I'd like to be able to subscribe to individual Shortform feeds via RSS.
I'd suggest initially making short-form a seperate section of the site as my suspicion that if it really is a compelling feature it should be able to succeed on its own without homepage integration. Otherwise, it likely doesn't provide enough value to make up for the loss of nuance.
A few plausible plans we're been thinking about:
Curious if any of those sound actively bad.
The current, hacky solution to shortform is: you make a post named "[Name]'s Shortform Posts", and write comments on it.
We're planning to promote this to a first-class site feature; we're going to make some UI that auto-generates a post like that for you, and gives the comments on it visibility on a special shortform page and on the All Posts page.
Seems like it could just go on the All Post page and have a filter for it, off by default. But it would seem that what really makes sense is something like a newsfeed, like that seen in Facebook or Twitter, and ways to filter or prioritize what shows up in it. Newsfeed would work especially well if the "short" aspect was enforced or strongly encouraged in some way.
When you say 'go on All Post page' what are you imagining? Would you rather see a list of posts (i.e. 'Gordon's Shortform Feed', or a list of comments (perhaps heavily truncated)? The former is the most straightforward thing to implement on AllPosts but also not really "the thing."
One concern is that the solution needs to not be something tucked-out-of-the-way — it needs to be something that a reasonable number of site visitors will see by default, so that users starting their shortform feed aren't just shouting into the void.
The LessWrong team might be putting more work into the shortform concept in the next couple weeks. I wanted to check in about what specific features people might want for that.
Right now, some users set up "shortform feed" posts, which are a hacky way to give yourself a more casual space for off-the-cuff writing. In the past few weeks we've seen an uptick of people creating feeds for themselves.
It seemed useful to make this a bit more official (i.e. there's just a "create shortform post" button you can click instead of navigating to a post and writing a comment).
But there's several open questions about the best way to consume shortform content. Right now most shortform comments appear in Recent Discussion and then quickly disappear, which is very low-discoverability.
Possible considerations include:
There's a few possible routes to more visibility:
There might be entirely different frames or ideas I haven't thought of.
Anyone have preferences on how to consume shortform?
(Also relevant would be if you find shortform actively annoying and would want to make sure it didn't get too much in your way)