I approach Less Wrong et al mostly from the Grey Tribe Social Club and community clearinghouse perspective. In that sense, I see four things we get from Less Wrong that we do not get from the disapora:
A central social arena for what SSC refers to as the Grey Tribe. Nerds, aspiring rationalists, political cynics, probably some other things I haven’t thought of, unified mostly by dispassionate discussion and valuing truth for its own sake. The disapora fails at this because the communities on individual blogs are only thinly connected by the occasional inter-blog link. There is much more There there, than is apparent to someone who discovers the community through a single blog.
Shared infrastructure that lowers trivial inconveniences to entry. Someone who wants to make a long point can do it here without needing to run their own blog.
Shared audience. This is more important than I think it’s given credit for. You can start a new blog, but unless you plan on also going out of your way to market it then your chances of starting a discussion boil down to “hope it catches the attention of Yvain or someone else similarly prominent in the community.” Here, you can write something on topics of mutual interest and have a reasonable shot at getting it read, without having to first establish yourself individually. Note that as I understand it (someone correct me if I’m wrong) most of the diaspora personages we’re actually aware of got their audience here first.
Community safety net. If Yvain gets hit by a car tomorrow, the SSC community disintegrates shortly thereafter as commenters move to their next-most-favored authors, which won’t necessarily match.
I’m from an IT background, so I will also discuss technology. There’s two technical problems you mention. The first is aggregation of the work of diaspora authors; right now, all we have is links on the sidebar and author links to each other. This actually seems like the simplest problem to solve. I’m pretty sure everybody’s blog software provides an RSS feed. Just configure them to provide full text, and display that on Less Wrong as a feed alongside Main and Discussion. Call it Diaspora or something. This does, admittedly, require cooperation from the owners; my intuition is that it would be easier to get in this community than most others.
But that doesn’t solve the greater difficulty, aggregation of comments. Even if we publish an aggregated feed of all known LW authors, and also allow posts on LW itself for people who don’t have their own blog, we still end up with N+1 disconnected communities.
Normally I’d say “everybody come back to LW and post here”, but 1. that’s not going to happen; people like owning their own gardens; and 2. you rightly point out that it benefits authors to have fuller control over their publishing environment. So there’s a divide here between what’s useful to authors and useful to the community.
The problem we’re actually trying to solve is community aggregation. We want individual homes for authors, but we also want a town square for residents and visiting speakers.
So I’m going to step to the side and bring something out here...
Anyone who follows SSC comment subthreads complaining about crappy commenting features will know what I’m going to say next.
Distributed discussion is a solved problem, and the solution is not Disqus or anything like it. The solution is called NNTP, and it has been around since approximately forever. It is currently mostly unused because no one has written (or, perhaps, popularized) a good web frontend for it; and today, the web is the Internet in most users’ eyes. It does not have all possible good features (in particular, it does not have a voting system, although it could probably be kludged in), but given the number of times I’ve answered feature complaints with some variant of “you know, somebody implemented something that does that 20 years ago, but no one uses it”, I am guessing it has enough.
So my personal solution is: Start a rationalist Usenet, with NNTP providing the backend and blogging software acting as a client. Each diaspora author gets a top-level group tree, within which groups are moderated by them. “blogs” are effectively frontends to the tree, presenting the local author’s work as top-level posts and comments as replies. Less wrong collects posts from friendly authors using NNTP’s existing mechanisms for distributing posts, but is only responsible for moderating within its own top-level tree, provided for general discussion and non-blog-owners (and as a sort of meta-moderator). Effectively, NNTP is now the database the site reads from. Only you don’t necessarily need the site to read it; power users who want better efficiency can use all the power of existing nntp clients.
This solution does require blog authors to use blogging software that accepts NNTP as a post/comment backend. However, I think it is an easier problem to convince a few dozen authors to do this (and to write such a frontend if necessary) than a few thousand readers to switch to non-web clients for anything. A web interface is necessary for any such plan anyway; in today’s world, if Google doesn’t index it, it doesn’t exist.
We’re a heavily tech-slanted community. There ought to be enough technical expertise here to pull such a thing off.
And while I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony.
