For me the annoying thing about LW is that it takes extremely long, usually forever, to change anything. You have a new idea? (Such as replacing “Main” and “Discussion” with something else.) You post it in Open Thread, and people agree? You post an article with a more detailed explanation, and many people upvote it? Guess what—most likely still not going to happen. :(
It’s not that we didn’t have good ideas in the past. We had many, most of them we never implemented. Maybe some of them would have improved things. We’ll never know. Why? Among other reasons, because Reddit codebase is a piece of crap. It would be probably better in long term to rewrite everything from scratch.
At this moment one idea resonates with me: “do one thing and do it well”. Identify the purposes that you want to be served. For each of them, build a separate, optimal solution. Link aggregator. Discussion forum. Community blog. Meetup organizer. Rationalist welcome page. Rationalist wiki. Give them all the same header, so people can easily link from here to there, and maybe even a single sign-on system.
For example, an optimal link aggregator would support tags, and filtering by tags; the main page would contain X recent entries with more than Y upvotes; the “show more” link would show all recent entries. An optimal discussion forum would support creating new topics, which is not the same as articles (each linked article could automatically spawn its own minidiscussion, but there should be some more general topics); I am not sure about details. Community blog would allow people to post articles (which would be automatically linked by the link aggregator) if a community of moderators agrees the articles are good enough (if they are not, no one else will know about them, so there is no public shame); maybe each article could have an optional “public draft” phase where people can suggest improvements. Etc.
Some more thoughts: The existing system already has some parts of what I suggest here, for example discussion system is separated from wiki system. And we do have a welcome page. I would like to see them better integrated; to have the buttons “About”, “Discussion” and “Wiki” as equal choices at the top. Plus a few more.
I imagine the “News” section should be separated from the “Discussion” section; they are interconnected, but they do not serve exactly the same purpose. There are article-oriented discussions, but there are also topic-oriented discussions, and periodical threads. On the other hand, the news section should contain both articles from here, and the articles from somewhere else (currently in the sidebar: rationality blogs). And there should also be a “Chat” section (more or less what Slack does today).
The “News” page would display 20 highest-rated links to articles (both here and on other websites) during the recent month or week. That would be the starting page of the website. A “show more” option would display all links, Reddit-style. Additionally, moderators could give a “promoted” flag to an article which would make it displayed on the title page regardless of its score; that would be used e.g. for the official MIRI/CFAR announcements. No need to separate “Main” and “Discussion” (and “rationality blogs”), they are simply “high karma or promoted” and “low karma”.
The “Discussion” starting page would be separated into three sections: (1) Article-related discussions. For any article displayed in the “News” section, whether from this website or another, a user could click a “start discussion” button, and a discussion linking to the article would be automatically created. This would be most similar to how we discuss now, except that we could in the same way discuss e.g. the SSC articles. (2) Periodic discussions, such as Open Thread, Media Thread, Rationality Diary, etc. There would be a fixed set of them; a new thread always replacing the old one. (3) Topic-oriented discussions that users could create without linking to any specific article, such as “University studying advice” or “Resources for programmers” or “Parenting”. These should be in general longer living than the article-specific debates.
The “Chat” page would contain a few channels, where people could communicate in real time.
The top menu would be approximately: “Welcome”, “News”, “Discussion”, “Chat”, “Meetups”, “Wiki”.
The “Welcome” page would actually be a read-only version of a section in wiki. The first page would contain a short explanation of the community and the website, and a link to the “Rationality A-Z” e-book (and other LW-related books, such as Bostrom’s “Superintelligence”).
One big change that I imagine would be having a team of pseudonymous moderators, whose actions would be completely transparent. They could do more or less anything, but there would be a “moderation log” where anyone could see all special actions they did. Each moderator would have a pseudonym different from their standard LW username, so people could debate possible moderator abuse without taking revenge on their regular contributions.
For me the annoying thing about LW is that it takes extremely long, usually forever, to change anything. You have a new idea? (Such as replacing “Main” and “Discussion” with something else.) You post it in Open Thread, and people agree? You post an article with a more detailed explanation, and many people upvote it? Guess what—most likely still not going to happen. :(
It’s not that we didn’t have good ideas in the past. We had many, most of them we never implemented. Maybe some of them would have improved things. We’ll never know. Why? Among other reasons, because Reddit codebase is a piece of crap. It would be probably better in long term to rewrite everything from scratch.
At this moment one idea resonates with me: “do one thing and do it well”. Identify the purposes that you want to be served. For each of them, build a separate, optimal solution. Link aggregator. Discussion forum. Community blog. Meetup organizer. Rationalist welcome page. Rationalist wiki. Give them all the same header, so people can easily link from here to there, and maybe even a single sign-on system.
For example, an optimal link aggregator would support tags, and filtering by tags; the main page would contain X recent entries with more than Y upvotes; the “show more” link would show all recent entries. An optimal discussion forum would support creating new topics, which is not the same as articles (each linked article could automatically spawn its own minidiscussion, but there should be some more general topics); I am not sure about details. Community blog would allow people to post articles (which would be automatically linked by the link aggregator) if a community of moderators agrees the articles are good enough (if they are not, no one else will know about them, so there is no public shame); maybe each article could have an optional “public draft” phase where people can suggest improvements. Etc.
Some more thoughts: The existing system already has some parts of what I suggest here, for example discussion system is separated from wiki system. And we do have a welcome page. I would like to see them better integrated; to have the buttons “About”, “Discussion” and “Wiki” as equal choices at the top. Plus a few more.
I imagine the “News” section should be separated from the “Discussion” section; they are interconnected, but they do not serve exactly the same purpose. There are article-oriented discussions, but there are also topic-oriented discussions, and periodical threads. On the other hand, the news section should contain both articles from here, and the articles from somewhere else (currently in the sidebar: rationality blogs). And there should also be a “Chat” section (more or less what Slack does today).
The “News” page would display 20 highest-rated links to articles (both here and on other websites) during the recent month or week. That would be the starting page of the website. A “show more” option would display all links, Reddit-style. Additionally, moderators could give a “promoted” flag to an article which would make it displayed on the title page regardless of its score; that would be used e.g. for the official MIRI/CFAR announcements. No need to separate “Main” and “Discussion” (and “rationality blogs”), they are simply “high karma or promoted” and “low karma”.
The “Discussion” starting page would be separated into three sections: (1) Article-related discussions. For any article displayed in the “News” section, whether from this website or another, a user could click a “start discussion” button, and a discussion linking to the article would be automatically created. This would be most similar to how we discuss now, except that we could in the same way discuss e.g. the SSC articles. (2) Periodic discussions, such as Open Thread, Media Thread, Rationality Diary, etc. There would be a fixed set of them; a new thread always replacing the old one. (3) Topic-oriented discussions that users could create without linking to any specific article, such as “University studying advice” or “Resources for programmers” or “Parenting”. These should be in general longer living than the article-specific debates.
The “Chat” page would contain a few channels, where people could communicate in real time.
The top menu would be approximately: “Welcome”, “News”, “Discussion”, “Chat”, “Meetups”, “Wiki”.
The “Welcome” page would actually be a read-only version of a section in wiki. The first page would contain a short explanation of the community and the website, and a link to the “Rationality A-Z” e-book (and other LW-related books, such as Bostrom’s “Superintelligence”).
One big change that I imagine would be having a team of pseudonymous moderators, whose actions would be completely transparent. They could do more or less anything, but there would be a “moderation log” where anyone could see all special actions they did. Each moderator would have a pseudonym different from their standard LW username, so people could debate possible moderator abuse without taking revenge on their regular contributions.