julianFeb 25

Reduced engagement due to Article type

NodeBB federates out Note or Article depending on the length of the content. While this by-and-large works, the article logic does not encourage as much discussion as expected because a summary is generated so as to provide something for microblog-style software to show (otherwise, it would only show the title (name) and a URL to the forum.)

That summary is limited to a maximum or 500 characters, ending at the last full detected sentence.

When composing a long topic, 500 characters may not be enough to fully introduce the topic and engage users. This lowers click-through rates.

I expressed my frustration about this online to @thisismissem and suggested that I might just revert back to sending the entire post content in summary. This would violate FEP b2b8's recommendation that summary be a maximum of 500 characters:

It should be a maximum of about 500 characters; a few sentences; or a short paragraph.

After consultation with Matt Baer of Writefreely (@[email protected]), he suggested the following changes:[...]

https://activitypub.space/post/1350

Emelia

⁂ ActivityPub.Space
Show threadevan

@julian So, there are a few ways to handle this.

First, the b2b8 recommendation on the summary is just a guideline, not a strict requirement (thus the 'about').

A common practice in news-style text is that the first paragraph is a lede that summarizes the article's main points.

For example, in this article, Lawrence Summers Will Resign From Harvard After Epstein Revelations, the first paragraph is:

Lawrence H. Summers, a Harvard University economist and the school’s former president, will resign from teaching at the end of the academic year, according to a Harvard spokesman.

Some bloggers follow a similar practice, especially since blogging software often uses the first paragraph as the summary in RSS and Atom feeds.

I think if I were generating a summary for long-form text, I'd use these techniques in roughly descending order:

  • Manual override; an optional way for the user to define a summary manually - either with a marker in the text, or with a separate input element (I think WordPress does this).
  • Use the whole text if it meets the rough guidelines (~1 paragraph, a few sentences, about 500 chars) in b2b8.
  • Use the first paragraph if it meets the rough guidelines (a few sentences, about 500 chars) in b2b8.
  • Truncate the first paragraph and include an ellipsis ([...]).

This is also something that LLMs are pretty good at. So, maybe rather than truncating (last option), consider using an LLM to generate a summary that meets the boundary requirements.

Lead paragraph - Wikipedia

Feb 26 at 8:01pmWeb
Show threadjulianFeb 26

@evan that makes sense. I've just updated NodeBB to allow for the use of a manual override marker. The limit and even the marker is now customizable per-instance, and I do use the ellipsis when truncating text.

Hopefully that resolves the engagement issue while still preserving the intent of b2b8 

As for the use of an LLM to generate a summary, I think I will defer on that, since that might be a source of surprise for those not expecting the invocation of a LLM