I think if you want to unify the community, what needs to be done is the creation of a hn-style aggregator, with a clear, accepted, willing, opinionated, involved BDFL, input from the prominent writers in the community (scott, robin, eliezer, nick bostrom, others), and for the current lesswrong.com to be archived in favour of that new aggregator. But even if it’s something else, it will not succeed without the three basic ingredients: clear ownership, dedicated leadership, and as broad support as possible to a simple, well-articulated vision. Lesswrong tried to be too many things with too little in the way of backing.
I didn’t delete my account a year ago because the site runs on a fork of Reddit rather than HN (and I recall that people posted links to outside articles all the time; what benefit would a HN-style aggregator add over either what we have now or our Reddit fork plus Reddit’s ability to post links to external sites?); I deleted it because the things people posted here weren’t good.
I think if you want to unify the community, what needs to be done is the creation of more good content and less bad content. We’re sitting around and talking about the best way to nominate people for a committee to design a strategy to create an algorithm to tell us where we should go for lunch today when there’s a Five Guys across the street. These discussions were going on the last time I checked in on LW, IIRC, and there doesn’t seem to have been much progress made.
I haven’t seen anyone link to a LW post written after I deleted since I deleted. I suspect this has less to do with aggregators or BDFL nomination committees and more to do with the fact that a long time ago people used to post good things here and then they stopped.
Then again, better CSS wouldn’t hurt. This place looks like Reddit. Nobody wants to link to a place that looks like Reddit.
I didn’t delete my account a year ago because the site runs on a fork of Reddit rather than HN (and I recall that people posted links to outside articles all the time; what benefit would a HN-style aggregator add over either what we have now or our Reddit fork plus Reddit’s ability to post links to external sites?); I deleted it because the things people posted here weren’t good.
I think if you want to unify the community, what needs to be done is the creation of more good content and less bad content. We’re sitting around and talking about the best way to nominate people for a committee to design a strategy to create an algorithm to tell us where we should go for lunch today when there’s a Five Guys across the street. These discussions were going on the last time I checked in on LW, IIRC, and there doesn’t seem to have been much progress made.
I haven’t seen anyone link to a LW post written after I deleted since I deleted. I suspect this has less to do with aggregators or BDFL nomination committees and more to do with the fact that a long time ago people used to post good things here and then they stopped.
Then again, better CSS wouldn’t hurt. This place looks like Reddit. Nobody wants to link to a place that looks like Reddit.