Eliezer office hours 2016-05-07

Questions for Eliezer

Strategy

Q: What does a discussion of which EA cause to donate to look like? Or what will a discussion between economists look like? (user story for Arbital the Salon)

• Why are we doing the Explanations beta before discussion / debate?
• I've previously said "explanations are the key to debates" and you said that's wrong, but why?
  • Would you not say being able to get any participant up to speed on a topic is the key to debates?

Front page

Q: How should the front page look?

• Current draft: 3fv

Q: How are writers going to know what to write? Are we relying on people coming with ideas, or are we capturing "requests" somehow?

• (see: proposal above)

Hedons

Q: Let's review the writer-reader feedback cycle

• Nate comes to Arbital with a topic he wants to write about. He follows the How to author on Arbital! guide and produces a series of pages he's happy with.
• All of the pages show up on the front page, and a few readers dive in.
• Should only one of them show up -- should Nate promote some page as the "entry point" into his explanation?
• Nate's pages get some likes, and remain on the front page.
• should pages decay off the front page?
• Nate checks out his user page, sees that he's gotten L likes and taught N people some concepts. He decides to write some more.

Q: How do updates like "L people liked your thing" and "N people learned from your page appear"? What about updates like "5 people were confused by this sentence"?

Q: Is XP part of the MFP for the beta?

Comments and queries

Q: Can we bury the comment feature behind the other ways we'd like people to interact with the page (marks)? Otherwise people might only use the comments.

• and in general this currently feels unusable
• only see these options when I select text
• get three different icons and it's not clear which to click on (suggest combining to one button)
• unclear to new user what queries are about
  • why would I choose question / objection instead of a discussion comment?