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 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 according to their own judgement. Even in the discussion section of LW some users including myself are literally too shy to post certain kinds of questions/content. I just wanted to bring that too attention.
Certainly this should wait until after the karma requirement is decreased to see how things develop then. I am assuming that things won't radically change, but that's a judgement call.
My intuition is that with an option like the one Jess suggested there would be a lot more posts in general, would you agree? If that's the case and the kinds of posts that we currently see should be visible just like they are now, except there's a checkbox "display minor posts" somewhere. This sounds to me like a forum that people would describe as uncomplicated. All in all this approach seems less complicated to me than having dedicated threads titled 'ask a stupid question' etc.