thought: the problem with less wrong's epistemic health is that stuff isn't short form

Moreover, why should there be discussion? If a post is authoritative, well researched and obviously correct, then the only thing to do is upvote it and move on. A lengthy discussion thread is a sign that either the post is either unclear, incorrect, or has mindkilled its readers.

Uh.

A lengthy discussion thread is progress.

An authoritative post is one person doing all the work.

A discussion thread is getting help with your initial thoughts.

That is the reason I use Facebook as little as possible, and I would stop interacting with LessWrong entirely if it moved to this format.

I don't appreciate the participation-threat here and I don't think it's reasonable to decide what's good based on what current users would respond to by abandoning - don't negotiate with terrorists, etc. I also think you're conflating things with the endless discussion thing - endless scrolling is super addictive, I agree, but I didn't mean that, I mean how posts are short form/partially-finished-thoughts by default. I think crap like zvi and ben hoffman post make the bar too high and things need to be shorter and less of a Big Deal. I'd prefer if everything was on one page by default but you had to do explicit paging to prevent severe addictiveness.

Facebook uses a number of nasty evil tricks, such as carefully timing when you get notifications, outright lying about the number of new posts there are to read (on mobile, it always says 9+ EVEN WHEN THERE ARE EXACTLY ZERO BECAUSE YOU UNSUBSCRIBED FROM EVERYTHING), infinite scroll, not showing you all the things your friends post at once so you can only see everything by going back repeatedly, not propagating notification counts between different clients, showing new notification *counts* without refresh but not showing the new notifications themselves without refresh, etc etc. it's not hard to be less addictive than facebook - it's the default.

I don't want high pageviews. I don't want upvotes. I want discussion. I want a place where people can exchange ideas. I want to take what already exists on rationalist's facebook walls and move it to lesswrong.

Moreover, why should there be discussion? If a post is authoritative, well researched and obviously correct, then the only thing to do is upvote it and move on. A lengthy discussion thread is a sign that either the post is either unclear, incorrect, or has mindkilled its readers.

Alternatively, a length discussion could be a sign that the post inspired connections to related topics and events. Additionally, it may have made a critical advance that furthered understanding of the topic for other people. Even though optimizing for engagement yields divergence from what we want doesn't mean we should optimize against engagement. Or that a lack of engagement is somehow good.

If there are a bunch of long-form articles for which the only reasonable response is, “Yep, that’s all true. Good article!” that’s a win condition.

I do believe there is a place for that, but were I to repeatedly make posts which were so thoroughly correct and got essentially no engagement I would take that as a sign that people weren't really interested in it and that I should focus on other topics that have a larger impact.