Proposed New Features for Less Wrong

I'm voting against those two proposals. They'll have the effect of lowering the overall quality of comments.

My suggestion (if it is codable) is some icon next to the names of new users in their comments or some other innocuous identifying feature to let us identify them. The only problem we have with new users is not recognizing they are new. What we need is more information, not a watering down of our incentive structure. If people can easily identify new users they will avoid downvotes except for trolls and remember to be more welcoming and helpful. Moreover, new users should be defined by number of comments (30 or fewer?) not time since registration, since some will register but only later start commenting.

Whatever happened to Hold Off on Proposing Solutions?

Here is a little linguistic experiment. I'm going to rewrite the first paragraph of the post, replacing every mention of a solution with Sn and every mention of a problem to be solved with Pn.

"After the recent discussion about S1, me and Less Wrong site designer Matthew Fallshaw have been discussing possible S's. As far as I can tell, the general community consensus in the previous post was that S2 would be a good idea, due to the many P's, but that it would be problematic to S3. For this reason, our current proposal involves S4. What are now S5 would be S6, in a more P1."

Maybe I'm being generous in interpreting "a more user-friendly and appropriate format" as a problem specification, but I think the experiment is conclusive: the above introductory paragraph suggests that discussion so far has been implementation-focused, rather than paying due attention to what is wanted.

Here is my counter-suggestion: describe the desired outcomes without reference to current or future implementation details. After that we may be ready to propose solutions. This probably needs to be a community discussion, but we may want to remember the issues associated with "design by committee".

LessWrong needs an FAQ. Really. I can't encourage everyone enough to look at the example of

MathOverflow.net. It has a fantastic FAQ that simultaneously makes the site less scary and the standards more evident. Yes, those goals aren't entirely mutually exclusive!

And MathOverflow, created by 2 grad students, grew explosively in a matter of months to involve many famous mathematicans and even fields medalists.

There is more than speculation here... there is evidence we should be updating on.

The problem with both proposals (1 and 2), I think, is that a significant portion of potential posters aren't worried so much about Karma as about looking dumb. Removing the karma hit doesn't matter when they can still very easily see that they said something which the community thinks is incorrect - the particular post/comment will still have a score, and the comments also provide information.

This, at least, is my usual worry, so typical mind fallacy caveats apply.

the high quality standard, heavy use of neologisms, and karma penalties for being wrong might be intimidating to newcomers

This is both why I don't participate much and why I keep coming here anyways. I want to read things that are written by people who are smarter than me. For me (and I suspect for some other lurkers, though I should be careful not to generalize prematurely), a wider range of participants could be a turn-off -- assuming they'd only be as insightful as I am, or worse. I'm not an expert (yet) and many of you are.

I would, on the other hand, enjoy more efforts at synthesizing and re-explaining the most important LW themes for beginners. Whether this takes the form of a FAQ, or some sort of general Q&A board, or just some nice short summaries of the most important sequences, I would enjoy the reading.

It would be good to see not only the points, but how many downs and ups votes has been used for it. Not only -5, but -12 and 7, for example. That for the each post and each user. Somebody/something voted 1000 times with about 500 ups and about 500 downs is more interesting than something with only 2 ups.

It would be also nice to see, how many upvotes and downvotes somebody launched already. And to whom.

The last one maybe in a special (periodic) post, where the divisions would be clearly visible.

A feature I'd love to see implemented is a Q&A section. Let's say that this would be to Yahoo! Answers as LessWrongWiki is to Wikipedia.

The idea is that people can ask questions -- any questions -- related to rationality and whoever wants it can jump in trying to answer them. Good answers gain karma. And whoever asked the question selects the best answer.

The question could be made looking for qualitative answers (as with Yahoo! Answers) or quantitatively, as a poll (such as here, but much more seriously...)

Another suggestion: a super-parent feature. Let me explain.

Often I hit a comment from the recent comments feature that turns out to be in the middle of a big discussion. How do I get to the beginning of that discussion, i.e. highest-level parent that the comment is replying to? The default context is only 1 parent comment. I can hit "show more comments above," but I will have to hit it multiple times to get to the top level parent comment in a big discussion. And even after that, it only shows replies to the top level parent that the original comment is in reply to, and you will not be able to see the other comment branches in response to the top level parent, meaning that you don't actually see the whole discussion.

