So what features would this have? HN and other blogs basically just have link posts, text posts and comment threads for each post.
The largest problem (and/or existential threat) I can see with LW is its stagnation/decline, both in content, and in new insights generated here.
I haven’t been around long enough to agree or disagree with this, but I could believe it. You say you’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about this. What do you think of things other than just aggregating content from similar sites? I sense that there are opportunities for some larger more fundamental changes. Some ideas:
Increasing offline interaction (making it easy for LW users to room with each other, get rationality clubs set up in colleges, have hack-a-thons...)
Encouraging more brainstorming. Right now I think people are hesitant to start a conversation unless they have pretty refined and insightful thoughts.
Better categorize things. To use an example, I think there would be more talk about life hacks if there was a life hacks section and there was a list of useful life hacks maintained by the community.
the problem is that these suggestions have orders of magnitude higher cost of implementation. This is further compounded by the fact that 1. LW uses a fork of the reddit codebase, which was not built with modification in mind, and 2. the fact that the owners of LW are (a) hard to engage in a conversation about changes and (b) even harder to get them to actually apply it.
The suggestion I made above suffers from none of these, and is technically implementable in a weekend (tops) by a single developer—me. Whether it will be successful or not is a different story.
All in all I share your sense that this community is not nearly as optimally organised as it could to be, given the subject matter. Unfortunately we seem stuck in a local maxima of organisation.
Regarding cost of implementation, 1) I’ll probably be willing to work on it and 2) I sense that the benefits far outweigh the costs, and that we’ll be able to get people to work on it. Especially if it’s well thought out and some nice mockups are made that are convincing.
Regarding the owners of LW being reluctant to change, I don’t know much about this issue so it’s tough to say, but I sense that 1) if we get enough community support, they’ll be pretty likely to go along with it and 2) I would think that they’re smart enough to see the benefits would be large and if volunteers like me (and you?) would be willing to work on it, the costs could be pretty small.
Consider the fact that many, many programmers frequent LW. It’s quite likely the majority of members know how to program a computer, and most of them have a very high level of skill. Despite this, contributions to LW’s codebase have been minimal over the life of this website. I take this as extremely strong evidence that the friction to getting any change through is very, very high.
I don’t want to propose any solutions because I don’t understand what the source of the friction truly is. If you understand the real sources of friction, could you explain it in some more depth?
I sense that the lack of contribution to the codebase is because it’s inconvenient, not necessarily difficult. It seems that it’s inconvenient for the reasons you said: 1) the reddit fork is hard to modify and 2) the site owners are reluctant to change.
But I also sense that the proposed features aren’t too difficult to implement (because they’re relatively common) and that a handful of skilled volunteers could get it done in a few weeks (very rough estimate; I’m way too inexperienced to really say, but I do sense that it’s very doable). Perhaps it wouldn’t be compatible with the reddit codebase and it’d take a major overhaul.
But I really think the benefits would outweigh the costs. The costs would be a few weeks of a handful of programmers’ time (or something like that, I don’t really know). The benefits would be huge! Imagine LW users collaborating on new projects, brainstorming new ideas, contributing to and benefiting from the list of life hacks, studying together, having hack-a-thons, rooming together, having more productive discussions, summarizing the content to make it more accessible to common people etc. etc. Isn’t that worth a few weeks of time from a handful of people? Even if only one or two projects emerged from the site overhaul, I think the benefits would outweigh the costs.
Sorry if my argument for why the benefits outweigh the costs isn’t concrete enough. I tried.
I admire your optimism and determination. It’s not my intention to convince you not to try. Even if you don’t succeed, and it’s not impossible that you could succeed, you will certainly get a lot out of it. So take my negativity as a challenge, and prove me wrong :).
Thanks for the encouragement! Would you mind offering your opinion on a few things though?
How many people would a complete overhaul take, and how long would it take (roughly)?
Why are the site owners reluctant to change?
What do you think of my rough cost-benefit argument? The things I said are my intuition, but I could easily be overlooking certain things, and I don’t understand it well enough to be too confident in the intuition. So what do you think? (you seem to share the belief in the value of the benefits, but don’t seem to think they outweigh the costs)
Also, I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up about my contributions. I’m still learning to code and I don’t know how good I’ll be in 13 weeks when I finish my bootcamp and I can’t tell how long it’ll be before I’m capable enough to contribute to something like this.
I don’t know, I haven’t done the effort estimation. It just looks like more than I’d be willing to put in.
One hypothesis is that LessWrong.com is a low priority item to them, but they like having it around, so they are averse to putting in the required amount of thought to evaluate a change, and inclined to leave things as they are.
I think it is unlikely it will have as much benefit as you expect, and that the pain will be bigger than you expect. However, if you add the fact that your drive may help you learn to program, then the ROI tips the other way massively.
By the way, an alternative explanation for the fact that so many developers are here but so few (or none) actually contribute to LW code, is that they’re busy making lots of money or working on other things they find exciting. This is good news for you, because making the changes may be easier than I originally estimated. As long as you are determined enough.
I think a core reason is intransparency of how to contribute changes. You don’t know who you have to convince to chance something so most people don’t even try.
So what features would this have? HN and other blogs basically just have link posts, text posts and comment threads for each post.
