I'm starting to wonder whether it might be useful to have a 'Meta' section, which is separate from Discussion (and Main) for meta threads of all kinds.
Then when that gets filled with meta threads about the Meta section we can create the Meta Meta section.
If people would just start the title with "Meta:", people would be warned up front. Some people here have already done this, and it is a common technique with a long pedigree on mailing lists.
I see the same thing being done with Meetup:.
Is this already suggested in the Wiki or FAQ?
Okay, I understand, because of this comment, why the thread was voted down. Thanks Konkvistador.
I consider this is a design defect of the forum software that limits scalability. Or if not a design defect, just a mismatch between design and use.
Blog software just was not designed for sustained discussion or filtered discussion. Just catch some eyeballs and let them spout off. That's what it enables. It's the same annoyance everywhere.
I'll repeat my old geezer lament - TRN and other usenet readers were vastly superior for discussion lists compared to web forum software and blog software in general use.
I think this is an important risk, even though people are tired of meta discussion (and these posts are way too long for their useful content). This use case should be captured in some plan. Right now all we have is possibility of shutting down and possibly recovering from an archive, and that is not a good solution.
People with 0 Karma can still upvote, so there is a danger that new members will just upvote each other quickly. This problem could be solved if there is enough latency between a point where a user starts participating and where they can influence moderation by voting, i.e. only allow voting (both upvoting and downvoting) after a significant threshold, something like 500 Karma points, so that it would take at least a month at typical Karma gain rates of very active users to get there, sufficient for vetting of new members.
Current limitation of 4xKarma on downvoting amplifies initial votes, so can run out of control if applied to upvoting. If upvoting is limited to, say, 0.5xKarma, then any vote granted to a new member releases the potential effect of 1+0.5+0.5^2+...=2 points; if it's 0.9xKarma, it has the potential effect of 10 points, and 1xKarma is critical, with potentially unlimited effect. So below 500 points where we may decide that a new user is known to be acculturated enough, no more than about 0.5xKarma of upvotes should be allowed.
People with 0 Karma can still upvote, so there is a danger that new members will just upvote each other quickly. This problem could be solved if there is enough latency between a point where a user starts participating and where they can influence moderation by voting, i.e. only allow voting (both upvoting and downvoting) after a significant threshold, something like 500 Karma points, so that it would take at least a month at typical Karma gain rates of very active users to get there, sufficient for vetting of new members.
I made a very similar proposal recently, just set at 1000 karma. There is some discussion there on the ups and downs of such an approach behind the link.
My intent wasn't mockery.
I had no way to distinguish between the learning disorder hypothesis and the "has not assimilated LW culture/vocabulary" hypothesis, and the latter seemed a lot more salient and likely. You're new, you're making other cultural errors that just don't happen to be so readily quoted, and I don't remember you mentioning this anywhere before.
Ironically, after reading your incessant calls for improvement, the suggestion I have is to limit the number of top-level posts per month by a new member to the number of months they have been active.
It's unlikely that this would occur to someone, so this should be a statement and not a rhetorical question (since it's a question, I'm still not certain if it's a statement, and if so what it means more specifically). The choice you describe is a false trichotomy. For example, you could be discussing the changes, but in a less verbose manner (this takes care of shminux's complaint), or you could only summarize after you've finished designing them and were preparing to move to implementation (this takes care of suddenness of changes, allows revision).
Your writing does tend to be verbose-- the amount of interesting surprise per amount of text is low.
Part of the problem seems to be repetition among articles as well as within them.
Judging the amount of redundancy needed and then supplying good quality redundancy is a hard problem, and I think most people just have a habitual redundancy level. (Mine may be too low.) I haven't seen an overt discussion of how to do redundancy well anywhere.
Many parts of this comment pattern-match to the poorly informed ranter type we get here that I was talking about earlier. (You don't match overall, but sometimes people don't seem to, at first...)
Here's a point by point on what patterns you're matching if that'll help, but after that I want to end the thread because I find you kind of frustrating to talk to.
I don't see being less verbose as a good way to convey all relevant information.
Response to feedback about how to talk to us: denying that that's how to talk to us.
