Yeah, I think the issue I mostly see here is that it’s not very clear how to get to those things if you’ve just stumbled upon the site. (In particular, I don’t know much at all how to find online hangouts. I think the site does a decent job of displaying meetups—if you live near a city and want to do any hanging out, I highly recommend going to a meetup. If you don’t live near a city, then yeah doing the slack/discord/irc is the best bet, but we could do a better job of making that obvious)
On Less Wrong itself, the Open Threads and Media Threads function as this sort of thing.
I also think “rationalist facebook” and “rationalist tumblr” are places where more informal discussion ends up happening.
Yeah, I think the issue I mostly see here is that it’s not very clear how to get to those things if you’ve just stumbled upon the site. (In particular, I don’t know much at all how to find online hangouts. I think the site does a decent job of displaying meetups—if you live near a city and want to do any hanging out, I highly recommend going to a meetup. If you don’t live near a city, then yeah doing the slack/discord/irc is the best bet, but we could do a better job of making that obvious)
On Less Wrong itself, the Open Threads and Media Threads function as this sort of thing.
I also think “rationalist facebook” and “rationalist tumblr” are places where more informal discussion ends up happening.