I know that I wrote about this at length somewhere else, but I can’t currently find it, so here is a super short summary:
One of the primary goals of the frontpage guidelines is to avoid making the site only feel welcome to people who share all the social context of the rationality community. I want people to feel welcome if they are good at rationality, and don’t want them to feel like their membership is conditional on having lots and lots of social connections. Organizational announcements often assume a massive amount of context and create an in-groupy feeling that I think distracts from the goals of LessWrong.
I think it’s quite bad if someone shows up to LessWrong and the first thing they see is someone asking them to donate money to them. I think it creates a much more epistemically adversarial environment than is healthy, and generally will make people (justifiedly) think that all the other content on the site is just there to sell you these organizations that want money from you. There are few things a website can do to make me trust them less than to ask me for money in the first few minutes of showing up.
Eliezer (I think) went through the same line of thinking with the original sequences, which is why he avoided talking about any organizational announcements or any requests for donations during the whole period in which he wrote the sequences. I think this was quite important and good for the site.
Organizational announcements can still get a lot of traction on people’s personal blog. Most people who have enough context to be interested in that kind of announcement have the personal blog filter for the frontpage turned off, so I think this doesn’t actually hurt organizations very much (and overall I think it creates an environment of higher trust in which people are much less likely to feel spammed or inundated by requests for donations and organizational announcements, which I think is overall better for communicating about projects and getting early-stage projects off the ground).
Edited to add:
Another major component for not having organizational announcements is our attempt at encouraging timeless content on LessWrong, and generally trying to disentangle LessWrong from news and other time-driven content. The vast majority of organizational announcements have almost no value when read a year or two after they were posted, and one of the goals of the frontpage/personal distinction is to create a space where content tries to be timeless and long-lasting.
It seems to me like banning organizational announcement will make it much harder to get new initiatives of the ground.
Incidentally, anyone in this space trying to get a new initiative off the ground may want to apply to SurvivalAndFlourishing.org’s first funding round. (We’ll be providing funding, as well as fiscal sponsorship some administrative support. Applications due by October 1st.)
[Edited to clarify that we won’t provide full fiscal sponsorship. We will provide some administrative support via SEE (who is SAF’s fiscal sponsor). Project seeking long-term fiscal sponsorship may want to apply directly to SEE (perhaps after bootstrapping via SAF). See more details on our announcement page.]
Is this rule still in place?
Why do you have this rule? It seems to me like banning organizational announcement will make it much harder to get new initiatives of the ground.
I know that I wrote about this at length somewhere else, but I can’t currently find it, so here is a super short summary:
One of the primary goals of the frontpage guidelines is to avoid making the site only feel welcome to people who share all the social context of the rationality community. I want people to feel welcome if they are good at rationality, and don’t want them to feel like their membership is conditional on having lots and lots of social connections. Organizational announcements often assume a massive amount of context and create an in-groupy feeling that I think distracts from the goals of LessWrong.
I think it’s quite bad if someone shows up to LessWrong and the first thing they see is someone asking them to donate money to them. I think it creates a much more epistemically adversarial environment than is healthy, and generally will make people (justifiedly) think that all the other content on the site is just there to sell you these organizations that want money from you. There are few things a website can do to make me trust them less than to ask me for money in the first few minutes of showing up.
Eliezer (I think) went through the same line of thinking with the original sequences, which is why he avoided talking about any organizational announcements or any requests for donations during the whole period in which he wrote the sequences. I think this was quite important and good for the site.
Organizational announcements can still get a lot of traction on people’s personal blog. Most people who have enough context to be interested in that kind of announcement have the personal blog filter for the frontpage turned off, so I think this doesn’t actually hurt organizations very much (and overall I think it creates an environment of higher trust in which people are much less likely to feel spammed or inundated by requests for donations and organizational announcements, which I think is overall better for communicating about projects and getting early-stage projects off the ground).
Edited to add:
Another major component for not having organizational announcements is our attempt at encouraging timeless content on LessWrong, and generally trying to disentangle LessWrong from news and other time-driven content. The vast majority of organizational announcements have almost no value when read a year or two after they were posted, and one of the goals of the frontpage/personal distinction is to create a space where content tries to be timeless and long-lasting.
That makes sense. Thanks for taking the time to answer.
Incidentally, anyone in this space trying to get a new initiative off the ground may want to apply to SurvivalAndFlourishing.org’s first funding round. (We’ll be providing funding, as well as
fiscal sponsorshipsome administrative support. Applications due by October 1st.)[Edited to clarify that we won’t provide full fiscal sponsorship. We will provide some administrative support via SEE (who is SAF’s fiscal sponsor). Project seeking long-term fiscal sponsorship may want to apply directly to SEE (perhaps after bootstrapping via SAF). See more details on our announcement page.]