1) A crazy idea—how about creating a “welcoming committee”; a group of people who would offer to spend some of their time welcoming the new LW members personally (on Skype). They would be volunteers who see the community aspect of LW as important, but also would have to be accepted by the LW vote as representatives of the community (instead of e.g. people who have incompatible ideas, and try to abuse LW for spreading their personal goals).
Now every new user would have an opportunity (and be encouraged) to request e.g. two 10-minutes talks with two members of the “welcoming committee”. The new user would provide a short introduction about themselves (hobbies, what do they expect from LW), and the committee would contact them and have a talk. There would be an (unenforceable) expectation that in return, the new user will write an article on LW, and generally, start being active in the community, if they are compatible with the community.
2) A part of the impression of LW decay could be an artifact of how article publishing works here. The popularity of an author grows gradually, but when a well-known author leaves, it is visible. If we imagine the article quality graph, it could be a curve with a lot of small growth (which we don’t notice) and an occasional sharp drop (noticed by many).
For example, someone new would come, post an article in Discussion with 5 karma, a month later another with 15 karma, yet a month later an article with 30 karma would get to Main, then five more articles in Main… and then the person would decide to start their own blog. What would be our impression of this whole process? Probably that LW is getting worse than before, because yet another important author has left. (We wouldn’t contrast the end situation with what was before the author came to LW.)
3) Related to recent article by Robin Hanson and the discussion below it: people often don’t read sources for information per se, but for information useful socially. For example, if you could read two articles in a newspaper, equally useful, but one published today and another published a year ago, you would prefer to read the article written today, because then you can go out and have a debate with people about it.
Analogically, LessWrong became “old news”. The great old articles (from Sequences, but also by Yvain, lukeprog, etc.) are old. Reading them now for the first time is lower-status than having them read when they were published. MIRI and CFAR themselves are “old news”; they exist, just like they have existed years before. There is no new exciting topic for the new readers. It is like joining an already huge pyramid scheme at the bottom.
This could potentially be helped by creating sub-communities on LW. The new members were not here when LW started, but they can still participate at starting some subgroup, and get status there. (Similarly how people who start a local LW meetup can get high status for that.)
1) A crazy idea—how about creating a “welcoming committee”; a group of people who would offer to spend some of their time welcoming the new LW members personally (on Skype). They would be volunteers who see the community aspect of LW as important, but also would have to be accepted by the LW vote as representatives of the community (instead of e.g. people who have incompatible ideas, and try to abuse LW for spreading their personal goals).
Now every new user would have an opportunity (and be encouraged) to request e.g. two 10-minutes talks with two members of the “welcoming committee”. The new user would provide a short introduction about themselves (hobbies, what do they expect from LW), and the committee would contact them and have a talk. There would be an (unenforceable) expectation that in return, the new user will write an article on LW, and generally, start being active in the community, if they are compatible with the community.
2) A part of the impression of LW decay could be an artifact of how article publishing works here. The popularity of an author grows gradually, but when a well-known author leaves, it is visible. If we imagine the article quality graph, it could be a curve with a lot of small growth (which we don’t notice) and an occasional sharp drop (noticed by many).
For example, someone new would come, post an article in Discussion with 5 karma, a month later another with 15 karma, yet a month later an article with 30 karma would get to Main, then five more articles in Main… and then the person would decide to start their own blog. What would be our impression of this whole process? Probably that LW is getting worse than before, because yet another important author has left. (We wouldn’t contrast the end situation with what was before the author came to LW.)
3) Related to recent article by Robin Hanson and the discussion below it: people often don’t read sources for information per se, but for information useful socially. For example, if you could read two articles in a newspaper, equally useful, but one published today and another published a year ago, you would prefer to read the article written today, because then you can go out and have a debate with people about it.
Analogically, LessWrong became “old news”. The great old articles (from Sequences, but also by Yvain, lukeprog, etc.) are old. Reading them now for the first time is lower-status than having them read when they were published. MIRI and CFAR themselves are “old news”; they exist, just like they have existed years before. There is no new exciting topic for the new readers. It is like joining an already huge pyramid scheme at the bottom.
This could potentially be helped by creating sub-communities on LW. The new members were not here when LW started, but they can still participate at starting some subgroup, and get status there. (Similarly how people who start a local LW meetup can get high status for that.)
I like the idea of a welcome committee and am willing to spearhead it.