Spring 2010 Meta Thread

I've decided to write polling support for Less Wrong. In particular, I'm going to make it possible to make polls that ask for probabilities, and let people choose to vote either anonymously or on the record. Expect a beta of some kind by 22 Mar.

Which choice? [poll]{First choice}{Second choice}{Third choice}
How much do you agree? [poll: Agree.....Disagree]
How likely? [poll: probability]
How many? [poll: number]

Is it possible to make it so that all of the comments in a thread appear on the same page, instead of having deeply nested comments appear on a separate page with a "continue this thread »" link? The current setup can make it hard to follow discussions, and to ctrl+f find things in a thread.

I think the minimum karma for posting (20) is too low. My fear is not an influx of shoddy posts. Rather, ~20 karma is too low because many first posting attempts don't go well even if the user could eventually make lots of positive contributions. Often, the work isn't up to our expectations and we'll vote the post down to -2 to -5 (or sometimes worse). But since votes on posts are worth 10 karma the author's karma total just gets decimated. Thirty karma isn't a big deal to posters with totals in the the thousands, but a -3 to someone with the minimum requirements to post puts them lower than where they started. The numerical representation of the effort they've put in participating and trying to understand the content here is wiped out. Add to the fact that publishing here is really intimidating to begin with and the fact that we can be kind of mean: there is a decent chance that low karma posters whose first posts don't go over well won't come back (or won't comeback for a long time), like in a video game when you die and haven't saved. I fear this will happen if it hasn't already (I won't single them out but looking back there are one or two cases where this may have occurred).

With a higher karma level the hit from a bad post can be comfortably absorbed and people won't feel so bad, it's like having to restart the level instead of the game. Plus waiting probably increases the chances the post will go over well. We could leave this up to the discretion of individual posters but it seems likely to me that many people won't properly anticipate the reaction they will have if their karma hits zero or below.

Also, if a power or award is easy to get it just isn't as exciting when you get it.

Math plugin for the wiki doesn't work for several months already, which causes the error

Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.)

to appear instead of formulas. The formulas show on the old pages only because they are cached and were not edited recently.

I previously reported this problem in November 2009.

On user pages, could there be an option to sort the person's posts/comments by karma score instead of by recency? When I click on a username to find out more about someone, seeing them at their best can be more informative than just seeing their most recent contributions.

I suggest that a new open thread be opened whenever the current one reaches 500 comments, since that's the highest number that can be displayed at once, unless a new one would be opened shortly anyway. (Shortly meaning in less than somewhere between a week and three days, depending on how fast these open threads are filling. )

Poll: Vote by voting one option up and the karma balance down.

EDIT: Changing the poll options in light of khafra's comment, "in favor" -> "New thread after 500 comments" (4 votes at the time of the edit); "against" -> "no new threads" (0 votes) and adding options for other thresholds.

Minor bug report: the post 37 Ways Words Can Be Wrong currently consists of five ways words can be wrong, numbered 1-5, followed by 32 ways words can be wrong, numbered 1-32.

LW is, implicitly, a learning platform for philosophy. The post+discussion format is very good, but IMO it would be well complemented by something like book club format, which is a longer continuous experience. (Yes I know book clubs often fall apart, but a big reason for that is that the members do not really like to read, and are trying to precommit themselves. After some time nature takes it due. Should not be a problem here).

What do you fellas think?

As billswift says, the monthly open thread easily gets full of too much stuff to wade through. The recent comments page can alleviate that, but it would be useful to get a similar view of the comments for a single posting, i.e. in unthreaded most-recent-first order.

There is a thread somewhere for suggestions about the software that runs LessWrong, but I don't know where it is, which is also a problem.

New open threads aren't being promoted once the previous one hits 300 comments. The defunct April 2010 open thread should also be demoted.

I've noticed a couple of times recently interesting discussion attached to a strongly downvoted article or comment. I just thought of a problem description: The display system does not distinguish between interesting/uninteresting items (articles or comments) and interesting/uninteresting threads; an interesting thread is at the mercy of its ancestors.

This could be fixed by allowing items to gain rank in sorting/filtering based on their replies or, more elaborately, a high-scoring reply to a low-scoring item should be promoted above it displaywise. I have no wonderful ideas about how to visually format this.

