I think we need to put our money and investment where our mouths are on this. Either Less Wrong (or another centralized discussion platform) are very valuable and worth tens of thousands of dollars in investment and moderation, or they are not that important and not worth it. It seems that every time we have a conversation about Less Wrong and the importance of it, the problem is that we expect everyone to do things on a volunteer basis and things will just magically get going again. It seems like Less Wrong was going great back when there was active and constant investment in it by MIRI and CFAR, and once that investment stopped things collapsed.
Otherwise we are just in a situation like that of Jaguar with the cupholders, where everyone is posting on forums for 10 years about how we need cupholders, but there is no one whose actual, paid job is to get cupholders in the cars.
I think we need to put our money and investment where our mouths are on this. Either Less Wrong (or another centralized discussion platform) are very valuable and worth tens of thousands of dollars in investment and moderation, or they are not that important and not worth it. It seems that every time we have a conversation about Less Wrong and the importance of it, the problem is that we expect everyone to do things on a volunteer basis and things will just magically get going again. It seems like Less Wrong was going great back when there was active and constant investment in it by MIRI and CFAR, and once that investment stopped things collapsed.
Otherwise we are just in a situation like that of Jaguar with the cupholders, where everyone is posting on forums for 10 years about how we need cupholders, but there is no one whose actual, paid job is to get cupholders in the cars.
The list of plausibly worthwhile changes that would help to revitalize LessWrong is long:
redesigning LW’s appearance
cleaning up the codebase
forming a new moderation team
producing a bunch of new content
removing the main/discussion distinction
choosing one or more people to take full leadership of the project
(maybe) recentering the list of topics for discussion to include more about EA, tech or politics
(maybe) allow more links, rather than just posts
rebranding. x) getting many people join at once.
Effort might be superlinear here—once you commit to a few, you might just want to bite the bullet a build a new damned site.
That’s going to cost time and dollars—maybe hundreds of thousands, but if it’s what has to be done...