What are you trying to improve on LW, and why? What is the purpose of improvements? What do you want LW to be like after you’ll apply them?
Personally, I’d want LW to be an effective tool in learning how to apply rationality, discussing rationality and rationality-related topics, and developing new rationality techniques. Every instrument has its purpose; if you want to study, say, math, isn’t it more effective to go to some math communities and seek help and assistance there? If you want to chat like in Facebook, why not go to Facebook? If you have a brilliant startup idea, why not go to the (potentially much broader) community of people interested in such kind of ideas? And so on.
The obvious, and very important, improvement is writing more high-quality posts on rationality-related topics, like the sequences.
The harder subsection mostly consists of technical improvements. Is it an actual bottleneck of LW, or our needs are mostly satisfied with nested comments?
On second thought, I think I may have overestimated the value of things like study partners and project collaboration. Personally, I just really value being able to do these things with other LW users. Inferential distance is one big reason. I sense that I’m not alone here, but I’m not sure.
In addition to these sorts of tangential things, I also would like to see the quality of posts and conversation on LW improve, and I think some of the other points I brought up would help address that.
The harder subsection mostly consists of technical improvements. Is it an actual bottleneck of LW, or our needs are mostly satisfied with nested comments?
Hmm, I don’t want to nitpick, but I’m struggling to answer this question because I don’t know how to interpret words like “bottleneck” and “satisfied”. I think that a more sophisticated UI could really transform how people think and communicate. As for how things are right now, I’d qualitatively describe it as “fine”. Maybe “mildly satisfying”.
What are you trying to improve on LW, and why? What is the purpose of improvements? What do you want LW to be like after you’ll apply them?
Personally, I’d want LW to be an effective tool in learning how to apply rationality, discussing rationality and rationality-related topics, and developing new rationality techniques. Every instrument has its purpose; if you want to study, say, math, isn’t it more effective to go to some math communities and seek help and assistance there? If you want to chat like in Facebook, why not go to Facebook? If you have a brilliant startup idea, why not go to the (potentially much broader) community of people interested in such kind of ideas? And so on.
The obvious, and very important, improvement is writing more high-quality posts on rationality-related topics, like the sequences.
The harder subsection mostly consists of technical improvements. Is it an actual bottleneck of LW, or our needs are mostly satisfied with nested comments?
[pollid:986]
Good points, thanks for bringing them up.
On second thought, I think I may have overestimated the value of things like study partners and project collaboration. Personally, I just really value being able to do these things with other LW users. Inferential distance is one big reason. I sense that I’m not alone here, but I’m not sure.
In addition to these sorts of tangential things, I also would like to see the quality of posts and conversation on LW improve, and I think some of the other points I brought up would help address that.
Hmm, I don’t want to nitpick, but I’m struggling to answer this question because I don’t know how to interpret words like “bottleneck” and “satisfied”. I think that a more sophisticated UI could really transform how people think and communicate. As for how things are right now, I’d qualitatively describe it as “fine”. Maybe “mildly satisfying”.