I guess this is too complicated for people to want to be involved in it. Maybe they don't care that much or just want someone to figure it out for them or something.
Subtly derisive remarks about others' virtue (tolerance for complexity, commitment to site, interest level, initiative, etc.)
I never seem to assume that, though. I always seem to assume they'll want to know. Maybe that's an odd habit.
Passive-aggressive assertion about self-exceptionalism and your rare, yet unfailing tendency to see the best in others even when constantly disappointed - budding martyr complex.
Still, I have a hard time understanding why they'd seek to censor somebody talking about something that was relevant, and could be important, that other people do want to talk about.
Ignorance claim that happens to oblige other people to justify wanting you to stop doing somethin...
I know it can be tiring to explain to frustrating people why they are frustrating. Thanks for taking the time to type this up. Hopefully I'm good enough at taking criticism that I won't stay frustrating long.
Doomsaying. Also, you're conveniently the only one who has noticed this Terrible Danger.
This seems rather harsh, given what Eliezer has been saying. If the person with ultimate power over the forum has been talking about the site "going to hell" it has to be expected that the language of doom will rub off on new users. This isn't to say Epiphany matches patterns any less but we could perhaps avoid conveying isolation.
Actually, this eternal September business was preceded by the concerns of other people in my LessWrong could grow a lot but we're doing it wrong thread:
gjm (Specifically concerned about intentional growth that I proposed causing eternal September.)
More people expressed concern when I talked about preventing it:
People are still expressing concern in this very thread:
If there's a volunteer interested in working on growth, and it looks like lots of growth is possible, but a bunch of people are concerned about a decline in culture and it's a known risk of growing internet forums, and Eliezer is talking about the proliferation of undiscriminating skeptics, and I saw a forum collapse from it myself, doesn't it make sense to talk about whether growth would destroy LessWrong before speeding up growth?
People were quick to up vote my growth post like there's no tomorrow. It was the most popular post in almost a month. Then I write a post about the downsides of growth, and it's down voted to the point of being hidden. Might this be optimism bias, normalcy bias, or denial at work? I don't think that the reject...
I am capable of doing the programming myself, correct. I haven't offered LessWrong a blank check, but I feel strongly about eternal September protection, so I'm willing to code it myself. If they want something else, they can ask, although motivation level is a key factor.
If anything, LW is far more at risk of becoming an echo chamber than of an eternal September. Fora can also die just by becoming a closed group and not being open to new members, and given that there's a fairly steep learning curve before someone is accepted here ("read the Sequences!") it would, if anything, make more sense to be reducing barriers to entry rather than adding more.
If anything, LW is far more at risk of becoming an echo chamber than of an eternal September.
Have you seen our contrarians?
The quality of LW discourse is in my opinion dropping with more and more guessing of the teachers password.
Claim: "Eternal September" is impossible to avoid.
The way "memetic movements" deal with Eternal September is one of the following:
(a) Dilute and die in the original sense (some of longer living meme complexes did this and are now "mainstream religions"). This might not be so bad. It may be that diluted/dead Christianity saved europe from collapse during the dark ages. In general I can think of many ways in which a counterfactual non-christian europe probably would have been much much worse off.
(b) Create an "inner scho...
Divide into sub-sites. Most obviously, rationality vs AI. Each group will be better able to maintain the ideal size for self-policing.
Create new software tools to support regular features like meetups, rationality quotes, re-discussions of Eliezer's old posts, and open thread. The tools would have to reflect all requirements, including directing the right degree of user attention to them.
As a last-resort emergency measure, we might also want to literally shut down the site automatically if to many people try to join in a given day until we've found better ways to handle this.
I agree: anyone wishing to shut down this internet website should be required to register numerous accounts within a one-day span, and all requests meeting such criteria should be automatically anonymised and approved.
I don't think downvotes should be a limited resource. They're much more important than upvotes in filtering out bad comments and commenters, and it doesn't take a brilliant commenter to recognize a bad comment. (Full disclosure: I'm out of downvotes.)
The trivial solution: meter new members of the community.
The difficult solution: Stop trying to control culture directly.
