This seems like a really great initiative, I'm excited to see how it goes.

How high a bar should I set for using this service? I have basically no posts where I'd post this with editing help but would not post it on my own, but would generally appreciate editing help on basically every post I make.

Wow!

I remember we had a few conversation about this problem and a few solutions came up, some of them fairly complex. But this just nukes the problem (in a good way). I love it. Now I want to write a post just to try the feature... :)

Anyway, I'm very curious to see how this works out, and how it will affect the posts that are published from now on. And I hope you'll manage the load.

And speaking of managing the load, I'd love to volunteer if I can be of help. I'll send a message on intercom.

btw there's a typo: "The LessWrong team can get things back to you within a day or two", the "to" is missing.

I asked for feedback on this post [LW · GW] before publishing, and my reply to the feedback from LW staff was:

[T]hank you for the thoughtful responses. Your feedback was probably in the 95th percentile, re overall quality, of the feedback I've ever gotten on any of my writing in my schooling, professional life, or personal life.

Wow, this is really cool! I'm very keen to give it a go.

But it also sounds like you guys will be taking on a lot of load.  And I guess I wonder whether that will end up being worth it in the end or whether it would be better to focus on further developing the website instead. But I suppose experimenting is the only way to find out.

Just like everyone here, I am very excited to see this new feature, which sounds like a powerful aid I may like a lot!

About the bar of 100 karma, I view it positively for newcomers. I am well below 100 right now, but I feel like to start accumulating karmas after reading this post. It is like, I can aim for goal--definite and doable-- and unlock something as if I am playing a video game. So far my experience with Lesswrong was slack--I often stopped reading sequences, writing a post sounded like a distant goal, and commenting was a few time event. This is why I say 100 karma is a definite goal. I can aim at one point.    

Would you consider making such milestones on karma or something? It wouldn't be bad to add more :)

This is super cool! I cannot wait to give this a go on my next post. Having access to a high-quality feedback loop is such a powerful way to improve our writing and hence our thinking.

Assuming this results in better quality posts being created on LessWrong, I, therefore, wonder if it means more posts will be promoted to Frontpage as a result or if the Frontpage promotion will be made more stringent.

[The rest of this comment is off-topic, feel free to ignore it.]

I also wonder how this feature will scale as LessWrong continues to grow.

More broadly, I've been thinking about the scalability of the LessWrong model ever since I read the book The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch. I am very impressed with LessWrong as a platform, not only in terms of the integrity of discussions but also in terms of the software quality and moderation. I emailed Jonathan Rauch and brought LessWrong to his attention. He dedicates a significant portion of the book to product designs that incentivise civil and explanatory discussions and the graceful collision of ideas without siloing users into bubbles.

Imagine if LessWrong had 2.89 billion monthly active users (which is Facebook's MAO), could it handle that scale with its current product design and governance model? If not, what changes and innovations would be needed? My understanding is that Facebook is hiring a lot of human moderators to deal with misinformation and disinformation. I wonder when AI will be sufficiently intelligent to help with things like moderation and proofreading effectively.

Once things have stabilized and things like inline annotations are there, I'd love to see the following: (1) An easy way to add and remove yourself from a pool of available feedback providers. (Checkbox in settings?) And (2) a way for anyone (or nearly anyone - e.g. non-negative karma) to request brief / "basic feedback" on their posts, by automatically matching people from the pool to posts based on e.g. post tags and front page tag weights.

On (1): I have proofread a couple thousand pages by now, and while I'm usually pretty busy, in a slow week I'd be happy to proof-read a bunch of drafts. However, if that involves messaging someone to be added to a list and then messaging someone again to be taken off that list, that's quite a lot of overhead - I probably wouldn't bother and just look for other stuff to do. So I suspect automating that part might greatly increase the amount of available reviewers for feedback.

On (2): With some extra capacity from (1), I expect the main bottleneck for providing more reviews is matching reviewers to posts. If that's automated, the only cost is the time spent reviewing. With a scheme like "review two/three posts to get one post reviewed by two/three people", the reviewer pool should be even bigger (so with (1) you might even go "review 2 to get 3") and things should remain relatively fair. With multiple reviews, you should get some decent feedback even if one reviewer writes complete nonsense or doesn't understand anything.

