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.
This is a fair suggestion.
I guess my take on this is that most people care about reading good quality material a lot more than they care about length. For example, lots of Wei Dai's early posts on LessWrong were short but incisive, so they got upvoted.
Even a checkbox with tags has disadvantages - Even if posts are categorised in stealth, if half of the posts are hidden a lot of the time, this complicates the experience of a new user. It's hard to get users to add tags and boring to have to tag things myself. This is all to benefit some fraction of users, maybe a quarter, who can then hide short posts. On balance, I lean towards simplicity.
So if people have great links or questions, I think they should just post them to the front page. If they get 10+ karma and 10+ comments there, then it's an appropriate place for them.
"This is all to benefit some fraction of users, maybe a quarter, who can then hide short posts."
It's interesting that you view this more from the reader's perspective. Perhaps a good idea since readers are in the majority. To me the main benefit would be for the posters. It can be daunting to post a simple question (perhaps about an issue that confuses you) in a place where everyone will see it among a bunch of thought-out posts. Therefore I would welcome giving posters the ability to check "minor" if their post meets the criteria accor... (read more)