META: Meetup Overload
Does anyone else think we need a better way of dealing with meet-ups? I totally understand that meeting face to face is an (at least arguably) important next-step in the rationalist-community-building project, but the fact is the front page, which was originally for all the most content-rich, accessible, and noteworthy articles is now being filled with blurbs that are irrelevant to 95% of the readership.
I can see why these posts would need to be highly visible if the meetups are going to work at all, but I think we should get the ball rolling on figuring out a better way to handle location-specific posts. For example, mandatory-but-private location setting in your profile (at least to the country, possibly to the state/province/etc for larger areas), which would subscribe you (with opt-out available) to any happenings in that area. That’s just the first idea, like I said the idea is just to get the discussion going.
I really like the location idea, because of the potential to say “There are X other LW members within Y miles of you” or “There are Z other LW members in your metropolitan area.” If you see “wow, there are 100 members in [City]? If only 10% of us show up, that’s still a pretty nice group!” then you’re much more likely to start / have an interest in a meetup than if you’re just pinging empty space.
And, if you get people to join, seeing that number go up might be rather useful feedback.
Also, you don’t even need people to manually enter their locations. IP addresses are usually enough to narrow your location down to a city or metropolitan area, and we wouldn’t need much higher resolution than that.
The current popular non-event threads have not been promoted—for some reason.
It took me a while to notice the ghostly tabs on the front page.
Perhaps they should be a little higher contrast.
That being said, a meet-up tab might be a good idea.
Also, how hard would it be to have email notifications of meet-ups, possibly with an option for which meet-ups you want to know about?
How about a monthly meetup thread, in the main session, to include:
Recaps of meetups in the past month
Planning of future meetups / polling for “who’d be interested?”
This would declutter the front page while still making meetups proeminent enough so that most visitors would notice them.
And if a meetup (or “community” or “meta”) subreddit is made in whihc meetups are organized, there could still be a monthly summary thread in the main section.
So, I think the problem is that meet-up threads have sharply discontinuous value; hearing about Meetups in NY does me no benefit at all, whereas hearing about one in Oxford or London would be invaluable. Any given top level will be irrelivant for over 99% of the daily readers, but the utility from the few who turn out might well make high-prominence still the best option.
Some sort of automated system based on location could be better, but anything requiring coding should probably be rejected in favour of social solutions, ceteris paribus. Also, there’d be issues with people moving area.
I’ve been pondering this problem for about two months. In the short term, I think there is a clear solution, but one that requires a measure of coordination between meetup organizers and Eliezer (who is promoting the meetup articles to the front page, which I think is a very good thing to do, given the importance of F2F for building a community capable of truly generating and retaining novel, true, and useful ideas).
I think a good solution would be to have a single meetup announcement always on the front page, with a list of dates and locations with links into the commenting area above the cut. Then top level comments to the article should be created about each meetup with details about location/time/topic, these are the thing to link to from above the cut. Conversation about specific meetups should occur as child comments off of the top-level-meetup-announcing-comments.
The benefit here is that it keeps critical dates and locations in the public eye, using much less screen space, but with a low barrier to entry (clicking on the link to the relevant comment tree) to find out more. Another benefit is the social cohesion among organizers and meetup attendees that would be likely to form if their discussions took place closer to each other.
The policy should be spelled out in the wiki with lots of advice and help on setting up a meetup and a template for what information needs to be nailed down to announce one. Once someone gets involved in organizing meetups, we should have a mailing list for meetup organizers to talk about what works and what doesn’t.
There’s a risk that this general policy wouldn’t work, if fewer people see what they need to see in order to know that a meetup is happening that they want to attend. I would hesitate to change LW’s software until we have a socially functioning solution. When I have set up meetups in the past in different places around southern california, I was initially surprised that most of the attendees have not been major and highly visible posters… being a “power user” on the website does not seem to strongly predict whether someone will be a “power attender”...
If any other organizers think something in this ballpark is a good idea they should PM me. If two people do this I will unilaterally set up a mailing list for us (or they can set one up and I’ll join and promote it), then I will make sure that it is announced in a top level discussion article, and try to spur more discussion for a solution in the general ballpark of “more thinking and talking, less coding”.
Whatever happens, it will require buy-in from Eliezer, because it is his promotion policy plus the lack of a better venue for meetup organizers which is responsible for the front page having so many meetups in the first place. If non-policy-educated people start meetup articles and he promotes them, then all the organizing and software in the world would not fix the problem so that the front page was cleaner and more relevant to a web audience.
A possibility: have a sub-section of discussion or a sub-section of the main page just for meetups and related topics like planning, recaps of the meetup that you just attended, etc.
It took someone pointing out this discussion section to me for me to find it; visibility (particularly if your goal is community-building) seems pretty important. I suppose if you entitle the section “meetup” or something it might be more readily visible, but I know I’m much more likely to go to an Austin LW meetup if it is presented to me than if I need to go find it.
How about this:
By default, a user sees all Meetup announcements and other announcements of regional interests.
A user may edit their settings to turn hide regional announcements except those for regions they care about.
Regional announcements will include a link the the relevant settings page.
One potential issue is that if a region is added, interested users might not find out about if they have already opted out. If regions are added slowly, it could work to show users new regions by default even if they have opted out before.
Why not just enforce keeping meetup posts in the discussion area? I’ve always imagined that “casual” LW readers, who are pretty unlikely to go to a meetup and probably don’t even have an account here, tend to only read the front page, while people who actually post and have LW occupy a decent amount of their day are pretty likely to read the discussions too, and also are the kind of people who would care about a meetup. This does make it so that casual readers are less likely to be transformed into LW junkies, but I’m curious if the arrow of causality actually ever points that way in practice (attend meetup → start participating in discussion area).
Are there any specific examples of people only casually reading LW, then attending a meetup, then starting to participate much more? Or is everyone who cares about meetups already a regular participant in discussions?