

I think straight number limits give us the most usefulness for the difficulty to implement. If you have other suggestions, I'm interested.

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If we are talking about the criteria for the promotion to the full vote-wielding membership of LW, you are not limited to looking just at karma.

For example: Promote to full membership when (net karma > X) AND (number of positive-karma comments > Y) AND (days when posted a positive-karma comment > Z).

Implementation shouldn't be difficult, given how all these conditions are straightforward SQL queries.

A more general question is the trade-off between false positives and false negatives. Do you want to give the vote to the newbies faster at the cost of some troll vandalism, or do you want to curtail the potential for disruption at the cost of newbies feeling themselves second-class citizens longer?

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straightforward SQL queries

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If what should be straightforward SQL queries are too difficult to implement, LW code base is FUBARed anyway.

Anyone wants to write another middle layer which will implement normal SQL on top of that key-value store implemented on top of normal SQL? X-D

A bit more seriously, LW code clearly uses some ORM which, hopefully, makes some sense in some (likely, non-SQL) way. Also reading is not writing and for certain tasks it might make sense to read the underlying Postgres directly without worrying about the cache.

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We've already seen some innocent bystanders hit.

The disabled buttons should have tooltips saying "you need X karma to vote".

I think you're underestimating the difficulty in getting up to 100 karma.

Maybe 10 is okay for upvoting, but there needs to be a sufficiently high limit for downvoting, to stop the usual Eugine's strategy of "post three quotes in rationality thread, get a few upvotes, and immediately use the karma to harass others". Higher costs of doing things increase the cost of avoiding bans by making new accounts repeatedly.

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This feels wrong to me. I mean, I would like to have a website with a lot of high-quality materials. But given a choice between higher quality and more content, I would prefer higher quality. I am afraid that measuring these KPIs will push us in the opposite direction.

But more content equals a higher chance that some of the content is worth reading. You can't get to gold without churning through lots of sand.

Instead I think there should be decent filtering. It shouldn't be sorted by new by default, but instead "hot" or "top month" etc.

I think the subreddits should only be created after enough articles for given category were posted (and upvoted). Obviously that requires having one "everything else" subreddit. And the subreddits should reflect the "structure of the thingspace" of the articles.

I second this. In fact I would go further and say there should only be 1 or 2 distinct subreddits. Ideally just 1.

The model for this is Hacker News. They only have one main section. And no definition of what belongs there except maybe "things of interest to hackers" it's filled with links of all kinds of content from politics to new web frameworks.

I think lesswrong could do something like that successfully. The only reason it isn't is because, see above, new content like that is discouraged.

It would be nice to have scripts for creating things like Open Thread automatically.

Lesswrong currently uses (a highly outdated version of) reddit's api, so writing bots to do various tasks shouldn't be too difficult, and doesn't require access to Lesswrong's code.

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I don't know about CFAR, but my sense is that if the LW community as a whole ignored PJ Eby it wasn't because of Bay Area prejudice (what fraction of LW people have, or had, any idea where he lives?) but because the style of his writing was offputting to many here.

I mean, for instance, his habit of putting everything important in boldface, which feels kinda patronizing (and I think LW people tend to be extra-sensitive to that). And IIRC he used too many exclamation marks! The whole schtick pattern-matches to "empty-headed wannabe lifestyle guru"!

Having said that, I just had a quick historical look and it seems like from ~2013 (which is as far back as I looked) he hasn't been doing that much, and hasn't been ignored any more than other LW contributors. But perhaps he also hasn't been posting much about his lifestyle-guru/therapist/coach stuff either. (I can easily believe that the unusual writing style goes with the self-help territory rather than being something he just does all the time.)

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I don't know about CFAR, but my sense is that if the LW community as a whole ignored PJ Eby it wasn't because of Bay Area prejudice (what fraction of LW people have, or had, any idea where he lives?) but because the style of his writing was offputting to many here.

I think this is the main factor. I didn't find his style offputting, at least to the degree others did, but I notice that I never went on an archive-binge of what he'd written.