At that point, the human overhead for having this extra "basic feedback" system should be near-zero, apart from from maybe having to manually filter people trying to abuse the system - no clue how prevalent that is. And looking at myself, (a) I probably wouldn't bother manually asking others for reviews, and (b) knowing that I can get guaranteed feedback, no questions asked, would make it more likely to actually start writing. (While I can't say for sure whether that translates into actual posts, I can clearly see that there are lots of other "very important" things, some of which only barely win out because they're less headache-inducing / uncertain.)

Thank you for doing this. I just requested a proofread on a draft I'm working on.

When I first clicked "Get Feedback" it didn't do anything. I think this was because I had "Hide Intercom" turned on in my settings. When that setting was on, I saw the following error in my console:

PostSubmit.tsx:93 Uncaught TypeError: window.Intercom is not a function
    at onClick (PostSubmit.tsx:93)
    at Object.ein (react-dom.production.min.js:14)
    at rin (react-dom.production.min.js:14)
    at nin (react-dom.production.min.js:14)
    at cgt (react-dom.production.min.js:15)
    at min (react-dom.production.min.js:52)
    at GAe (react-dom.production.min.js:51)
    at ooe (react-dom.production.min.js:52)
    at Jgt (react-dom.production.min.js:56)
    at ygt (react-dom.production.min.js:287)
    at bgt (react-dom.production.min.js:19)
    at ZAe (react-dom.production.min.js:70)
    at loe (react-dom.production.min.js:69)
    at fc.unstable_runWithPriority (scheduler.production.min.js:19)
    at wM (react-dom.production.min.js:122)
    at vgt (react-dom.production.min.js:287)
    at Cin (react-dom.production.min.js:68)
    at HTMLDocument.n (helpers.ts:87)

When I turned off "Hide Intercom", the "Get Feedback" button worked and I requested feedback.

FYI the screenshots here say "Request feedback" but the actual button currently says "Get feedback". Might trip someone up if they're trying to search for the text.

Love this initiative! I do have a question though. It seems that people with 100+ karma have most likely figured out how to write publicly with a decent quality. So this service would simply be a bonus for them.

Isn't it more important to enable this service for lurkers/readers on Lesswrong who haven't yet written many posts due to the reasons you've mentioned?

Disclaimer: I don't have 100+ karma and haven't written a lot outside as well - just privately in my note taking app.

This is an amazing initiative! Even aside from providing an excellent service, and also lowering the bar for those of us who feel less than confident writers, I also think it will help center the community around Lesswrong.

I am by no means a professional-level proof reader, but I might still find some errors here and there. I would be really excited to provide what help I can, as long as I don't feel like I'm the only one looking and all the expectations (and thus obligations) are on me. Is there a way for me to be one-among-several proofreaders? If crowd-sourcing isn't the model you are going with for now, then I fully understand.

The part about hiring proofreading brought a question to mind: where does the operating budget for the lesswrong website come from, both for stuff like that and standard server costs?

I'm trying to get started on making a rationalist blog (here), and I've posted this to LessWrong before [LW · GW]. I have several half-finished drafts for the blog; if I ever finish up those drafts, would it be bad form to ask about feedback from LessWrong, since it's not strictly speaking part of LessWrong? Or would it be fine, since I'm planning on posting it to LessWrong and partly (though not wholly) have a rationalist audience in mind?

Cool!

Two questions:

1. Is it possible to also get something re-formatted via this service? (E.g., porting a Google Doc with many footnotes and tables to LessWrong or the EA Forum.)
2. Is it possible to get feedback, proofreading, etc. via this service for things that won't be posts?
   • E.g. mildly infohazardous research outputs that will just be shared in the relevant research & policy community but not made public

(Disclaimer: I only skimmed this post, having landed here from Habryka's comment on It could be useful if someone ran a copyediting service [EA · GW]. Apologies if these questions are answered already in the post.)

I often write on my phone (via Safari on IOS), and I notice when I press the “request feedback” button, nothing seems to happen. I’m not sure if you’re receiving anything on your end. So far what I’ve done is just submit it anyway, since until coming across this post I wasn’t sure what the button was supposed to do exactly.

I'm trying to get a post reviewed for feedback, however the feature does not seem to be working on my Firefox. When I click the "Get feedback" button, it acts as if I had clicked the "Save as draft" button.