For example, let's say that someone runs into this comment from the recent comments sidebar and clicks it. The reader will now have to hit "show more comments above" 3 times to be able to view the top level parent. Yet to actually see all the replies to the top level parent, they will have to click its "permalink" (notice how many more replies to the top level parent there are that weren't showing as the context of the original comment).

So for a comment at level n, it takes n - 1 additional page views to see the original post that sparked the comment, and all its replies (and this is if you find it off recent comments; if you found it via a permalink from someone else, then you must go through n page views to view the top level parent and all its replies).

There is a way to cheat, and cut things down to two operations, but you have to manually edit the url. If I took the original url from the recent comments and edited the "context" parameter to something ridiculously large, like this, then the context is large enough that it will show me the top level comment, and all I have to do is hit permalink.

Does anyone else often find themselves wanting to easily view the original comment that sparked a reply that they found from the recent comments (or elsewhere)? If so, do you also want to see all the branches of responses, not just the ones that contain the recent comment?

At least, it would be nice to have a link on every post that enlarges the context of a comment to the max, and shows all of its parents. It could also be nice if that link just takes you straight to the super parent / top level comment (whatever you want to call it), and shows all comments in response.

Are newcomers actually intimidated? Was anybody intimidated when they first arrived? (I wasn't.) Maybe this is a subject for a poll itself.

I am a newcomer and my initial complaint is that this is a hard site to navigate. It's good, at least, that the sequences are all in one place; but the posts are not categorized by topic and divided into subforums. It's a little slow to manoeuver.

The other thing that I found myself wanting was profile pages for the users (where they could if they chose put location, bio, date of first signup, etc.) Intro threads are great, but sometimes I want to know who you are right away.

We probably could also use non-post threads. For people studying a particular topic, or planning a meetup, or whatever. Or a plain off-topic thread.

I'm not sure how feasible any of this is -- it just seems that this is in between a blog and a forum, structurally, which prevents you from doing some of the things you might want to do on a forum. This isn't quite a "Rationalists' Cantina." Maybe it shouldn't be, though I'm inclined to think such a thing might be nice to have.

• Proposal 1: Posts submitted to Less Wrong can be tagged with a "karma coward" option.

Rock band name. I called it first.

We have also identified another potential problem with the site: the high quality standard.

I really can't stress strongly enough how much I disagree with the idea that this is a potential problem. This is the single best feature of the site. I have no doubt that over time Less Wrong will follow the inevitable downward quality trajectory of all internet communities but I strongly oppose any proposals to deliberately accelerate the process by lowering the barrier to entry.

What do people think of adding a "Rationalist Consultation" section? This would be for people who haven't studied much rationality but need advice, specifically from rationalists, on a particular problem they're facing.

I have a suggestion: recent comments for threads.

Once the comments to a post get big and grow into many trees (which get split off onto other "continue this thread..." pages), it becomes very hard to follow and find new replies to those threads.

Manually scanning through all the branches in the tree is time-consuming, and it can be easy to miss one or two new posts. Sometimes I find myself using the recent comments page, but then I have to scan through comments in other discussions that I'm not so interested in. Another technique I've tried is watching the comments page of the prolific posters in the discussion I am following, but that also gets time-consuming, and will lead me to miss comments from other people in the discussion.

Does anyone else find this a problem? Any solutions within the current features of the site? If not, is there anything that can be done to make this easier to follow?

The best thing I can think of would be a "recent comments" page for each individual post. It would basically be another "Sort By" of the comments that would take them out of their tree structure, and put them in a flat view ordered by recentness.

In the spirit of striving for constructive criticism, let me follow up on my earlier comment with a response to this short excerpt, which does qualify as a problem description:

The high quality standard, heavy use of neologisms, and karma penalties for being wrong might be intimidating to newcomers.

A quick trip down memory lane reveals that my first two comments on LW were elicited by coming across something that my professional expertise allowed to identify as misinformation.

This is partial evidence of how newcomers can be encouraged to contribute through the discussions themselves, rather than through extraneous means.

I was largely unaware of the site's specialized vocabulary at that time, or at least comfortable ignoring it when I started contributing.

I had no use at all for karma initially, and was only peripherally aware of it. I think I only started taking karma seriously at all when a comment of mine, about one month after I started commenting in the first place, garnered a fair number of upvotes.

