This is a short post inspired by "EXEMPLIFYING EQUITABLE GROWTH: MR. GOOGLE SERVES ME A BAKER'S HALF-DOZEN FROM THE WCEG WEBSITE, AND WHAT I LEARN THEREBY...". Delong looks at google results for his blog archive, and finds they are very weakly predictive of what he thinks is useful about his blog. He thinks about that in terms of the "flow" of intellectual discussion — what people are talking about — versus the "stock" — what is known.
I think that's a productive analytical frame. Websites live and die off of their salience to the flow, but their long-term value is what they contribute to the stock. Twitter is optimized for flow to the point where it's nearly useless as stock; but high-quality work that never gets into the flow ends up so unread and hard to find that it has little value as stock.
For sites like Less Wrong, I think that thinking about stock and flow could help to improve how upvotes work. To some extent, upvotes help promote a healthy flow, which is an important and useful goal. But that is essentially a short-term value, and so upvotes like that should decay. On the other hand, upvotes also serve as long-term markers of valuable stock. That kind of upvote shouldn't decay.
One place this kind of thinking could lead would be to having different kinds of upvotes. "Thanks" and "good question" would be more flow-y and thus decay faster; "well said" and "good link" would be more stock-y and last longer.
Yeah. Not 100% sure how to implement this but I've been thinking about this general principle and expect it to be important in some fashion. Getting linked (in particular by highly upvoted posts seems like it should contribute to post karma).
One important question is "what is the mechanism by which we want people to be finding old posts in the first place?"
Old stock posts that have low karma (because they came before the current inflationary period where karma got multiplied by 3). But this doesn't really come into play at the moment AFAICT, since we don't actually have a view for looking at old posts with high karma.
It does seem like we should probably have such a view – we removed the Top Posts view when we re-organized the frontpage because a) almost nobody was using it and b) the frontpage filtering options were getting somewhat convoluted and we were trying to keep them simple.
I do expect us to revisit this at some point, although I think it's worth putting some thought into what we're actually trying to accomplish here. If there's important Stock posts that people haven't read, it may make more sense to have them included in sequences that are promoted or something rather than a posts-view that's basically "here read all the most important stock posts in random order."