As a counter-point, my day was made significantly better by the front page being nuked in 2020 - it was exciting, novel, hilarious (by my lights—clearly not to some people), made some excellent points about phishing and security, and gave me opportunities to dissect why people oriented to this event differently from me. I expect my experience would have been less good last year had the phishing attempt not happened, and we all simply coordinated. More generally, when a website does something unusual and novel like this, I feel like the value of novelty and interestingness can outweigh the costs of a single day of disrupted use?
I’d further argue that the people highly invested in this seem much more invested in the abstract ideas of trust, community, shared ritual and cohesion, more so than the object level of the frontpage being down (besides, people can always use greaterwrong.com )
I note that the feelings you describe are the underlying assumption which makes the risk real: if no one thought the consequences of pushing the button was entertaining or a learning opportunity, then no one would push the button, and the tension goes away.
As a counter-point, my day was made significantly better by the front page being nuked in 2020 - it was exciting, novel, hilarious (by my lights—clearly not to some people), made some excellent points about phishing and security, and gave me opportunities to dissect why people oriented to this event differently from me. I expect my experience would have been less good last year had the phishing attempt not happened, and we all simply coordinated. More generally, when a website does something unusual and novel like this, I feel like the value of novelty and interestingness can outweigh the costs of a single day of disrupted use?
I’d further argue that the people highly invested in this seem much more invested in the abstract ideas of trust, community, shared ritual and cohesion, more so than the object level of the frontpage being down (besides, people can always use greaterwrong.com )
I note that the feelings you describe are the underlying assumption which makes the risk real: if no one thought the consequences of pushing the button was entertaining or a learning opportunity, then no one would push the button, and the tension goes away.