The idea is indeed that you are welcome to post about whatever you want on LW, and as we get more and more content, we will make people’s personal blogs less visible from the frontpage, and instead add subscription mechanisms that allow people to subscribe to the specific people they want to follow (which they will see in addition to the frontpage discussion).
We are planning to turn off the ability to lose and gain global-karma for personal blogposts in the near future, though we are still planning to allow people to upvote and downvote content (though we might put a lower bound of something like −4 or 0 on the negative score a post can get). So as soon as that happens, you will no longer be able to lose karma from writing a post on your personal blog that people didn’t like.
We are still optimizing the site for the people who are trying to make progress on rationality and various related topics, and so while it’s possible to use LessWrong as a fashion blog, you will probably find the feature set of the site not super useful to do that, and you won’t benefit super much from doing that on LessWrong over something like Medium (unless you want to analyze fashion using the rationalist paradigm, in which case I would actually be interested in reading that, and would welcome that content).
The only stuff that’s off-limit for personal blogs is stuff that might transform all of LessWrong into a political battleground via spillover effects (i.e. very strongly politicized discussion, direct personal attacks on people, etc.). And if you somehow build a culture on your personal blog that the moderators perceive to be actively harmful to the culture of the broader site, then we might also take action (though that action would more look like reducing the spillover from your blog to the rest of the site, as opposed to outright deleting your content).
The idea is indeed that you are welcome to post about whatever you want on LW, and as we get more and more content, we will make people’s personal blogs less visible from the frontpage, and instead add subscription mechanisms that allow people to subscribe to the specific people they want to follow (which they will see in addition to the frontpage discussion).
We are planning to turn off the ability to lose and gain global-karma for personal blogposts in the near future, though we are still planning to allow people to upvote and downvote content (though we might put a lower bound of something like −4 or 0 on the negative score a post can get). So as soon as that happens, you will no longer be able to lose karma from writing a post on your personal blog that people didn’t like.
We are still optimizing the site for the people who are trying to make progress on rationality and various related topics, and so while it’s possible to use LessWrong as a fashion blog, you will probably find the feature set of the site not super useful to do that, and you won’t benefit super much from doing that on LessWrong over something like Medium (unless you want to analyze fashion using the rationalist paradigm, in which case I would actually be interested in reading that, and would welcome that content).
The only stuff that’s off-limit for personal blogs is stuff that might transform all of LessWrong into a political battleground via spillover effects (i.e. very strongly politicized discussion, direct personal attacks on people, etc.). And if you somehow build a culture on your personal blog that the moderators perceive to be actively harmful to the culture of the broader site, then we might also take action (though that action would more look like reducing the spillover from your blog to the rest of the site, as opposed to outright deleting your content).