It seems worth at least checking what the requirements are for making meetups on LW good. The team did an initial “get them basically working at all” pass, and they’re about to benefit a bit from our subscriptions-overhaul (so getting notifications, email-notifications-in-particular) will become easier.
My guess is that there’s maybe a 1-3 months of work that’d be needed to get them generally as-good-as-facebook, which is nontrivial but definitely worth considering.
The one major thing going on FB that’s less easily portable is the sheer casualness (which includes the entire color scheme, portraits, focus on colorful reacts, etc. You might consider this good or bad.
Awhile ago we had talked about something like “www.social.lesswrong.com″ which might be as sub-site that’s just much more geared towards casualness, and is allowed to veer off in that direction without conflicting with the vague “minimalist respectability” theme we have going on in the main site.
1-3 months doesn’t seem so bad as a timeline. While it’s important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good (since projects like this can easily turn into a boondoggle where everyone quibbles endlessly about what the end-product should look like), I think it’s also worth a little bit of up-front effort to create something that we can improve upon later, rather than getting stuck with a mediocre solution permanently. (I imagine it’s difficult to migrate a social network to a new platform once it’s already gotten off the ground, the more so the more people have joined.)
Well, Raemon said it’s 1-3 months of work, but I’m a bit concerned that those 1-3 months might not start for another year or so, due to the LW team being busy as heck with a bunch of other priorities. I do agree that it’s worth putting real thought into this though, and not starting out on a platform just so we can start out, if it might end up being the case that we want to use a different platform later.
It seems worth at least checking what the requirements are for making meetups on LW good. The team did an initial “get them basically working at all” pass, and they’re about to benefit a bit from our subscriptions-overhaul (so getting notifications, email-notifications-in-particular) will become easier.
My guess is that there’s maybe a 1-3 months of work that’d be needed to get them generally as-good-as-facebook, which is nontrivial but definitely worth considering.
The one major thing going on FB that’s less easily portable is the sheer casualness (which includes the entire color scheme, portraits, focus on colorful reacts, etc. You might consider this good or bad.
Awhile ago we had talked about something like “www.social.lesswrong.com″ which might be as sub-site that’s just much more geared towards casualness, and is allowed to veer off in that direction without conflicting with the vague “minimalist respectability” theme we have going on in the main site.
1-3 months doesn’t seem so bad as a timeline. While it’s important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good (since projects like this can easily turn into a boondoggle where everyone quibbles endlessly about what the end-product should look like), I think it’s also worth a little bit of up-front effort to create something that we can improve upon later, rather than getting stuck with a mediocre solution permanently. (I imagine it’s difficult to migrate a social network to a new platform once it’s already gotten off the ground, the more so the more people have joined.)
Well, Raemon said it’s 1-3 months of work, but I’m a bit concerned that those 1-3 months might not start for another year or so, due to the LW team being busy as heck with a bunch of other priorities. I do agree that it’s worth putting real thought into this though, and not starting out on a platform just so we can start out, if it might end up being the case that we want to use a different platform later.
I’m interested in hearing about the specific things that seem necessary to get a sense of when and how to prioritize it, though