Stop making really long posts I don't want to read. This is way more annoying than any imaginary september of infinite lameness
As you are probably already aware, many internet forums experience a phenomenon known as "eternal September". Named after a temporary effect where the influx of college freshmen would throw off a group's culture every September, eternal September is essentially what happens when standards of discourse and behavior degrade in a group to the point where the group loses it's original culture. I began focusing on solving this problem and offered to volunteer my professional web services to get it done because:
- When I explained that LessWrong could grow a lot and volunteered to help with growth, various users expressed concerns about growth not always being good because having too many new users at once can degrade the culture.
- There has been concern from Eliezer about the site "going to hell" because of trolling.
- Eliezer has documented a phenomenon that subcultures know as infiltration by "poseurs" happening in the rationalist community. He explains that rationalists are beginning to be inundated by "undiscriminating skeptics" and has stated that it's bad enough that he needed to change his method of determining who is a rationalist. The appearance of poseurs doesn't guarantee that a culture will be washed away by main-streamers, but may signal that a culture is headed in that direction, and it does confirm that a loss of culture is a possibility - especially if there got to be so many undiscriminating skeptics as to form their own culture and become the new majority at LessWrong.
My plan to prevent eternal September sparked a debate about whether eternal September protection is warranted. Lukeprog, being the decision maker whose decision is needed for me to be allowed to do this as a volunteer, requested that I debate this with him because he was not convinced but might change his mind.
Here are some theories about why eternal September happens:
1. New to old user ratio imbalance:
New users need time to adjust to a forum's culture. Getting too many new users too fast will throw off the ratio of new to old users, meaning that most new users will interact with each other rather than with older users, changing the culture permanently.
2. Groups tend to trend toward the mainstream:
Imagine some people want to start a group. Why are they breaking away from the mainstream? Because their needs are served there? Probably not. They most likely have some kind of difference that makes them want to start their own group. Of course not everyone fits nicely into "different" and "mainstream", no matter what type of difference you look at. So, as a forum grows, instead of attracting people who fit nicely into the "different" category, you attract people who are similar to those in the different category. People way on the mainstream end of the spectrum generally are not attracted to things that are very different. But imagine how this progresses over time. I'll create a scale between green and purple. We'll say the green people are different and the purple people are mainstream. So, some of the most green folks make a green forum. Now, people who are green and similar - those with an extra tinge of red or blue or yellow join. People in the mainstream still aren't attracted, however, since there are still more in-between people than solid green or purple people, the most greenish in-between people begin to dominate. They and the original green people still enjoy conversation - they're similar enough to share the culture and enjoy mutual activities. But the greenish in-between people start to attract in-between people that are neither more purple or more green. There are more in-between people than greenish in-between or green people, because purple people dominate in their larger culture, so in-between people quickly outnumber the green people. This may still be fine because they may adjust to the culture and enjoy it, finding it a refreshing alternative to purple culture. But the in-between people attract people who are more purplish in-betweeners than greenish in-betweeners. There are more of those than the in-between people, so the culture now shifts to be closer to mainstream purple than different green. At this point, it begins to attract the attention of the solid purple main streamers. "Oh! Our culture, but with a twist!" They think. Now, droves of purple main stream people deluge the place looking for "something a little different". Instead of valuing the culture and wanting to assimilate, they just want to enjoy novelty. So, they demand changes to things they don't like to make it suit them better. They justify this by saying that they're the majority. At that point, they are.
3. Too many trolls scare away good people and throw off the balance.
Which theory is right?
All of them likely play a role.
I've seen for myself that trolls can scare the best people out of a forum, ruining the culture.
I've heard time and time again that subculture movements have problems with being watered down by mainstream folks until their cultures die and don't feel worth it anymore to the original participators. A lot of you have probably heard of the term "poseurs". With poseurs in a subculture, it's not that too many new people joined at once, but that the wrong sort of people joined. The view is that there are people who are different enough to "get" their movement, and people who are not. Those who aren't similar decided to try to appear like them even though they're not like them on the inside. Essentially, a large number of people much nearer to the mainstream got involved, so the group was no longer a haven for people with their differences.