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Re. "Reducing total negative karma" as a goal--

Negative karma is already less common than positive karma. This is good, since it would be bad if the "average user" couldn't post. But without a justified target for what the proper amount of negative karma is, setting "reduce negative karma" as a goal isn't reasonable. How do we know we don't already have the right amount? Or too little?

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Thank you very much for putting this together.

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PhilGoetz said, "votes on posts in Discussion should count for more than votes on comments do. Maybe 5 points per vote?"

I agree. posting this here so that it doesn't get lost.

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Very nice job! I added some edits, and encourage everyone else who cares about the future of LW to add their own thoughts and edit the document. I really appreciate you all leading this effort to change things for the better!

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Great work!

A clarifying question - is this more of a "here are the changes that we're going to make unless people find serious problems with them" kind of document (implying that ~everything in it will be implemented), or more of a "here are changes that we think seem the most promising, later on we'll decide which ones we'll actually implement" type of document (implying that only some limited subset will be implemented)?

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I would like to see as many of these implementations made in the least break-things order possible.

I already culled a lot of the unpromising ones, (yes some of these are less promising, i.e. maybe having subs will create a ghost town)

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Who is involved in this effort that has power to make any of it happen?

That raises the issue that "have more transparency about who runs the site and makes decisions" would be nice. The "About Less Wrong" page doesn't say anything about who runs the site, who the mods are, anything of that nature. I have no way of knowing whether Elo is a site webmaster, or some guy tossing out ideas.

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Clarity's seal of approval

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I didn't downvote you and I intend no offense.

Assuming that you genuinely approve of this article, a seal of approval from a user with 50% positive karma is more like an anti-seal of approval, regardless of the validity of that user's statements. Most humans will be inclined to smack you down for grabbing status that they don't think you deserve, and they may even improperly use the quality and content of your comment as a substitute criterion for evaluating the quality and content of the parent article. It's not to say that you should refrain from commenting at all, but that you should refrain from commenting if your comments lack cues that will lead readers to evaluate your comments and their parents slowly and deliberatively. The easiest way to do this is to write comments that can only be written slowly and deliberatively and to refrain from commenting otherwise.

Assuming that you don't genuinely approve of this article, obscurantism and social engineering are unlikely to be productive and are discouraged.

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Thanks for the comment; We have experienced this before (Clarity's support and following discussion). it might not be in everyone's memory but it is in mine.

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mmu/how_to_learn_a_new_area_x_that_you_have_no_idea/coby

At this point I am glad he posted. Clarity is still a member of the culture around here; even if he is not a good-karma scoring member, he still participates regularly and has valid opinions on things.

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HN has a mechanism for giving an article your seal of approval: it's called upvoting. More than that is only necessary if you expect your approval specifically to weigh more highly than that of other users.

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Seeing comments from (say) three people who explicitly say that they agree or think I've done a good work, feels much better than just seeing three upvotes on my comment / post. I know that there are other people who feel the same. Our minds aren't good at visualizing numbers.

I think that "if you are particularly happy about something, you can indicate this with an explicit comment in addition to the upvote" is a good norm to have. Giving people extra reward for doing particularly good work is good.

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That's a reasonable point. (And I have no inkling why anyone thought you should be downvoted for making it.)

None the less, it seems to me that if you really find an article particularly impressive then you should almost always be able to find something more specific to say than "I like this", and that a better norm than "if you really like something, post a generic positive comment" would be "if you really like something, post a positive comment saying something about why you like it". More useful feedback, more discussion fodder, less clutter, and (because of the small extra effort required) I think a better indication of actually having liked something substantially more than usual.

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I hope it isn't too late to make another feature suggestion:

What about enabling users to suggest edits to other users' posts and comments? It is my favorite feature on Quora, and I wish the same thing was possible everywhere on the internet.

It is awesome for all those times when people make minor spelling or formatting errors and I don't want to make a big deal about it by writing a comment. Whether or not the suggestion should be accepted or rejected is of course always the original author's decision.

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