http://bleacherreport.com/ + http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ + http://seekingalpha.com/ are all part of the new wave of “forum blogs”. They don’t seem to take the LW approach of shaming people in to quality… instead, they seem to encourage the production of lots of content and then build filtration mechanisms on top of that. (IMHO, Less Wrong’s moderation is overly harsh and just having upvote/downvote buttons gets you 80% of the way there without encouraging your users to use them. But, others have told me that they get REALLY PISSED OFF when they see things on Less Wrong that seem stupid, to the point where just a few persistently wrong regulars can turn them off the site completely. This is an outlook I have a hard time empathizing with.)
I think the harshness of LW is related to the difficulty of the topics. Debating quantum physics is more difficult than debating sport news—less experts, more myths. (And we care about getting the correct result, where “correct” is defined as “corresponding to the territory”, not as “which makes my tribe happy”.)
http://bleacherreport.com/ + http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ + http://seekingalpha.com/ are all part of the new wave of “forum blogs”. They don’t seem to take the LW approach of shaming people in to quality… instead, they seem to encourage the production of lots of content and then build filtration mechanisms on top of that. (IMHO, Less Wrong’s moderation is overly harsh and just having upvote/downvote buttons gets you 80% of the way there without encouraging your users to use them. But, others have told me that they get REALLY PISSED OFF when they see things on Less Wrong that seem stupid, to the point where just a few persistently wrong regulars can turn them off the site completely. This is an outlook I have a hard time empathizing with.)
I think the harshness of LW is related to the difficulty of the topics. Debating quantum physics is more difficult than debating sport news—less experts, more myths. (And we care about getting the correct result, where “correct” is defined as “corresponding to the territory”, not as “which makes my tribe happy”.)