And I think it's a no-brainer that if a group gets enough newbies at once, old members can't help them adjust to the culture, and the newbies will form a new culture and become a new majority.
Also, I think all of these can combine together, create feedback loops, and multiply the others.
Theory about cause and effect interactions that lead to endless September:
1. A group of people who are very different break away from the mainstream and form a group.
2. People who are similarly different but not AS different join the group.
3. People who are similar to the similarly different people, but even less similar to the different people join the group.
4. It goes on this way for a while. Since there are necessarily more people who are mainstream than different, new generations of new users may be less and less like the core group.
5. The group of different people begins to feel alienated with the new people who are joining.
6. The group of different people begin to ignore the new people.
7. The new people form their own culture with one another, excluding old people, because the old people are ignoring them.
8. Old people begin to anticipate alienation and start to see new users through tinted lenses, expecting annoyance.
9. New people feel alienated by the insulting misinterpretations that are caused by the expectation that they're going to be annoying.
10. The unwelcoming environment selects for thick-skinned people. A higher proportion of people like trolls, leaders, spammers, debate junkies, etc are active.
11. Enough new people who are ignored and failed to acculturate accumulate, resulting in a new majority. If trolls are kept under control, the new culture will be a watered down version of the original culture, possibly not much different from mainstream culture. If not, see the final possibility.
12. If a critical mass of trolls, spammers and other alienating thick-skinned types is reached due to an imbalance or inadequate methods of dealing with them, they might ward off old users, exacerbating the imbalance that draws a disproportionate number of thick-skinned types in a feedback loop and then take over the forum. (Why fourchan /b isn't known for having sweet little girls and old ladies.)
Is LessWrong at risk?
1. Eliezer has written about rationalists being infiltrated by main-streamers who don't get it, aka "poseurs".
Eliezer explains in Undiscriminating Skeptics that he can no longer determine who is a rationalist based on how they react to the prospect of religious debates, and now he has to determine who is a rationalist based on who is thinking for themselves. This is the exact same problem other subcultures have - they say the new people aren't thinking for themselves. We might argue "but we want to spread the wonderful gift of rational thought to the mainstream!" and I would agree with that. However, if all they're able to take away from joining is that there are certain things skeptics always believe, all they'll be taking away from us is an appeal to skepticism. That's the kind of thing that happens when subcultures are over-run by mainstream folks. They do not adopt the core values. Instead, they run roughshod over them. If we want undiscriminating skeptics to get benefits from refining the art of rationality, we have to do something more than hang out in the same place. Telling them that they are poseurs doesn't work for subcultures, and I don't think Eliezer telling them that they're undiscriminating skeptics will solve the problem. Getting people to think for themselves is a challenge that should not be undertaken lightly. To really get it, and actually base your life on rationality, you've either got to be the right type, a "natural" who "just gets it" (like Eliezer who showed signs as a child when he found a tarnished silver amulet inscribed with Bayes's Theorem) or you have to be really dedicated to self-improvement.
2. I have witnessed a fast-growing forum actually go exponential. Nothing special was being done to advertise the forum.
Obviously, this risks deluging old members in a sea of newbies that would be large enough to create a newbie culture and form a new majority.
3. LessWrong is growing fast and it's much bigger than I think everyone realizes.
I made a LessWrong growth bar graph showing how LessWrong has gained over 13,000 members in under 3 years (Nov 2009 - Aug 2012). LessWrong had over 3 million visits in the last year. The most popular post has gotten over 200,000 views. Yes I mean there are posts on here that are over 1/5 of their way to a million views, I did not mistype. This is not a tiny community website anymore. I see signs that people are still acting that way, like when people post their email addresses on the forum. People don't seem to realize how big LessWrong has gotten. Since this happened in a short time, we should be wondering how much further it will go, and planning for the contingency that could become huge.
4. LessWrong has experienced at least one wild spike in membership. Spikes can happen again.
We can't control the ups and downs in visitors to the site. That could happen again. It could last for longer than a month. According to Vladmir, using wget, we've got something like 600 - 1000 active users posting per month. We've got about 300 users joining per month from the registration statistics. What would happen if we got 900 each month for a few months in a row? A random spike could conceivably overwhelm the members.
