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Very true. I think "can you keep a secret", in the context of true secrets, is a bit of a non-question. What kind of secret? Sometimes, even revealing the type of the secret in question reveals bits about the secret itself (sometimes through multiple layers). How do you communicate about the meta-parts of said secret? What are your skills in behaving around true-secret material? Doing a " Can you keep a secret?" "Yeah I can keep a secret!" interaction doesn't really tell you much at all and seems to me more just a social dance to initiate gossip (or a similar interaction).
I liked your post.
What deeply frustrates me is the way content is rated, ordered and created as a broad phenomenon in today's internet.
Tangential, but I'd be interested to hear/read more about this. I have similar feelings but thoughts around this are very disorganized and blurry, rather than well laid out and clear.
Aiming to improve the quality of threads by telling users to post/comment less in a public forum seems to me like it's not going to be very helpful in the long term. If users self-select by simulating how much karma their post/comment gets (perhaps via extrapolating the average karma ratio of their previous posts) it might work for a subset, but will fail for other cases:
Namely:
- you'll miss people who would have benefited from the advice but predict the quality of their comment wrong ("yes I have a low average but this next post will be my big break")
- you'll affect people who the advice wasn't directed to / who wouldn't have needed it but implemented it anyway ("it must be my low quality thoughts that are the problem, better leave all writing to Eliezer" or "looks like I have an average score of {TOO_LOW}, better not post this {ACTUALLY_INSIGHTFUL_INSIGHT}.")
As you said yourself, it only takes a few seconds to upvote - so it does to downvote. I would expect the system to converge to lower quality comments being voted down more so the observed quality of the comment will roughly align with the votes on the comment.
If the system does not allow you to filter out comments that are below some downvote/upvote ratio, then perhaps the system needs to be tweaked to allow this kind of filtering - but the solution is not telling users to post less. (And if someone is serially creating low quality content, this person can usually be approached individually, rather than trying to optimize for the public forum.)
This seems worthwhile to care about for two reasons:
- There's a real risk of driving away people who would have something valuable to contribute but who end up self censoring before they post anything (and, AIUI, the bar for LessWrong is already really high).
- There's a risk of people optimizing for karma ratio rather than quality of the comment they're posting. The mental shortcut to take is "Now I have enough karma to make a low effort comment" which is probably not the effect you want.
(edit: improved the first paragraph to better articulate what I mean to say.)