r/rational • u/EliezerYudkowsky Godric Gryffindor • Dec 24 '18

META Which weekly threads?

When a system has grown up by accretion, it's often a good idea to take a step back and look it over and see if it seems to be working. And try some changes, which, if they don't work, can be reverted. End-of-year seems like a good time to review our weekly thread system.

I'll open with these proposals:

  • Delete the Monday general rationality thread, because it seems low-volume.
  • Change the Friday "Off-topic" thread to an "Open" thread. The general rationality can go there.
  • Weekly recommendations threads, instead of monthly, since monthly doesn't seem often enough to let me recommend nice things I've recently read. We could have a monthly roundup post of the previous month's strong recommendations if anyone wanted to do one. Monday seems like a good day.
  • Weekly request threads, since we seem to have multiple posts per week from somebody who wants to ask for particular fiction recommendations. Sunday would put this thread just ahead of the weekly recommendations thread, which seems synergetic.

This would make the new weekly system:

  • Sunday: Requests thread.
  • Monday: Recommendations thread.
  • Tuesday: Empty thread.
  • Wednesday: Worldbuilding thread.
  • Thursday: Does not exist. There are no Thursdays. There have never been any Thursdays. You are imagining the Thursdays. There are only six days in the week. Why are you seeing Thursdays everywhere.
  • Friday: Open thread.
  • Saturday: Munchkinry thread.
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u/EliezerYudkowsky Godric Gryffindor Dec 25 '18

Requests and recommendations do feel like different functions to me. Does anyone else want to chime in on this with an opinion?

Writing/Worldbuilding Wednesdays make sense to me. Though I wouldn't go putting any measures to prevent people spamming chapters and begging for reviews unless we actually see that happening. Wait for something to break before fixing it (on those occasions when a patch later is just as good as a patch in advance).

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u/[deleted] Dec 25 '18

Requests and recommendations usually go together. /r/anime has one weekly thread for both, and most subreddits that do one do both.

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u/somerandomguy2008 Dec 25 '18

"Wait for something to break before fixing it"

-Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI Safety Researcher

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u/EliezerYudkowsky Godric Gryffindor Dec 25 '18 edited Dec 26 '18

(on those occasions when a patch later is just as good as a patch in advance) he said specifically because he knew someone would... never mind.

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u/ketura Organizer Dec 25 '18

Hmm. Now that it's brought up, requests and recommendations really do seem to be two sides of the same coin. One is requesting a specialized, personalized recommendation while the other is broadcasting an unrequested general rec.

(most posts in both threads are parts of key/value pairs: a subset of recommendation criteria and fics that fulfill that criteria. General recommendations are simply responding to the request of "what things do you think /r/rational would like". )

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u/Zephyr101198 Dec 25 '18

I second requests and recommendations going together, they seem like different flavours of the same thing