Provide separate discussion areas (subreddits?) for geographic subcommunities.
Google Groups and Meetup.com are currently used for this purpose by some, but this is not the most elegant solution. It sprawls LW content beyond the main site, requires learning how to use different interfaces, and puts us at the mercy of outside companies. The possibility of karma would also encourage more discussion among these groups.
Originally this was a separate comment; it’s basically a rehash of childofbaud’s comment though, so I moved to a reply:
Much stronger meet-up integration. Mailing lists shouldn’t be offsite, they should be part of the site. Something like discussion section, but you put your location in as part of signing up, and gain access to a ‘Location’ section that operates the way that Discussion operates. Details are unimportant; the main part is that meet-ups need a more integrated system, the tools that meetup threads use (mailing lists, schedule-matching) need to be available on LessWrong, and being part of your geographically local group of LessWrongers needs to be opt-out, not opt-in.
I don’t disagree about the benefits of integration and improvements to meet-up threads, but opt out is a fairly obnoxious way to manage anything. I don’t see anything in those other benefits that requires (or even is improved by) opt out. I may be missing something though and am interested to hear why opt out improves them.
Any new arrangement should not be confined to one’s profile location—consider travellers wanting to see if there’s a meet-up coinciding with their travel.
The standard argument for opt-out is that it avoids the problem whereby newcomers don’t realize the option is there, which seems relatively salient in this case.
Especially if the “Make it go away please” option is clearly labeled, I’m content with opt-out (speaking as one of the uninterested folk).
Hmm. I agree re. utility of drawing newcomers’ attention to it. I’m still not sure opt-in is the best way to do that, when there are other measures that achieve this and bring other benefits (such as an improved “newcomer experience”—i.e. some kind of tutorial or page with suggestions) without any opt-out problems.
Put another way, if the goal is to draw newcomers’ attention to something, then actually drawing their attention to it seems to me a better approach.
FWIW I don’t feel strongly about participating in meet-ups either, but opt-out seems to be done wrong by so many organisations that I set the bar pretty high for what I’ll agree is a reasonable justification. When all the purported benefits of an opt-out arrangement don’t actually depend on it being opt-out, I am sceptical. :)
A “newcomer experience” or “how to use this site” kind of approach through which all the bells and whistles are explained, so they don’t have to be default-visible to get attention, seems like a fine thing. Upvoted that.
Provide separate discussion areas (subreddits?) for geographic subcommunities.
Google Groups and Meetup.com are currently used for this purpose by some, but this is not the most elegant solution. It sprawls LW content beyond the main site, requires learning how to use different interfaces, and puts us at the mercy of outside companies. The possibility of karma would also encourage more discussion among these groups.
Originally this was a separate comment; it’s basically a rehash of childofbaud’s comment though, so I moved to a reply:
Much stronger meet-up integration. Mailing lists shouldn’t be offsite, they should be part of the site. Something like discussion section, but you put your location in as part of signing up, and gain access to a ‘Location’ section that operates the way that Discussion operates. Details are unimportant; the main part is that meet-ups need a more integrated system, the tools that meetup threads use (mailing lists, schedule-matching) need to be available on LessWrong, and being part of your geographically local group of LessWrongers needs to be opt-out, not opt-in.
I don’t disagree about the benefits of integration and improvements to meet-up threads, but opt out is a fairly obnoxious way to manage anything. I don’t see anything in those other benefits that requires (or even is improved by) opt out. I may be missing something though and am interested to hear why opt out improves them.
Any new arrangement should not be confined to one’s profile location—consider travellers wanting to see if there’s a meet-up coinciding with their travel.
The standard argument for opt-out is that it avoids the problem whereby newcomers don’t realize the option is there, which seems relatively salient in this case.
Especially if the “Make it go away please” option is clearly labeled, I’m content with opt-out (speaking as one of the uninterested folk).
Hmm. I agree re. utility of drawing newcomers’ attention to it. I’m still not sure opt-in is the best way to do that, when there are other measures that achieve this and bring other benefits (such as an improved “newcomer experience”—i.e. some kind of tutorial or page with suggestions) without any opt-out problems.
Put another way, if the goal is to draw newcomers’ attention to something, then actually drawing their attention to it seems to me a better approach.
FWIW I don’t feel strongly about participating in meet-ups either, but opt-out seems to be done wrong by so many organisations that I set the bar pretty high for what I’ll agree is a reasonable justification. When all the purported benefits of an opt-out arrangement don’t actually depend on it being opt-out, I am sceptical. :)
Sure. And I endorse skepticism in general.
A “newcomer experience” or “how to use this site” kind of approach through which all the bells and whistles are explained, so they don’t have to be default-visible to get attention, seems like a fine thing. Upvoted that.