5. Considering how many readers it has, LessWrong could get Slashdotted by somebody big.
If you've ever read about the Slashdot effect, you'll know that all it might take to get a deluge bigger than we can handle is to be linked to by somebody big. What if Slashdot links to LessWrong? Or somebody even bigger? We have at least one article on LessWrong that got about half as many visits as a hall of fame level Slashdot article. The article "Scientologists Force Comment Off Slashdot" got 383692 visits on Slashdot, compared with LessWrong's most popular article at 211,000 visits. (Cite: Slashdot hall of fame.) LessWrong is gaining popularity fast. It's not a small site anymore. And there are a lot of places that could Slashdot us. I may be just a matter of time before somebody pays attention, does an article on LessWrong, and it gets flooded.
6. We all want to grow LessWrong, and people may cause rapid growth before thinking about the consequences.
What if people start growing LessWrong and wildly succeed? I would like to be helping LessWrong grow but I don't want to do it until I feel the culture is well-protected.
7. Some combination of these things might happen and deluge old people with new people.
Does LessWrong need additional eternal September protection?
Lukeprog's main argument is that we don't have to worry about eternal September because we have vote downs. Here's why vote downs are not going to protect LessWrong:
1. If the new to old user ratio becomes unbalanced, or the site is filled with main streamers who take over the culture, who is going to get voted down most? The new users, or the old ones? The old members will be outnumbered, so it will likely be old members.
2. This doesn't prevent new users from interacting primarily with new users. If enough people join, there may not be enough old users doing vote downs to discourage them anymore. That means if the new to old user ratio were to become unbalanced, new users may still interact primarily with new users and form their own, larger culture, a new majority.
3. Let's say Fourchan /b decides to visit. A hundred trolls descend upon LessWrong. The trolls, like everybody else, have the ability to vote down anything they want. The trolls of course will enjoy harassing us endlessly with vote downs. They will especially enjoy the fact that it only takes three of them to censor somebody. They will find it a really, really special treat that we've made it so that anybody who responds to a censored person ends up getting points deducted. From a security perspective, this is probably one of the worst things that you could do. I came up with an idea for a much improved vote down plan.
Possibly more important: What happens if we DO prevent an eternal September?
What we are deciding here is not simply "do we want to protect this specific website from cultural collapse?" but "How do we want to introduce the art of refining rationality to the mainstream public?"
Why do main streamers deluge new cultures and what happens after that? What do they get out of it? How does it affect them in the long-term? Might being deluged by main streamers make it more likely for main streamers to become better at rational thought, like a first taste makes you want more?
If we kept them from doing that, what would happen, then?
Say we don't have a plan. LessWrong is hit by more users than it can handle. Undiscriminating skeptics are voting down every worthwhile disagreement. So, as an emergency measure, registrations are shut off, the number of visits to the website grows and then falls. We succeed in keeping out people who don't get it. After it has peaked, the fad is over. Worse, we've put them off and they're offended. Or, we don't shut off registrations, we're deluged, and now everyone thinks that a "rationalist" an "undiscriminating skeptic". We've lost the opportunity to get through to them, possibly for good. Will they ever become more rational? LessWrong wants to make the world a more rational place. An opportunity to accomplish that goal could happen. Eliezer figured out a way to make rationality popular. Millions of people have read his work. This could go even bigger.
This is why I suggested two discussion areas - then we get to keep this culture and also have an opportunity to experiment with ways for the people who are not naturals at it to learn faster. If we succeed in figuring out how to get through to them, we will know that the deluge will be constructive, if one happens. Then, we can even invite one on purpose. We can even advertise for that and I'd be happy to help. But if we don't start with eternal September protection, we could lose all this progress, lose our chance to get through to the mainstream, and pass like a fad.
For that reason, even if eternal September doesn't look likely to you after everything that I've explained above, I say it is still worthwhile to develop a tested technique to preserve LessWrong culture against a deluge and get through to those who are not naturals. Not doing so takes a risk with something important.
Please critique.
Your honest assessments of my ideas are welcome, always.