As someone who has organised meetups outside of the main hubs my experience matches pretty much everything said here. The current format is not ideal for accomplishing anything, so much so that I’ve stepped down from organising mine because they were providing so little value. It’s a sad state of affairs, but from what I can tell the majority are content with them being low-effort social groups.
In terms of coordinating between regional hubs I would suggest opting for LessWrong instead of Facebook. Many people simply won’t see the content due to either algorithms or newsfeed blockers plus Facebook no longer maintains the monopoly over everyone’s social calendar that it had just 2 years ago.
I would also like to register my opposition to using Facebook. While it might seem convenient in the short term, it makes the community more fragile by adding a centralized failure point that’s unaccountable to any of its members. Communicating on LessWrong.com has the virtue of it being owned by the same community that it serves.
I share a general opposition to Facebook. However, I’m not sure what would be a reasonable alternative. I’ve tried setting up Google Groups and Slacks for coordination of this type before, but those platforms have a bit of a ‘talking in a library’ problem—if they’re inactive, they generally remain inactive. There’s also the problem of needing to use a platform that people use all the time anyway. Slack is good for me, because I’m in multiple active Slack workspaces, but lots of people use it only for work or don’t want multiple workspaces. Google Groups are okay on this axis because they can go to people’s emails, but there’s some magic startup energy that needs to go into making a Google Group active, and I don’t know what it is (critical mass?).
As for the LW suggestion—I don’t feel that LessWrong currently has the infrastructure to support something similar to a Facebook group, and even if the LW team was willing to build something like that, they have dozens of other priorities. In addition, a lot of the groups I’m targeting identify as SlateStarCodex meetups and don’t have buy-in to LessWrong either as a platform or as a thing they want to identify with.
So, yes, I’m definitely open to alternatives to Facebook. I guess at this point a Google Group feels like the best option, but I’m not optimistic about it. Very open to continuing this conversation here or elsewhere.
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.
As someone who has organised meetups outside of the main hubs my experience matches pretty much everything said here. The current format is not ideal for accomplishing anything, so much so that I’ve stepped down from organising mine because they were providing so little value. It’s a sad state of affairs, but from what I can tell the majority are content with them being low-effort social groups.
In terms of coordinating between regional hubs I would suggest opting for LessWrong instead of Facebook. Many people simply won’t see the content due to either algorithms or newsfeed blockers plus Facebook no longer maintains the monopoly over everyone’s social calendar that it had just 2 years ago.
I would also like to register my opposition to using Facebook. While it might seem convenient in the short term, it makes the community more fragile by adding a centralized failure point that’s unaccountable to any of its members. Communicating on LessWrong.com has the virtue of it being owned by the same community that it serves.
I share a general opposition to Facebook. However, I’m not sure what would be a reasonable alternative. I’ve tried setting up Google Groups and Slacks for coordination of this type before, but those platforms have a bit of a ‘talking in a library’ problem—if they’re inactive, they generally remain inactive. There’s also the problem of needing to use a platform that people use all the time anyway. Slack is good for me, because I’m in multiple active Slack workspaces, but lots of people use it only for work or don’t want multiple workspaces. Google Groups are okay on this axis because they can go to people’s emails, but there’s some magic startup energy that needs to go into making a Google Group active, and I don’t know what it is (critical mass?).
As for the LW suggestion—I don’t feel that LessWrong currently has the infrastructure to support something similar to a Facebook group, and even if the LW team was willing to build something like that, they have dozens of other priorities. In addition, a lot of the groups I’m targeting identify as SlateStarCodex meetups and don’t have buy-in to LessWrong either as a platform or as a thing they want to identify with.
So, yes, I’m definitely open to alternatives to Facebook. I guess at this point a Google Group feels like the best option, but I’m not optimistic about it. Very open to continuing this conversation here or elsewhere.
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