People sometimes ask me what's good about glowfic, as a reader.

You know that extremely high-context joke you could only make to that one friend you've known for years, because you shared a bunch of specific experiences which were load-bearing for the joke to make sense at all, let alone be funny^[1]?  And you know how that joke is much funnier than the average low-context joke?

Well, reading glowfic is like that, but for fiction.  You get to know a character as imagined by an author in much more depth than you'd get with traditional fiction, because the author writes many stories using the same character "template", where the character might be younger, older, a different species, a different gender... but still retains some recognizable, distinct "character".  You get to know how the character deals with hardship, how they react to surprises, what principles they have (if any).  You get to know Relationships between characters, similarly.  You get to know Societies.

Ultimately, you get to know these things better than you know many people, maybe better than you know yourself.

Then, when the author starts a new story, and tosses a character you've seen ten variations of into a new situation, you already have _quite a lot of context_ for modeling how the character will deal with things.  This is Fun.  It's even more Fun when you know many characters by multiple authors like that, and get to watch them deal with each other.  There's also an element of parasocial attachment and empathy, here.  Knowing someone^[2] like that makes everything they're going through more emotionally salient - victory or defeat, fear or jubilation, confidence or doubt.

Part of this is simply a function of word count.  Most characters don't have millions of words^[3] written featuring them.  I think the effect of having the variation in character instances and their circumstances is substantial, though.

1. ^{^}

   If you don't, you're missing out.

2. ^{^}

   Works even if they're fictional.

3. ^{^}

   Often by fairly talented writers, who themselves have much better taste in conflict-drivers than the average author of published fiction.

Probably I should've said this out loud, but I had a couple of pretty explicit updates in this direction over the past couple years: the first was when I heard about character.ai (and similar), the second was when I saw all TPOTers talking about using Sonnet 3.5 as a therapist.  The first is the same kind of bad idea as trying a new addictive substance and the second might be good for many people but probably carries much larger risks than most people appreciate.  (And if you decide to use an LLM as a therapist/rubber duck/etc, for the love of god don't use GPT-4o.  Use Opus 3 if you have access to it.  Maybe Gemini is fine?  Almost certainly better than 4o.  But you should consider using an empty Google Doc instead, if you don't want to or can't use a real person.)

I think using them as coding and research assistants is fine.  I haven't customized them to be less annoying to me personally, so their outputs often are annoying.  Then I have to skim over the output to find the relevant details, and don't absorb much of the puffery.

If we assume conservatively that a bee’s life is 10% as unpleasant as chicken life

This doesn't seem at all conservative based on your description of how honey bees are treated, which reads like it was selecting for the worst possible things you could find plausible citations for.  In fact, very little of your description makes an argument about how much we should expect such bees to be suffering in an ongoing way day-to-day.  What I know of how broiler chickens are treated makes suffering ratios like 0.1% (rather than 10%) seem reasonable to me.  This also neglects the quantities that people are likely to consume, which could trivially vary by 3 OoM.

If you're a vegan I think there are a bunch of good reasons not to make exceptions for honey.  If you're trying to convince non-vegans who want to cheaply reducing their own contributions to animal suffering, I don't think they should find this post very convincing.

I agree it's more related than a randomly selected Nate post would be, but the comment itself did not seem particularly aimed at arguing that Nate's advice was bad or that following it would have undesirable consequences^[1].  (I think the comments it was responding to were pretty borderline here.)

I think I am comfortable arguing that it would be bad if every post that Nate made on subjects like "how to communicate with people about AI x-risk" included people leaving comments with argument-free pointers to past Nate-drama.

The most recent post by Nate seemed good to me; I think its advice was more-than-sufficiently hedged and do not think that people moving in that direction on the margin would be bad for the world.  If people think otherwise they should say so, and if they want to use Nate's interpersonal foibles as evidence that the advice is bad that's fine, though (obviously) I don't expect I'd find such arguments very convincing.

1. ^{^}

   When keeping in mind its target audience.

I think it would be bad for every single post that Nate publishes on maybe-sorta-related subjects to turn into a platform for relitigating his past behavior^[1].  This would predictably eat dozens of hours of time across a bunch of people.  If you think Nate's advice is bad, maybe because you think that people following it risk behaving more like Nate (in the negative ways that you experienced), then I think you should make an argument to that effect directly, which seems more likely to accomplish (what I think is) your goal.

