I initially had an extremely negative emotional response to this post. Then I realized you actually point out exactly why I had such a response with point number 2.
Less Wrong has a language problem.
To someone first coming to read the discussion forum with only a vague idea of what Less Wrong represents (maybe even slightly biased towards thinking of the community as an elitist cultish ivory tower exercise in intellectual masturbation), this post, to be short, doesn’t help.
What makes this sort of funny is that your actual message is just, “We want more high quality content producers.” which is completely harmless and the implicit goal of any fledgling online community aiming to grow. But you wrap this message in the exclusionary, “We want more smart people.”
I’d argue that you achieve both goals by just attracting more people to the community. Consider something like the sprawling Somethingawful forums. The only barrier to entry is $10.00, and there’s a thriving science and academics subforum.
Definitely remove the jargon. This would help on the cult side of things. And for pete’s sake, don’t go fishing for “Intellectual Elites”, just try and grow the community—elites will come in due time.
I’m a 2001-regged user on Something Awful and I recently quit entirely (after having been drifting away for a while) due to frustration with how irrational that place is. I don’t want LW to become like that.
Luke was asking for “high quality relatively general interest forums”. Somethingawful is damn near foundational as a general interest forum community, and has high quality, albeit niche subforums.
The point wasn’t that Lesswrong should be more like Somethingawful, the point was that attracting a larger user-base will incidentally achieve Luke’s goal.
I will admit that my knowledge of SA and its environment and culture is limited, but nothing I’ve seen would cause me to think of them as particularly “high quality”.
I will admit that my knowledge of SA and its environment and culture is limited, but nothing I’ve seen would cause me to think of them as particularly “high quality”.
I haven’t read the SA forums regularly in a while, but AFAIK they’re like Reddit: the good stuff’s tucked away in (some of) the lower traffic specialist subforums, while the more popular, general subforums naturally lie at the lowest common denominator level because of the sheer number of people reading & posting.
My webpages sometimes are linked on the SA forums (usually relating to either nootropics or Neon Genesis Evangelion; I’ve poked around the relevant threads looking for useful points or citations or criticism). Nothing about them ever made me think that the SA forums were unusually insightful or intelligent.
I initially had an extremely negative emotional response to this post. Then I realized you actually point out exactly why I had such a response with point number 2.
Less Wrong has a language problem.
To someone first coming to read the discussion forum with only a vague idea of what Less Wrong represents (maybe even slightly biased towards thinking of the community as an elitist cultish ivory tower exercise in intellectual masturbation), this post, to be short, doesn’t help.
What makes this sort of funny is that your actual message is just, “We want more high quality content producers.” which is completely harmless and the implicit goal of any fledgling online community aiming to grow. But you wrap this message in the exclusionary, “We want more smart people.”
I’d argue that you achieve both goals by just attracting more people to the community. Consider something like the sprawling Somethingawful forums. The only barrier to entry is $10.00, and there’s a thriving science and academics subforum.
Definitely remove the jargon. This would help on the cult side of things. And for pete’s sake, don’t go fishing for “Intellectual Elites”, just try and grow the community—elites will come in due time.
I’m a 2001-regged user on Something Awful and I recently quit entirely (after having been drifting away for a while) due to frustration with how irrational that place is. I don’t want LW to become like that.
Are you suggesting that LW should evolve towards something resembling SA? 8-0 That’s an… unusual idea.
Luke was asking for “high quality relatively general interest forums”. Somethingawful is damn near foundational as a general interest forum community, and has high quality, albeit niche subforums.
The point wasn’t that Lesswrong should be more like Somethingawful, the point was that attracting a larger user-base will incidentally achieve Luke’s goal.
I will admit that my knowledge of SA and its environment and culture is limited, but nothing I’ve seen would cause me to think of them as particularly “high quality”.
I don’t know what his goal is.
I haven’t read the SA forums regularly in a while, but AFAIK they’re like Reddit: the good stuff’s tucked away in (some of) the lower traffic specialist subforums, while the more popular, general subforums naturally lie at the lowest common denominator level because of the sheer number of people reading & posting.
My webpages sometimes are linked on the SA forums (usually relating to either nootropics or Neon Genesis Evangelion; I’ve poked around the relevant threads looking for useful points or citations or criticism). Nothing about them ever made me think that the SA forums were unusually insightful or intelligent.
This is why veteran SA goons never read the general discussion page. =)
SA is a good forum as long as you consider “Hey everybody look at this asshole!” a good style of argument.
With “asshole” generally defined as someone arguing unpopular positions.
Often it’s just people being stupid, and the approach works quite nicely. But then it’s also this pretty much every time someone does that.