Prior to my first writing a top-level post, I had gleaned karma through the following types of interactions:

• directly answering a question asked in a top-level post
• responding to top-level posts with disagreement, external links, amplifications, or even just sympathy
• posting a link in the open thread

In all, this leads me to doubt that specialized jargon or karma penalties have much to do with discouraging newcomers. I agree that the high standards the community sets for itself may discourage newcomers, but that if anything is something that should be increased.

What seems to me to discourage newcomers is something perhaps a little harder to specify: an inward focus of the discussions at any given time, contrasted to an attitude of encouraging and rewarding engagement by outsiders.

The recent "Attention Lurkers" post was a straightforward and successful example of directly engaging outsiders. However, it was limited in its potential to draw forth interesting contributions, since it deliberately lowered the barrier to "just saying hi".

The post I responded to early in my newbiehood was probably a better example: it asked a rather concrete question, "What is your most valuable skill", and encouraged participation in a way that I suspect was particularly likely to turn commenters into later contributors.

These "homework assignment" type posts have seemed most effective to me at encouraging me to increase my level of participation. Admittedly what worked for me may not work for others, but this suggests that the most effective ways to achieve the outcomes we desire may not be quick technological fixes, but rather deliberate and cumulative efforts to encourage and reward specific types of content.

While we're talking about these issues:

The minimum karma needed to make a top level post needs to be raised. My reasons are in the meta thread here. To summarize: the low karma requirement combined with the 10x bonus means that newish users will make top level posts, not do a good job their first time and (with -3) end up with a negative karma total. In frustration they will leave.

Also, it's more fun if top level posting power is a little hard to win.

I voted for the karma-coward option because people are different, so having more options is good. But being new myself (only 16 comments, 43 karma points), you might be more interested in the fact that I would not use them if they were available.

I find it very gratifying to receive karma points. It motivates me to write more comments. If I was granted a grace period in which my comments did not receive karma points, I might have posted even less. Even the downvotes are a motivator, not to post more, but to put more effort next time I have something to say.

When I post a comment, a part of me does it to earn more karma points. If I expect that a comment will get downvoted, I rephrase it until I expect it to be accepted by the community. Therefore, even if I was the kind of person who needs protection from those scary downvotes, I would never cover my comments with cowardliness, as I would never expect the downvotes in the first place.

We have also identified another potential problem with the site: the high quality standard, heavy use of neologisms, and karma penalties for being wrong might be intimidating to newcomers.

Basically the quality of discussion that I didn't even dare to hope I could match was the reason I was so fascinated by this site when I first found it. Refraining from commenting was a natural step. Suggested methods in the post seem to have downside of leaving our garden undefended.

Maybe some sort of "Am I worthy enough to comment a LW post" FAQ could be better. That way encouragement to comment could be directed towards those who feel that they do understand basic concepts here, while others could be encouraged to read more.

As far as I can tell, the general community consensus in the previous post was that a discussion section to replace the Open Thread would be a good idea, due to the many problems with Open Thread, but that it would be problematic to host it off-site. For this reason, our current proposal involves modifying the main site to include a separate "Discussion" section in the navigation bar (next to "Wiki | Sequences | About"). What are now Open Thread comments would be hosted in the Discussion section, in a more user-friendly and appropriate format (similar to Reddit's or a BBS forum's). If my impression was mistaken, please do say so.

I think (and my impression is that many others think) this is a great idea if, and only if, some mechanism exists to maintain high standards in the new section, whether through integrating the karma system or otherwise.

Proposal 1 sidesteps the karma system mechanism too much. It wouldn't really encourage me to post more, and I don't think it'll improve quality beyond what a Discussion section would do.

Proposal 2 really doesn't address present lurkers' reluctance to comment. I would instead suggest all users get a small initial karma buffer that will absorb top post and comment downvotes. How that would work in conjuction with the top-post karma requirement, I'm not sure. The idea is to allow users to hide bad comments, give commenters a chance to integrate feedback, but still punish those who would use the "gimme's" as a chance for abuse.

I have high hopes for the discussion section--AT LEAST make sure to put in a plug for it in the not-logged-in welcome message. Having a smaller environment to practice, test out ideas, and get feedback would be great.

I hope people will just go ahead and ask, "Hey, if I invested more time thinking about this, do you think it would make a good post?"

I'm in favor of both the grace period and "karma coward" option. In my own experience, anxiety about being downvoted acted as a deterrent against posting comments; reading and responding to posts by new members is relatively cheap, while missing opportunities to make them feel included in the community (and thus potentially missing out on their future contributions) seems comparatively expensive.