How about a threaded/unthreaded option for viewing replies?

That would make it easier to keep up with big threads, instead of looking for the new comments in each sub-thread.

The "recent comments" sidebar is about an hour out of date right now, and has been out of date for at least all of today, for me.

Eliezer told me that his preference for new intra-month open threads was 500 comments.

500 is a logical cut-off point because that's as high as the software allows you to display at once without extra loading. Since discussions continue indefinitely on Less Wrong posts, it makes sense to start the new open thread somewhat before 500 comments, so there is some room for discussion to continue on the old open thread without going over 500 comments.

Why is it that the Recent Comments and Recent Posts sidebars are populated through AJAX instead of being generated on the server side, considering that they're not dynamically updated or anything?

(I was thinking of submitting a patch that would have the server send them pre-populated, but recalling this quote, I figured I ought to first see if I can find out the perfectly good reason why it was done this way.)

Is it possible to change my username?

What should be our convention for making top level posts for posting links vs posting them in the open thread?

I just upgraded my RSS reader and the links of the entries in the recent-comments RSS feed aren't working; they're relative URLs and the reader isn't handling this. Furthermore, according to The Feed Validator using relative links isn't valid there anyway. Please change the feed to use absolute URLs.

Also, the URL in the element is broken and trying to refer to reddit.

Recents are broken again - judging by these:

http://lesswrong.com/comments/?count=25&after=t1_1ub8

http://lesswrong.com/comments/?count=25&after=t1_1ub7

...looks like 1ub7 is responsible.

Edit: Aha! It's on

http://lesswrong.com/lw/20z/announcing_the_less_wrong_subreddit/

in the thread following

http://lesswrong.com/lw/20z/announcing_the_less_wrong_subreddit/1uak

Edit 2: The most recent comment to create a crash is

http://lesswrong.com/lw/20z/announcing_the_less_wrong_subreddit/1ub4

Edit 3: 1ub7 no longer causes any crashes.

Google Chrome seems to be having all kinds of problems with this site. I'm getting pages loaded in all-bold, lots of links bleeding HTML, background flowing into improper elements, etc.

ETA: version 4.1.249.1042 (public release) on Windows 7.

Time for June Open Thread Part 4. If you are reading this comment, you should make it! If no one makes it by the time Part 3 hits 550 comments I will make it.

Quick related pair of questions:

How long does a post have to be to need a cut?

How long does a post have to be under the cut to justify clicking through?

Transferring from "The Cameron Todd Willingham Test" a meta thread I began:

I don't think it is a good idea to invoke any sort of controversy without some specific novel point to make. I would not object were it just a thought experiment in an open thread, but good cause is necessary for a top-level post. As I said to Jack, I would hold top-level posts to a higher standard than "don't see the harm". By the novel-insight standard, "The Cameron Todd Willingham test" fails on two grounds:

1. The general idea is an obvious generalization of something already explored in some detail previously: examining the evidence associated with a criminal case and drawing an independent conclusion about the guilt or innocence of the defendant.

2. The post neither promises nor delivers substantial analysis on any subject.

It is my contention that what Kevin wrote does not show enough effort to justify a top-level post.

Is there a site policy for cross-posting at other blogs? Should there be one? Maybe an expectation of cross-linking at least? ...If only because it looks like plagiarism when the same article comes up on google at different sites (and possibly under different names).

How difficult would it be to add RSS feeds for comments on specific posts? They would have to be more than latest-10, of course.

Two things which would make if easier to track communication in LW:

I'd dearly like to have a most recent replies to my comments so that I don't need to check by hand.

Less important, but pleasant-- a way of finding out which comments have gotten karma changes.

March 2010 open thread part 3 is ranked lower than March 2010 open thread part 2 on the home page. The current thread should probably be ranked higher on the home page.

I’m following the lesswrong RSS feed via Google Reader. I just noticed that some top-level posts are not in my GR list. (Coincidentally, this one is an example.)

Did anyone notice something like this? Any ideas how to debug the problem?

The feed settings in GR show http://lesswrong.com/.rss as the URL it retrieves from.

This is a comment.