(Now that I’ve reached the bottom of my comment, I’m thinking of writing this up in further detail, as a full post, to describe exactly how such a plan could be implemented and solve technical and coordination problems—note that my proposition above could be adopted incrementally, which is important to the latter issue. I’ve never presented a full argument to a non-old-timer audience and I don’t know how convincing it would be. I’d rather get a sense of initial reactions first, though, and I’ve already spent more time on this post than my employer would probably approve of.)
I’m pretty sure everybody’s blog software provides an RSS feed. Just configure them to provide full text, and display that on Less Wrong as a feed alongside Main and Discussion.
This doesn’t work very well. Especially on tumblr, a lot of blogs have some rationalist content and lots of non-rationalist content. An aggregator that didn’t include anything from The Unit of Caring would be sorely lacking, but one that included her entire tumblr feed would be overinclusive. And she doesn’t even use that blog for cute animal pictures.
Tags might solve most of this: in this case, the craft and the community would capture a lot of the relevant stuff. In general, people could choose a specific tag for “include this on the diaspora feed”. If the platform doesn’t support tag-specific RSS, the aggregation software could do the filtering.
But there’s another problem, that tumblr’s rss feeds are shit. When I followed Scott’s, it would occasionally attribute things to him which he was replying to, and not show his reply. (Or maybe not that exactly, but something along those lines.)
And yet another problem, that even after filtering for rationalist content, there is just too damn much of it. It needs curation.
Feed filtering is policy, not mechanism; as you say, tags for inclusion provide an acceptable way to manage this and very light on the diasporists. A curated feed alongside it (akin to Promoted) would work well too, provided someone’s willing to do so.
The issue with tumblr’s RSS feeds is mechanism, though. That’s the layer I so desperately want to burn down because it is legitimately full of Fail. Reply reference chains are currently broken almost everywhere on the Internet. But not because they can’t be done well.
Note that as I understand it (someone correct me if I’m wrong) most of the diaspora personages we’re actually aware of got their audience here first.
It’s certainly true that most of the disapora personages that LWers are familiar with got their audience here first, but I think that’s a selection effect.
I approach Less Wrong et al mostly from the Grey Tribe Social Club and community clearinghouse perspective. In that sense, I see four things we get from Less Wrong that we do not get from the disapora:
A central social arena for what SSC refers to as the Grey Tribe. Nerds, aspiring rationalists, political cynics, probably some other things I haven’t thought of, unified mostly by dispassionate discussion and valuing truth for its own sake. The disapora fails at this because the communities on individual blogs are only thinly connected by the occasional inter-blog link. There is much more There there, than is apparent to someone who discovers the community through a single blog.
Shared infrastructure that lowers trivial inconveniences to entry. Someone who wants to make a long point can do it here without needing to run their own blog.
Shared audience. This is more important than I think it’s given credit for. You can start a new blog, but unless you plan on also going out of your way to market it then your chances of starting a discussion boil down to “hope it catches the attention of Yvain or someone else similarly prominent in the community.” Here, you can write something on topics of mutual interest and have a reasonable shot at getting it read, without having to first establish yourself individually. Note that as I understand it (someone correct me if I’m wrong) most of the diaspora personages we’re actually aware of got their audience here first.
Community safety net. If Yvain gets hit by a car tomorrow, the SSC community disintegrates shortly thereafter as commenters move to their next-most-favored authors, which won’t necessarily match.
I’m from an IT background, so I will also discuss technology. There’s two technical problems you mention. The first is aggregation of the work of diaspora authors; right now, all we have is links on the sidebar and author links to each other. This actually seems like the simplest problem to solve. I’m pretty sure everybody’s blog software provides an RSS feed. Just configure them to provide full text, and display that on Less Wrong as a feed alongside Main and Discussion. Call it Diaspora or something. This does, admittedly, require cooperation from the owners; my intuition is that it would be easier to get in this community than most others.
But that doesn’t solve the greater difficulty, aggregation of comments. Even if we publish an aggregated feed of all known LW authors, and also allow posts on LW itself for people who don’t have their own blog, we still end up with N+1 disconnected communities.
Normally I’d say “everybody come back to LW and post here”, but 1. that’s not going to happen; people like owning their own gardens; and 2. you rightly point out that it benefits authors to have fuller control over their publishing environment. So there’s a divide here between what’s useful to authors and useful to the community.
