Slow down a little... maybe?

It strikes me that it's not necessarily a bad thing if people are, right now, posting articles faster than they could sustainably produce in the long term. One thing you could do is not necessarily promote things immediately after they're written. Stuff on LW should still be relevant a week after it's written.

If there's a buffer of good posts waiting to be promoted, then we could make the front page a consistent stream of good articles, as opposed to having to promote slightly lower quality posts on bad days, and missing out on a few excellent posts on fast days.

EDIT: Another reason to wait before promoting things is that the goodness of some kinds of posts might really depend on the quality of the discussion that starts to form around them.

Restricting total posts (rather than per contributor) would make posting a rare/scarce resource, making people want it even more. Picking a system to pick who does and who doesn't get to post opens a huge can of worms.

Restricting the number of promotions sends a message that promotion isn't based solely on quality, popularity, and importance, it's also intentionally biased by accident of timing. This could cheapen it.

I'd write a post on how writing a post at busy times may be irrational, all else equal, because (for example):

• Less people will read, comment and vote on a post that's lost in the crowd.

• It's less likely to capture the attention of busy promoters, even if they're trying to stick to promoting based on good reasons.

• If you wait a bit rather than posting so early you'll get a better idea of what kind of post is better understood, more useful, and considered higher quality.

Other sites with similar systems have a constant stream of junk posts that nobody sees, wasnt the promotion/voting system meant to bring the rare good ones out of the junk?

If you're hoping for a growing community, wont it be even harder to maintain a slow post rate?

What seems to be needed is a page about the rules of Less Wrong - who can do what and how often - the moderation policy - that sort of thing.

If different rules are to apply to Yudkowsky and Hanson, then that could be made clear there.

I agree; limit the posting rate. But wait a week or two before you do so. It may just be that a lot of people had ideas they wanted to write about, and took the opening of posting as their cue to do so. If that's the case, then the post volume should die down on its own. I don't want good articles to be rejected, but I don't want posts appearing faster than I can read and digest them, either.

In theory, I should be able to decide what to read by setting a score threshold, and tuning it according to how much time I have to spend. Unfortunately, many sites have tried this and it doesn't work in practice, because the posts with the most positive votes are older, and replies to older threads are read by fewer people and earn less karma. I'd rather have an editor tell me which threads are worth my time, so I can skip worthless threads and still join discussions on the worthwhile ones while they're fresh.

maybe have the promoted page move at a slower pace for the higher quality articles and let the other pages (such as controversial) soak up the chaff.

Everyone doesn't need to read everything.

It seems to me like that sort of restriction could lead to people disengaging from the community. Generally, people getting involved in Less Wrong (either through commenting or posting) seems to be a good thing.

Would it work to just let people know that only a small number of posts will be promoted in any one period and just let them decide themselves whether to therefore wait to post later?

I favor a lot of posting and commenting, at least initially. It's not clear to me what kinds of ideas and communication is going to be promoted by this community, and I think a wide variety of possible things for reader/commenter/providers to latch onto provides the most possibility of something interesting coming out of this.

As other commenters have said, I imagine people will lose enthusiasm or run out of ideas eventually anyway, and we'll settle into a steadier state of posts/comments.

I've given up on more than one message board because it grew to the point where I could no longer reaonably stay up-to-date. It would be nice if LW didn't develop the same problem.

That said, this seems like a hard rule to enforce, unless we happen to have fewer than three people wrting posts. I was about to say "how do we decide which three posts should appear" and then I remembered that that's what voting is for.

If this 'explosion' is temporary, I have no problem dealing with it for a few days or weeks. This is the time when LW is still new and exciting and everyong will be willing to read two dozen posts a day. By the time the novelty of reading has worn off, maybe the novelty of writing will as well.

Let's wait for a couple of weeks and see what happens. Yesterday was primarily a comment explosion, not post explosion, although it was likely caused by the number of posts. Maybe it was even related to opening the comment Karma, who knows...

Nonetheless, limiting to 1 post a day for any given contributor seems like a good idea.

Wait a second ... what made you guys start using my standard of putting underscores in the blanks in names?