Benjamin Davies

If Veritula did implement articles, the first thing I’d want is the ability to criticize them; to submit deeply nested counter-criticisms; and to render a label showing how many pending criticisms an article has, calculated based on criticism chains.

I agree, and I think here you have inadvertently pointed at a key difference between discussions and articles. In terms of implementation, articles would be a near clone of discussions, except that the articles themselves can be criticised by users, including all the functionality that articles being criticisable may one day come with, like entire articles going dormant if they don’t answer criticisms within a certain period.

A couple of examples: If I wanted to keep and share information on Karl Popper, it would be a lot more intuitive to produce an article on him in encyclopedia style—where I can present information in a hierarchy, rather than creating a discussion and then making each detail about him a top-level idea, which is more chaotic. The same would be true if I wanted to make articles on CR terms—this doesn’t seem very natural to do in a Veritula discussion, but would be very natural in a series of Veritula articles, one for each term.

It also favours this articles idea that implementing it would be fairly straightforward, due to how much could be carried over from the discussions implementation. It makes it low cost to try.

Works well 👍

I used to think that articles would need to be grouped in some way, but I no longer think so. Articles will often compete, even if they aren’t about the same or even similar topic.

E.g. an article ‘Easy-to-Vary Explanations’ would compete with an article ‘The Simulation Hypothesis’

Users would be able to point out and connect conflicting articles, but that wouldn’t cause them to be connected by topic, but rather by conflict.

Users may wish to publish articles that don’t neatly fit into a discussion topic.

Top-level ideas need to be published to a specific discussion, which will cause some amount of silo-ing or similar dynamics.

Top-level ideas in a discussion thread are not standalone pages.

One thing that Wikipedia does well is having a structured, high level page for each idea/subject. This enables readers to get a good sense of an idea quickly.

Right now, to get a good sense of an idea on Veritula, a user often has to study a branching discussion, which can take a lot of work depending on how the discussion played out. A discussion also emphasises things that were relevant to the disagreements that took place in the discussion, rather than distilling the most important elements of an idea into a hierarchy, regardless of disagreements that took place in getting to it (like an encyclopedia entry does).

‘Articles’ are functionally no different than top-level ideas in a discussion thread.

Idea: Veritula Articles

Currently, Veritula is a discussion website. I believe it could one day do what Wikipedia (and Grokipedia) do, but better.

A step towards that would be enabling users to produce ‘articles’ or something similar.

An ‘Articles’ tab would be distinct from the ‘Discussions’ tab, featuring explanatory documents similar to encyclopedia entries, and perhaps also blogpost-like content.

Articles focus on distilling the good ideas created/discovered in the discussions that occur on Veritula.

It might make sense to have the new top-level idea form at the top, in the meantime. Compared to the current design, this would invite the creation of more top-level ideas.

Any progress on this? Scrolling to the bottom to submit new ideas is annoying.

Idea: Discussion specific activity feeds

It would be a waste of time to add features that don’t scale well.

The site isn’t at all big enough for this to matter yet.

As the site grows and there is more activity, there would be too much going on for any user to be interested in all the activity on the site, so it would eventually become irrelevant

Idea: Activity feed should track when you last visited it, take you there when you open it. Currently, someone like me who likes to see everything happening on Veritula needs to go back through pages to find the last thing they saw.

Would ideas that no longer have pending criticisms (perhaps because the criticism chain has been flipped further up), be pulled out of the archive?

Idea: Conjecture Arena

Idea: Reason Arena

I like something with ‘Arena’ because it would imply action, some ideas winning out over others, and has a Darwinian aspect to it. Our best ideas are the tentative champions in the arena of ideas, waiting for the next challenger.

To be clear, if you copy the entire box quote and paste it into a textarea, it will start with the > sign. I just double checked.

This doesn't work for me the way it does for you. I tried copying the entire quote, and also in a separate attempt, copying extra stuff above and below the box quote, and neither gave me the > sign.

I have tried on my windows computer and my iPad.

When copying a box quote from Veritula, the box quote formatting (>) is lost.