The problem we’re actually trying to solve is community aggregation. We want individual homes for authors, but we also want a town square for residents and visiting speakers.
So I’m going to step to the side and bring something out here...
/Error exits stage right, returns pushing small wooden horse labeled “hobby”/
Anyone who follows SSC comment subthreads complaining about crappy commenting features will know what I’m going to say next.
Distributed discussion is a solved problem, and the solution is not Disqus or anything like it. The solution is called NNTP, and it has been around since approximately forever. It is currently mostly unused because no one has written (or, perhaps, popularized) a good web frontend for it; and today, the web is the Internet in most users’ eyes. It does not have all possible good features (in particular, it does not have a voting system, although it could probably be kludged in), but given the number of times I’ve answered feature complaints with some variant of “you know, somebody implemented something that does that 20 years ago, but no one uses it”, I am guessing it has enough.
So my personal solution is: Start a rationalist Usenet, with NNTP providing the backend and blogging software acting as a client. Each diaspora author gets a top-level group tree, within which groups are moderated by them. “blogs” are effectively frontends to the tree, presenting the local author’s work as top-level posts and comments as replies. Less wrong collects posts from friendly authors using NNTP’s existing mechanisms for distributing posts, but is only responsible for moderating within its own top-level tree, provided for general discussion and non-blog-owners (and as a sort of meta-moderator). Effectively, NNTP is now the database the site reads from. Only you don’t necessarily need the site to read it; power users who want better efficiency can use all the power of existing nntp clients.
This solution does require blog authors to use blogging software that accepts NNTP as a post/comment backend. However, I think it is an easier problem to convince a few dozen authors to do this (and to write such a frontend if necessary) than a few thousand readers to switch to non-web clients for anything. A web interface is necessary for any such plan anyway; in today’s world, if Google doesn’t index it, it doesn’t exist.
We’re a heavily tech-slanted community. There ought to be enough technical expertise here to pull such a thing off.
And while I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony.
(Now that I’ve reached the bottom of my comment, I’m thinking of writing this up in further detail, as a full post, to describe exactly how such a plan could be implemented and solve technical and coordination problems—note that my proposition above could be adopted incrementally, which is important to the latter issue. I’ve never presented a full argument to a non-old-timer audience and I don’t know how convincing it would be. I’d rather get a sense of initial reactions first, though, and I’ve already spent more time on this post than my employer would probably approve of.)
This doesn’t work very well. Especially on tumblr, a lot of blogs have some rationalist content and lots of non-rationalist content. An aggregator that didn’t include anything from The Unit of Caring would be sorely lacking, but one that included her entire tumblr feed would be overinclusive. And she doesn’t even use that blog for cute animal pictures.
Tags might solve most of this: in this case, the craft and the community would capture a lot of the relevant stuff. In general, people could choose a specific tag for “include this on the diaspora feed”. If the platform doesn’t support tag-specific RSS, the aggregation software could do the filtering.
But there’s another problem, that tumblr’s rss feeds are shit. When I followed Scott’s, it would occasionally attribute things to him which he was replying to, and not show his reply. (Or maybe not that exactly, but something along those lines.)
And yet another problem, that even after filtering for rationalist content, there is just too damn much of it. It needs curation.
Feed filtering is policy, not mechanism; as you say, tags for inclusion provide an acceptable way to manage this and very light on the diasporists. A curated feed alongside it (akin to Promoted) would work well too, provided someone’s willing to do so.
The issue with tumblr’s RSS feeds is mechanism, though. That’s the layer I so desperately want to burn down because it is legitimately full of Fail. Reply reference chains are currently broken almost everywhere on the Internet. But not because they can’t be done well.
Huh. This got a more positive reception than I expected. Maybe I’ll do a more thorough writeup after all.
It’s certainly true that most of the disapora personages that LWers are familiar with got their audience here first, but I think that’s a selection effect.
I made an off-the-cuff list of people who strike me as notable in the diaspora, rot13ed in case people want to make their own lists and compare.
Ba Ghzoye: Fpbgg, Bml, Abfgnytroenvfg, Puevf Unyydhvfg, Gur Havg bs Pnevat, Tehagyrq naq Uvatrq. Ba snprobbx: Ryvmre, Oevraar, Ebo Jvoyva.
Of whom, I think 3⁄9 first had an audience here.