For nobodies that’s not much of problem. But for people with something to lose it is. The net effect is evaporative cooling where smart, interesting, important people either withdraw from the open ’net or curate their online presence into sterility.
I’m flagging this as a really important failure mode nobody noticed. It strikes me as very surprising this in hindsight seems so obvious when I know so many former top contributors not to have considered this as a failure mode. They didn’t anticipate as they got older and advanced in their social circles and their careers, they’d go from being nobodies to being somebodies. Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist now; he has to watch what he says on the internet more than Scott the pre-med/philosophy student needed to watch what he said several years ago. Many of the legacy contributors on LW, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Anna Salamon, Carl Shulman, Luke Muehlhauser and Andrew Critch work for nonprofits with budgets over a million dollars a year, part of the EA community, which seems hyper-conscious of status and prestige, and in a way thrusts all of them into the limelight more.
I’m flagging this as a really important failure mode nobody noticed. It strikes me as very surprising this in hindsight seems so obvious when I know so many former top contributors not to have considered this as a failure mode. They didn’t anticipate as they got older and advanced in their social circles and their careers, they’d go from being nobodies to being somebodies. Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist now; he has to watch what he says on the internet more than Scott the pre-med/philosophy student needed to watch what he said several years ago. Many of the legacy contributors on LW, like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Anna Salamon, Carl Shulman, Luke Muehlhauser and Andrew Critch work for nonprofits with budgets over a million dollars a year, part of the EA community, which seems hyper-conscious of status and prestige, and in a way thrusts all of them into the limelight more.