A couple years back I looked into one of those “designed from the ground up to be decentralized” facebook alternatives… and it was god-awful. And it wouldn’t have been all that hard for it to be at least “reasonable.”
I do think it’s legitimately hard to keep up with Facebook because it keeps improving, and then it’s legitimately hard to solve the coordination problem to switch. But it seems like at least one eccentric billionaire should be funding this sort of thing. (I guess they
But this seems like something you should be able to get an eccentric billionaire to fund to the point that it’s at least, like, Google Plus levels of good. (Okay, I guess we have one now maybe?)
Perhaps worth noting: a few years back, the hip intellectuals I know “knew” that blue screens were bad for you and invented/downloaded Flux, and it was discouraging that that was a weird hack you had to get for yourself. But, a few years later, that’s been rolled into official Apple Products, and iPhones now have some built in screen-time managing tools.
So I’m actually fairly optimistic about this working out, just… slowly enough that you’ll continuously be somewhat frustrated that the “obvious” things haven’t been implemented yet.
Perhaps worth noting: a few years back, the hip intellectuals I know “knew” that blue screens were bad for you and invented/downloaded Flux, and it was discouraging that that was a weird hack you had to get for yourself. But, a few years later, that’s been rolled into official Apple Products, and iPhones now have some built in screen-time managing tools.
Like, I believe that most of the problem is from the screen, and I never really had a strong opinion about eye-strain-in-particular. But… I find myself much more alert with blue light. I thought the mechanism was supposed to be circadian-rhythm based rather than fatigue based, which that article doesn’t discuss.
(The author also comes across as having a bit of a axe to grind about technology before bed, which is, like, a fair ax to want to grind, but makes me suspicious of the broader claim)
Wellll, I just signed up for wt.social and so far the interface and experience look terrible. It seems designed around sharing news articles, and that’s not very interesting or useful or better than Reddit. I would not call it at least google plus level of good.
I agree that it might take a large amount of funding to get something off the ground that has a chance of competing.
Honestly, I’d be pretty happy to see lesswrong shortform evolve more features rival facebook’s discussion space in some way. I’m not sure that’s actually the right direction, but I am saying I’m interesting in that direction.
I’ve definitely spent a bunch time about how to evolve LW shortform in this direction. One of the key things is that a lot of how FB works is to make things feel very low effort, and casual and fun. I don’t know that that would mix well with LessWrong, especially if it were trying to fill the void of “everyone and their grandmother are joining.”
There’s a bunch of obvious features to build to cover the basics (i.e. making it easier to subscribe to people’s shortform), that still fit easily within the LW aesthetic.
My guess is it’d be pretty reasonable to fork LessWrong for purposes of building a more explicitly social website, and that a lot of the infrastructure would be a good starting place.
I don’t want everyone and their grandmother to join, but I would like to see a lot more of the rationalist facebook content on LessWrong. Basically low-medium effort posts that abide by the spirit of truth-seeking norms. If I’m sharing memes I’ll do it somewhere else, but if I’m brainstorming about a nuclear winter hypothesis it would be cool to do it here.
One thing that felt a bit sad to me was that the schelling place (in my circles) to have smart conversations about covid-19 was a FB group. It seems like an achievable goal (but perhaps requires a few more features than we can easily develop quickly) for LW to be the best place on the internet to consolidated good discussion on that.
(we have a tag feature that isn’t quite ready for LW primetime, but has been partially rolled out to admins. You can actually check out a 2019-nCov tag page here. It’s still somewhat janky but I think could be workable without too much extra dev effort)
A couple years back I looked into one of those “designed from the ground up to be decentralized” facebook alternatives… and it was god-awful. And it wouldn’t have been all that hard for it to be at least “reasonable.”
I do think it’s legitimately hard to keep up with Facebook because it keeps improving, and then it’s legitimately hard to solve the coordination problem to switch. But it seems like at least one eccentric billionaire should be funding this sort of thing. (I guess they
But this seems like something you should be able to get an eccentric billionaire to fund to the point that it’s at least, like, Google Plus levels of good. (Okay, I guess we have one now maybe?)
Perhaps worth noting: a few years back, the hip intellectuals I know “knew” that blue screens were bad for you and invented/downloaded Flux, and it was discouraging that that was a weird hack you had to get for yourself. But, a few years later, that’s been rolled into official Apple Products, and iPhones now have some built in screen-time managing tools.
So I’m actually fairly optimistic about this working out, just… slowly enough that you’ll continuously be somewhat frustrated that the “obvious” things haven’t been implemented yet.
Off topic:
Apparently, like most else, this hasn’t replicated; https://news.osu.edu/blue-light-isnt-the-main-source-of-eye-fatigue-and-sleep-loss—its-your-computer/ .
Hmm. I… think I roll to disbelieve on this?
Like, I believe that most of the problem is from the screen, and I never really had a strong opinion about eye-strain-in-particular. But… I find myself much more alert with blue light. I thought the mechanism was supposed to be circadian-rhythm based rather than fatigue based, which that article doesn’t discuss.
(The author also comes across as having a bit of a axe to grind about technology before bed, which is, like, a fair ax to want to grind, but makes me suspicious of the broader claim)
I recently did a quick Google scholar search which convinced me of this, but was lazybwhen finding source for you :).
Google scholar search convinced me but totally ok to disbelieve. After all who is to say non-replications will replicate :).
Fair. Did the google scholar stuff include circadian rhythm stuff?
Wellll, I just signed up for wt.social and so far the interface and experience look terrible. It seems designed around sharing news articles, and that’s not very interesting or useful or better than Reddit. I would not call it at least google plus level of good.
I agree that it might take a large amount of funding to get something off the ground that has a chance of competing.
Honestly, I’d be pretty happy to see lesswrong shortform evolve more features rival facebook’s discussion space in some way. I’m not sure that’s actually the right direction, but I am saying I’m interesting in that direction.
I’ve definitely spent a bunch time about how to evolve LW shortform in this direction. One of the key things is that a lot of how FB works is to make things feel very low effort, and casual and fun. I don’t know that that would mix well with LessWrong, especially if it were trying to fill the void of “everyone and their grandmother are joining.”
There’s a bunch of obvious features to build to cover the basics (i.e. making it easier to subscribe to people’s shortform), that still fit easily within the LW aesthetic.
My guess is it’d be pretty reasonable to fork LessWrong for purposes of building a more explicitly social website, and that a lot of the infrastructure would be a good starting place.
I don’t want everyone and their grandmother to join, but I would like to see a lot more of the rationalist facebook content on LessWrong. Basically low-medium effort posts that abide by the spirit of truth-seeking norms. If I’m sharing memes I’ll do it somewhere else, but if I’m brainstorming about a nuclear winter hypothesis it would be cool to do it here.
One thing that felt a bit sad to me was that the schelling place (in my circles) to have smart conversations about covid-19 was a FB group. It seems like an achievable goal (but perhaps requires a few more features than we can easily develop quickly) for LW to be the best place on the internet to consolidated good discussion on that.
(we have a tag feature that isn’t quite ready for LW primetime, but has been partially rolled out to admins. You can actually check out a 2019-nCov tag page here. It’s still somewhat janky but I think could be workable without too much extra dev effort)