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)
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)