There seem to be two related problems here: content discovery for old posts without a specific topic; and finding posts on specific topics.
For the former, Less Wrong currently has two mechanisms: the Sequences wiki articles, and http://lesswrong.com/top/ . Neither of these is entirely adequate. The Sequences wiki articles fail to mention some of the best content. /top/ is close, but it’s a feature that you can only use once; if you go back a second time, it works badly because you have to click Next a bunch of times before you get to something you haven’t already read. This seems fixable! It might be good if LW tracked which articles you’ve read, in a way that’s more reliable/persistent than browser history, and provided a feed of unread posts with a mix of new posts and highly-upvoted old posts.
There seem to be two related problems here: content discovery for old posts without a specific topic; and finding posts on specific topics.
For the former, Less Wrong currently has two mechanisms: the Sequences wiki articles, and http://lesswrong.com/top/ . Neither of these is entirely adequate. The Sequences wiki articles fail to mention some of the best content. /top/ is close, but it’s a feature that you can only use once; if you go back a second time, it works badly because you have to click Next a bunch of times before you get to something you haven’t already read. This seems fixable! It might be good if LW tracked which articles you’ve read, in a way that’s more reliable/persistent than browser history, and provided a feed of unread posts with a mix of new posts and highly-upvoted old posts.
It seems to me like tags are potentially a good solution here, so long as citizen-editors have the power to create tags and keep them orderly.