People have been building communities with canons since the compilation of the Torah.
LW, running on the same Reddit fork it’s on today, used to be a functional community with a canon. Then… well, then what? Interesting content moved offsite, probably because 1) people get less nervous about posting to Tumblr or Twitter than posting an article to LW 2) LW has content restrictions that elsewhere doesn’t. So people stopped paying attention to the site, so the community fragmented, the barrier to entry was lowered, and now the public face of rationalists is Weird Sun Twitter and Russian MRAs from 4chan who spend their days telling people to kill themselves on Tumblr. Oops!
(And SSC, which is a more active community than LW despite running on even worse software.)
People have been building communities with canons since the compilation of the Torah.
LW, running on the same Reddit fork it’s on today, used to be a functional community with a canon. Then… well, then what? Interesting content moved offsite, probably because 1) people get less nervous about posting to Tumblr or Twitter than posting an article to LW 2) LW has content restrictions that elsewhere doesn’t. So people stopped paying attention to the site, so the community fragmented, the barrier to entry was lowered, and now the public face of rationalists is Weird Sun Twitter and Russian MRAs from 4chan who spend their days telling people to kill themselves on Tumblr. Oops!
(And SSC, which is a more active community than LW despite running on even worse software.)