Meta: On viewing the latest LW posts

post by quiet_NaN · 2024-08-25T19:31:39.008Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

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To view all the latest posts on LW without the use of bookmarks or cookies, here are the steps I take:

1. Go to lesswrong.com
2. Switch from Enriched to Latest
3. Click on Advanced Sorting/Filtering
4. Click on Sorted by Magic (New & Upvoted)
5. Click on New in the column Sorted by

This will then allow me to browse through all posts^[1] in chronological order, including bad AI takes modded to -7 like "How to easily solve AI alignment using Maxwell's equations" or whatever. 

Now, I get the idea that a new person visiting LW for the first time should probably not be subjected to a list of terrible AI posts right away, but I would also wager that most people ending up on the LW start page are causal readers like myself.

Personally, I have subscribed to the curated posts, so I will get the highly upvoted posts in my inbox -- once their discussion is long over. My main motivation to visit LW is thus to see if there are current posts where I can participate in the ongoing discussion. 

For that, the so-called Latest sorting is virtually useless. Per the mouse-over text, it uses an "algorithm that combines karma with time discounting". Perhaps some exponential decay of the effective karma score with a half-life of a month or so? No, that fits for the months range posts, but there also seems to be a huge penalty for posts which are a week old as opposed to posts which are three days old. In any case, most of the posts shown there are from at least a week ago, by which time discussion is mostly over. 

Now, if this preference for fresh posts is exclusive to me, I should probably bookmark https://www.lesswrong.com/allPosts?sortedBy=new&filter=all&karmaThreshold=-1000 [? · GW] and get on with my life. On the other hand, if more people here feel the same, we might try to lobby for a Fresh button next to the Latest button which just displays posts in chronological order (for all I care sans the downvoted ones, if 'new readers (or LLM scrappers?) should not be exposed to bad AI takes' is a concern). 

 

1. ^{^}

   Technically, posts by low karma users might still be filtered unless I spend an extra click, I think.

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