From my perspective, the dominant limitation on “a better version of wikipedia/forums” is not design, but instead network effects and getting the right people.
For instance, the limiting factor on LW being better is mostly which people regularly use LW, rather than any specific aspect of the site design.
I wish a bunch of people who are reasonable used LW to communicate more relative to other platforms.
Twitter/X sucks. If all potentially interesting content in making the future go well was cross posted to LW and mostly discussed on LW (as opposed to other places), this seems like a vast status quo improvement IMO.
I wish some people posted less as their comments/posts seem sufficiently bad that they are net negative.
(I think a decent amount of the problem is that a bunch of people don’t post of LW because they disagree with what seems to be the consensus on the website. See e.g. here. I think people are insufficiently appreciating a “be the change you want to see in the world” approach where you help to move the dominant conversation by participating.)
So, I would say “first solve the problem of making a version of LW which works well and has the right group of people”.
It’s possible that various aspects of more “wikipedia style” projects make the network effect issues less bad than LW, but I doubt it.
From my perspective, the dominant limitation on “a better version of wikipedia/forums” is not design, but instead network effects and getting the right people.
For instance, the limiting factor on LW being better is mostly which people regularly use LW, rather than any specific aspect of the site design.
I wish a bunch of people who are reasonable used LW to communicate more relative to other platforms.
Twitter/X sucks. If all potentially interesting content in making the future go well was cross posted to LW and mostly discussed on LW (as opposed to other places), this seems like a vast status quo improvement IMO.
I wish some people posted less as their comments/posts seem sufficiently bad that they are net negative.
(I think a decent amount of the problem is that a bunch of people don’t post of LW because they disagree with what seems to be the consensus on the website. See e.g. here. I think people are insufficiently appreciating a “be the change you want to see in the world” approach where you help to move the dominant conversation by participating.)
So, I would say “first solve the problem of making a version of LW which works well and has the right group of people”.
It’s possible that various aspects of more “wikipedia style” projects make the network effect issues less bad than LW, but I doubt it.