Would it be useful - maybe as something to be incorporated with the discussion forum - to have a (semi-)formalized system of study partners/groups? A while ago, Morendil asked if anyone would be interested in teaming up to study Jaynes' Probability Theory: the Logic of Science. An influx of new members would bring more people who could benefit from ongoing help and motivation to study the central topics of interest here on LW. It would be nice to have a standard way of coordinating with study partners.

Everyone who says this site is intimidating to new people is spot-on. I'd read all the OB sequences by the time LW started up, but I still came very close to never writing any top-level posts, and if my first one hadn't been well received I doubt I ever would have written a second.

But the current options don't address how, as Matt Simpson said, looking dumb is a bigger barrier than karma. I got over my "looking dumb" fear by using a name that's pretty hard to trace back to me and maintaining anonymity, but this isn't enough. Internet etiquette generally frowns on re-registering with a new handle after you embarrass your first one, so I was still risking "my" Less Wrong reputation.

So what about short "karma holidays" every so often? During a karma holiday, people have the option to post/comment anonymously (wait! hear me out!). The karma they earn or lose doesn't get added or subtracted to their real total. At any point, the poster can then "claim" the post and remove anonymity from it.

During a karma holiday, new people get every incentive to post and comment. If their post bombs, they don't lose any karma, no one ever has to know it was them, and they know not to post any more until they've done some more study. If their post succeeds, they can take the karma and the credit, lose their feelings of unworthiness, and then keep on posting good stuff after the karma holiday's over.

The downside is that we have to suffer through some posts that might be lower quality than normal once in a while, and we might get flooded with too many posts to read and review properly during that period.

It would be nice if you could "subscribe" to comments/posts - to be alerted to replies to particular comments - other than your own.

Another idea: in the upcoming Discussion section, there would be an option to turn a post into a top-level LW post, preserving the existing comments.

Current Open Threads say "If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post." This would improve on that by allowing the existing discussion to be preserved. A potential disadvantage is that this might make top-level posting too low-risk — everyone might start their top-level posts as open discussion posts, and only move them to the main LW category if they're well-received. Then again, I'm not sure if that's necessarily a bad thing.

Any thoughts?

It seems to me that the single most important thing we could do to make LW more welcoming to new people is to somehow deal with the problem of the neologisms.

(We could try to build a bot that automatically places a link over any neologism, linking to the LW wiki entry, for example.)

EDIT 2: To avoid contamination by other people's ideas, please vote before you look at the comments.

If other people's ideas are contaminants, why am I even here? :) Aumann agreement and all that.

I didn't vote; my vote in this case is to let the people who are willing to do the work make the choice based on ease of implementation, since I have no strong (or even perceivable) preference.

Having several threaded forums for major discussion topics, on the other hand, would be great.

Definitely "yes" to the discussion section. Call it "Off-topic" though.

The discussion section sounds like a solid idea. As for making LW less intimidating, I'd rank it as the grace period > doing nothing > "karma coward", though I think users should be able to exit the grace period earlier by choice, and also possibly the score of comments on users in the grace period should be hidden (not just kept from affecting the total karma).

Seeing your comments plummet in score might be demoralizing, even if it doesn't affect your total score.

I would like the LW codebase to scan for any cases where multiple upvotes/downvotes were made to a single post or comment from the same IP. If any accounts are found which do this frequently, I'd like the results posted publicly.

If you're trying to make LW less intimidating, I recommend not calling opting out of the karma system "karma coward". How about "karma neutral"? This especially makes sense because it applies to posts, not posters.

I think the forum-like discussion zone is a great idea.

I voted for the grace period, because the Karma coward feature would mess up the current system and encourage constant Karma cowardice on shorter, less substantial comments. In regards to the grace period I think that it would be wiser to set a comment counter instead of a time interval because a heavy posting trollish person would potentially cause annoyance even in the case of a short period. "Doing nothing" follows the grace period very closely in my preference as I feel the current karma system is satisfactory.

I support setting the posting threshold to 50 karma and the grace period proposals. I understand that up votes and down votes are generally given without comment, but providing constructive criticism to new users would be helpful.

my suggestion: implement both Proposal 1 and Proposal 2. Actually, they could be combined into a single proposal. Have an option to turn "karma coward" mode on or off for each individual post, and have an option in your user settings that says whether karma coward option is on or off by default. Make it default to on. No need to automate this with a time limit.