1. ^{^}

   Which, not having previously expressed an opinion on, I'll say once - sounds bad to me.

(Separately, even accepting for the sake of argument that you notice most work done and have a negative reaction to it, that is not very strong counterevidence to the original claim.)

If the only thing you see about Aella is that she had work done on her lips, then I think that sufficiently well demonstrates the point that you don't notice most "high quality" plastic surgery.

Almost every comment rate limit stricter than "once per hour" is in fact conditional in some way on the user's karma, and above 500 karma you can't even be (automatically) restricted to less than one comment per day:

  // 3 comments per day rate limits
    {
      ...timeframe('3 Comments per 1 days'),
      appliesToOwnPosts: false,
      rateLimitType: "newUserDefault",
      isActive: user => (user.karma < 5),
      rateLimitMessage: `Users with less than 5 karma can write up to 3 comments a day.<br/>${lwDefaultMessage}`,
    }, 
    {
      ...timeframe('3 Comments per 1 days'), // semi-established users can make up to 20 posts/comments without getting upvoted, before hitting a 3/day comment rate limit
      appliesToOwnPosts: false,
      isActive: (user, features) => (
        user.karma < 2000 && 
        features.last20Karma < 1
      ),  // requires 1 weak upvote from a 1000+ karma user, or two new user upvotes, but at 2000+ karma I trust you more to go on long conversations
      rateLimitMessage: `You've recently posted a lot without getting upvoted. Users are limited to 3 comments/day unless their last ${RECENT_CONTENT_COUNT} posts/comments have at least 2+ net-karma.<br/>${lwDefaultMessage}`,
    }, 
  // 1 comment per day rate limits
    {
      ...timeframe('1 Comments per 1 days'),
      appliesToOwnPosts: false,
      isActive: user => (user.karma < -2),
      rateLimitMessage: `Users with less than -2 karma can write up to 1 comment per day.<br/>${lwDefaultMessage}`
    }, 
    {
      ...timeframe('1 Comments per 1 days'),

      appliesToOwnPosts: false,
      isActive: (user, features) => (
        features.last20Karma < -5 && 
        features.downvoterCount >= (user.karma < 2000 ? 4 : 7)
      ), // at 2000+ karma, I think your downvotes are more likely to be from people who disagree with you, rather than from people who think you're a troll
      rateLimitMessage: `Users with less than -5 karma on recent posts/comments can write up to 1 comment per day.<br/>${lwDefaultMessage}`
    }, 
  // 1 comment per 3 days rate limits
    {
      ...timeframe('1 Comments per 3 days'),
      appliesToOwnPosts: false,
      isActive: (user, features) => (
        user.karma < 500 &&
        features.last20Karma < -15 && 
        features.downvoterCount >= 5
      ),
      rateLimitMessage: `Users with less than -15 karma on recent posts/comments can write up to 1 comment every 3 days. ${lwDefaultMessage}`
    }, 
  // 1 comment per week rate limits
    {
      ...timeframe('1 Comments per 1 weeks'),
      appliesToOwnPosts: false,
      isActive: (user, features) => (
        user.karma < 0 && 
        features.last20Karma < -1 && 
        features.lastMonthDownvoterCount >= 5 &&
        features.lastMonthKarma <= -30
      ),
      // Added as a hedge against someone with positive karma coming back after some period of inactivity and immediately getting into an argument
      rateLimitMessage: `Users with -30 or less karma on recent posts/comments can write up to one comment per week. ${lwDefaultMessage}`
    },

I think you could make an argument that being rate limited to one comment per day is too strict given its conditions, but I don't particularly buy this as argument against rate limiting long-term commenters in general.

But presumably you want long-term commenters with large net-positive karma staying around and not be annoyed by the site UI by default.

A substantial design motivation behind the rate limits, beyond throttling newer users who haven't yet learned the ropes, was to reduce the incidence and blast radius of demon threads.  There might be other ways of accomplishing this, but it does require somehow discouraging or preventing users (even older, high-karma users) from contributing to them.  (I agree that it's reasonable to be annoyed by how the rate limits are currently communicated, which is a separate question from being annoyed at the rate limits existing at all.)