It’s actually a somewhat different thing where, normally frontpage is supposed to be stuff that’s more timeless, that people might presumably still care about in 5 years. Part of the whole point is to avoid LessWrong being news-driven.
Early in the pandemic, the mods decided that coronavirus was important enough to frontpage lots of stuff about it, and it did take over the site for awhile. Later, it happened that a) people were talking about it less, and b) it felt like we’d 80/20d the covid discussion and it was no longer urgent enough to break our frontpage guidelines for.
(Note that personal blogposts still get a fair bit of visibility, the point is mostly to avoid having it be the first thing people associate with LessWrong when they first show up. Frontpage posts tend to get 2-3x the traffic, mostly from newbies and people not logged in. Zvi’s weekly covid posts get a fair number of comments.)
I do think this topic seems quite important if true (haven’t evaluated it myself yet), and am glad you posted it here.
Does this not get front paged because of coronavirus saturation?
It’s actually a somewhat different thing where, normally frontpage is supposed to be stuff that’s more timeless, that people might presumably still care about in 5 years. Part of the whole point is to avoid LessWrong being news-driven.
Early in the pandemic, the mods decided that coronavirus was important enough to frontpage lots of stuff about it, and it did take over the site for awhile. Later, it happened that a) people were talking about it less, and b) it felt like we’d 80/20d the covid discussion and it was no longer urgent enough to break our frontpage guidelines for.
(Note that personal blogposts still get a fair bit of visibility, the point is mostly to avoid having it be the first thing people associate with LessWrong when they first show up. Frontpage posts tend to get 2-3x the traffic, mostly from newbies and people not logged in. Zvi’s weekly covid posts get a fair number of comments.)
I do think this topic seems quite important if true (haven’t evaluated it myself yet), and am glad you posted it here.