Hi all,
I have some small news. Since the forum's launch, Trike have made two updates. The first fixed some login issues. The second made several improvements:
- If you visit a url from the old blog, it now redirects to the corresponding pages on the forum.
- The default font in articles and comments is now darker and more readable.
- When you try to post an article but can't, the forum now explains why more clearly.
To recap, if you can't post an article, you can earn posting rights by:
- Getting 30 karma. Your karma is the upvotes on your comments minus the downvotes.
- Sending a draft to ry.duff [at] gmail.com. I'm keen to post articles that will be of interest to a wide range of aspiring effective altruists. Academic style is not required.
After three more weeks, the karma requirement will be eased to 10-20 to allow wider participation.
If you notice any further bugs, you can continue to submit them here.
In possibly the most exciting news of all, Vipul Naik, Evan Gaensbauer and Jacy Anthis have already broken the 30 karma barrier. First was Vipul, co-creator of OpenBorders.info, who displayed minimal difficulty, earning 30 karma in six posts across three days. It'll be great to see what they contribute when they choose to do so. Hot on their tails, Michael_Dickens, lincolnq and Geuss, each have over 20 karma.
To earn karma, you can contribute a quote, an introduction, an idea, or comment on one of over 100 existing articles.
So the main reason LW's Main/Discussion distinction was criticized is that the Discussion section lacks a critical mass? And would you say this is the main argument against subforums? This would be useful to know I think - when the argument is on the table we can start thinking about solutions ;)
Also, how can we make main more lenient to short questions, except by lowering the karma requirement?
Re: Fragmenting the community: Do you think this would also occur if we have subforums like 'career', 'donations', 'causes' etc. or rather if we had 'poverty', 'animals', 'x-risk'?
And thanks for thinking about this intensively and putting in the time to respond to so many comments!
Hey Soeren. My main reasons for having only one forum are critical mass considerations, fragmentation considerations and useability considerations. However, even if we thought this was a desired feature, it would require significant further argumentation to decide that it was more important to develop this feature than, for example, ironing out bugs in the mobile and Firefox versions of the site.
Apart from the suggestions I made above about making the forum more lenient to short questions (moving mid-length content from the open thread to the main page, ma... (read more)