I haven’t been around long enough to agree or disagree with this, but I could believe it. You say you’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about this. What do you think of things other than just aggregating content from similar sites? I sense that there are opportunities for some larger more fundamental changes. Some ideas:
Increasing offline interaction (making it easy for LW users to room with each other, get rationality clubs set up in colleges, have hack-a-thons...)
Rethinking the simple threaded comments system. Here’s my raw thoughts—http://lesswrong.com/lw/jr4/a_medium_for_more_rational_discussion/.
Encouraging more brainstorming. Right now I think people are hesitant to start a conversation unless they have pretty refined and insightful thoughts.
Better categorize things. To use an example, I think there would be more talk about life hacks if there was a life hacks section and there was a list of useful life hacks maintained by the community.
etc. etc.
the problem is that these suggestions have orders of magnitude higher cost of implementation. This is further compounded by the fact that 1. LW uses a fork of the reddit codebase, which was not built with modification in mind, and 2. the fact that the owners of LW are (a) hard to engage in a conversation about changes and (b) even harder to get them to actually apply it.
The suggestion I made above suffers from none of these, and is technically implementable in a weekend (tops) by a single developer—me. Whether it will be successful or not is a different story.
All in all I share your sense that this community is not nearly as optimally organised as it could to be, given the subject matter. Unfortunately we seem stuck in a local maxima of organisation.
Do they have to be nagged to merge pull requests or what?
Ahh, I see.
Regarding cost of implementation, 1) I’ll probably be willing to work on it and 2) I sense that the benefits far outweigh the costs, and that we’ll be able to get people to work on it. Especially if it’s well thought out and some nice mockups are made that are convincing.
Regarding the owners of LW being reluctant to change, I don’t know much about this issue so it’s tough to say, but I sense that 1) if we get enough community support, they’ll be pretty likely to go along with it and 2) I would think that they’re smart enough to see the benefits would be large and if volunteers like me (and you?) would be willing to work on it, the costs could be pretty small.
Consider the fact that many, many programmers frequent LW. It’s quite likely the majority of members know how to program a computer, and most of them have a very high level of skill. Despite this, contributions to LW’s codebase have been minimal over the life of this website. I take this as extremely strong evidence that the friction to getting any change through is very, very high.
I don’t want to propose any solutions because I don’t understand what the source of the friction truly is. If you understand the real sources of friction, could you explain it in some more depth?
I sense that the lack of contribution to the codebase is because it’s inconvenient, not necessarily difficult. It seems that it’s inconvenient for the reasons you said: 1) the reddit fork is hard to modify and 2) the site owners are reluctant to change.
But I also sense that the proposed features aren’t too difficult to implement (because they’re relatively common) and that a handful of skilled volunteers could get it done in a few weeks (very rough estimate; I’m way too inexperienced to really say, but I do sense that it’s very doable). Perhaps it wouldn’t be compatible with the reddit codebase and it’d take a major overhaul.
But I really think the benefits would outweigh the costs. The costs would be a few weeks of a handful of programmers’ time (or something like that, I don’t really know). The benefits would be huge! Imagine LW users collaborating on new projects, brainstorming new ideas, contributing to and benefiting from the list of life hacks, studying together, having hack-a-thons, rooming together, having more productive discussions, summarizing the content to make it more accessible to common people etc. etc. Isn’t that worth a few weeks of time from a handful of people? Even if only one or two projects emerged from the site overhaul, I think the benefits would outweigh the costs.
Sorry if my argument for why the benefits outweigh the costs isn’t concrete enough. I tried.
I admire your optimism and determination. It’s not my intention to convince you not to try. Even if you don’t succeed, and it’s not impossible that you could succeed, you will certainly get a lot out of it. So take my negativity as a challenge, and prove me wrong :).
Thanks for the encouragement! Would you mind offering your opinion on a few things though?
How many people would a complete overhaul take, and how long would it take (roughly)?
Why are the site owners reluctant to change?
What do you think of my rough cost-benefit argument? The things I said are my intuition, but I could easily be overlooking certain things, and I don’t understand it well enough to be too confident in the intuition. So what do you think? (you seem to share the belief in the value of the benefits, but don’t seem to think they outweigh the costs)
Also, I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up about my contributions. I’m still learning to code and I don’t know how good I’ll be in 13 weeks when I finish my bootcamp and I can’t tell how long it’ll be before I’m capable enough to contribute to something like this.
I don’t know, I haven’t done the effort estimation. It just looks like more than I’d be willing to put in.
One hypothesis is that LessWrong.com is a low priority item to them, but they like having it around, so they are averse to putting in the required amount of thought to evaluate a change, and inclined to leave things as they are.
I think it is unlikely it will have as much benefit as you expect, and that the pain will be bigger than you expect. However, if you add the fact that your drive may help you learn to program, then the ROI tips the other way massively.
By the way, an alternative explanation for the fact that so many developers are here but so few (or none) actually contribute to LW code, is that they’re busy making lots of money or working on other things they find exciting. This is good news for you, because making the changes may be easier than I originally estimated. As long as you are determined enough.
I think a core reason is intransparency of how to contribute changes. You don’t know who you have to convince to chance something so most people don’t even try.
Ok, thanks for your input! I’ll have to do more research and brainstorming into how much benefit it really would have.