# LW authors: How many clusters of norms do you (personally) want?

_note: this post is about gathering data for "what might the archipelago model look like if implemented on LW", which is s separate question from "should the archipelago model be implemented on LW?"_

Periodically, I've argued for applying [Archipelago-style norms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/97LgacucCxmyjYiNT/the-archipelago-model-of-community-standards) to LessWrong (i.e. give people the tools to establish different norms and culture, then let them experiment however they want, and let the best cultures attract participants)

One cost of this approach is that it's much harder to keep track of which space you're in, and what the rules are. This could be disorienting.

There are various ways to streamline that process. For example, we could (and I expect will, at least on desktop computers) make it so that as soon as you start typing a comment, the moderation norms for the relevant post appear next to your comment box, so it's much easier to see what norms you're expected to follow.

But if there were \*hundreds\* of different types of norms, this might still get a bit bewildering (in particular if each set of norms had a lot of nuance to it), and place too high a burden on commenters.

One thing I'm wondering is how many different normsets there actually are demand for, among authors. (I do think it's important to ground this out in "what authors want" rather than "what commenters want" since the authors are doing the bulk of the work, and the [conversations won't happen at all without them](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5Ym7DN6h877eyaCnT/meta-tations-on-moderation-towards-public-archipelago), with the caveat that I think it's a fine outcome for an author to write a post with one set of comment-norms, and someone who prefers other norms to write up a post titled "Discussing Bob's Post X" that sets different norms).

Knobs that I could imagine an author wanting to turn include:

*   Do you want feedback on writing style?

*   (possibly with different answers for typos, high level structure, etc)

*   Is there a particular conversation you're trying to have? Is there a [product](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i2dNdHrGMT6QgqBFy/what-product-are-you-building) you're trying to build? Or are your mostly just throwing your ideas out into the wild and see what happens?
*   Should commenters relate to your post as if it's in a playful/creative/exploratory stage, or more of a finished product that you want judged professionally (or somewhere else on a spectrum?
*   Do you prefer that you (and each commenter) be responsible for justifying their ideas, or do you prefer commenters who are helping each other and you to figure out whether an idea is good?
*   How much do you expect people to own their own emotional state?
*   Is this intended to be a 101-discussion (or, a "201" discussion where participants have read the sequences and major-upvoted-posts-since-then, but not necessarily much else), or are you knee deep in a particular frame and you aren't interested in commenters who don't share that frame?

It'd be convenient if this turned out to compress into 2-4 major sets of norms (which could then be made clearly visually distinct)

As an author, or as a person who thinks they'd actively be motivated to write posts akin to "Discussing Bob's Ideas X through Normset Z", what are the commenting norms you'd want to have?