The "Facebook Search Problem"


Filer - namespace

Source URL - http://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wmEcNP3KFEGPZaFJk/the-craft-and-the-community-a-post-mortem-and-resurrection#kePaurKxPS3xTt5dm

Author - vedrfolnir

Category - Record Keeping

summary - The "Facebook Search Problem"

Problem Description -

Right -- wikis and blogs have different uses. Blogs (or magazines, or letters...) are for hashing things out; wikis (or books, or journals [although journals can do both]...) are for writing things up once they've been hashed out. This is useful to avoid the "Facebook search problem", which IMO hasn't been getting as much attention as it should, especially given that it was one of the reasons listed for why LW ought to be revived:

>The first bottleneck for our community, and the biggest I think, is the ability to build common knowledge. On facebook, I can read an excellent and insightful discussion, yet one week later I forgot it. Even if I remember it, I don’t link to the facebook post (because linking to facebook posts/comments is hard) and it doesn’t have a title so I don’t casually refer to it in discussion with friends. On facebook, ideas don’t get archived and built upon, they get discussed and forgotten. To put this another way, the reason we cannot build on the best ideas this community had over the last five years, is because we don’t know what they are. There’s only fragments of memories of facebook discussions which maybe some other people remember. We have the sequences, and there’s no way to build on them together as a community, and thus there is stagnation.

One possible solution to the problem that awarding status for wiki edits is hard would be to abandon the wiki model entirely, in favor of a curated encyclopedia model: instead of waiting around for someone to write up X, you'd have curators (status!) who can ask someone who understands X to write (status!) the encyclopedia page on X.

What do you do if their writeup is controversial or could be built upon? Well, that's an implementation detail. Maybe a comments page? How do actually-existing curated encyclopedias handle that?

Timestamp (autofilled) - 1511684172


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quanticle02 December 2017, 00:25

And this is precisely why the Seattle Rationality Reading Group notes are on their own site, not submitted as Facebook comments. Not only do I have notes, but, almost as importantly, I have an independent record of the links that we read each week. That's almost as valuable as the notes are.

Diffractor26 November 2017, 07:33

For 10 bucks an hour I'll binge-read whichever facebook archives I'm pointed at and save important conversations and comments, and live-stream it so the person paying me can verify that I'm not goofing off. Hit me up if you're interested in this offer.

namespace26 November 2017, 03:19

I actually started Rescued From Facebook for precisely this reason. I figure any time I see good content on Facebook, I might not be able to see it again so I'd best save it now while it's available. In general there's a huge bubble where Bay Area rat types use Facebook and assume this is an excellent way to reach the entire community. I don't even have Facebook, and most of the interesting productive people I know avoid the platform to the best of their ability.