I had been a small-time LW regular for about 3 years and witnessed its decline until I stopped commenting a couple of months back. It was frustrating to see Eliezer, Yvain, Luke and others leave for other social media platforms, and even more to watch them fragment their writings further between personal blogs, FB, Reddit and tumblr. Not because it’s a wrong thing to do, just because it’s harder to follow and the commenting system is usually even worse than here. Well, except for Reddit. Without a strong leader charismatic emerging and willing to add quality content and drive the changes, I don’t expect any site redesign to revive this rather zombified forum. Or maybe if the forum is redesigned one would emerge, who knows. Chicken and egg.
Or maybe it should be a rationality-related aggregator/hub, where all relevant links get posted and discussed. So that one could see at a glance that Scott A posted something on his blog, Eliezer on tumbler, Brienne on Facebook, gwern on his site and someone else on twitter or reddit. All on one page. There are various sites like that around. With the ability to comment locally, or go to the source and discuss it there. Maybe even add linkbacks to this site.
I think the main thing that went wrong, is that not enough people saw it. It didn’t pick up critical mass, or even self-sustaining mass. Now, ESRogs seems to be the only submitter, and there’s not enough voting to act as a filter or to make links show up on my reddit front page.
But there’s nothing stopping it from becoming that thing, if a bunch of people did start using it all at once. To that end, I just submitted something.
If there’s going to be a single “hub” where links to rationalist stuff across the web gets posted, it seems like LW itself is a more obvious Schelling point than /r/RationalistDiaspora.
LW isn’t suitable as-is, I think. There’s more friction to submitting a link (you need to create a text post, put the link in there, and current norms dictate that you write a summary), more friction to following one (you need to click to the post, then click the link), and discussion is ordered by submission time and not votes. It’s like browsing /new on a subreddit that only allows self-posts.
It seems like it might be better to reduce that friction than to try to set up a completely different link-hub site somewhere else. LW’s codebase is basically a fork of reddit’s, IIRC; does that mean there could be a “Links” section (parallel to “Main” and “Discussion”, I guess) that behaves more like a typical subreddit?
(I have to say that on Reddit and HN I actually almost always prefer to go first to the local discussion rather than just following the external link—so I’m not so concerned about “more friction to following one [link]”. But that’s dependent on there usually being some local discussion.)
Perhaps. I’m not sure LW is the right place for it, especially while LW still has original content, and a culture that some find offputting.
Technically, Reddit is pretty customizable, in ways that I think would be difficult to migrate to LW. For example, suppose we wanted to implement Alicorn’s suggestion “granting OP some veto power about what sorts of comments and commenters are allowed under their post”.
On reddit, I think we can get a pretty good stab at it. Create some standard discussion norms, with wiki pages describing them. If someone submits a link with title starting [NO NRX], have automoderator assign it a specific piece of flair. Then use subreddit CSS to add some text prominently to the comments page, “discussion of neoreactionary ideas is forbidden in this thread”, linking to the wiki.
A developer could easily get something similar on LW. But I don’t think it would be so easy for a developer to copy the features of reddit which make a developer unnecessary.
Lesswrong is based on Reddit’s code. I would be easy to do that. Create a “link” section, and encourage people to post links there. Either to their own content, or others. I think this could work really well.
I had been a small-time LW regular for about 3 years and witnessed its decline until I stopped commenting a couple of months back. It was frustrating to see Eliezer, Yvain, Luke and others leave for other social media platforms, and even more to watch them fragment their writings further between personal blogs, FB, Reddit and tumblr. Not because it’s a wrong thing to do, just because it’s harder to follow and the commenting system is usually even worse than here. Well, except for Reddit. Without a strong leader charismatic emerging and willing to add quality content and drive the changes, I don’t expect any site redesign to revive this rather zombified forum. Or maybe if the forum is redesigned one would emerge, who knows. Chicken and egg.
Or maybe it should be a rationality-related aggregator/hub, where all relevant links get posted and discussed. So that one could see at a glance that Scott A posted something on his blog, Eliezer on tumbler, Brienne on Facebook, gwern on his site and someone else on twitter or reddit. All on one page. There are various sites like that around. With the ability to comment locally, or go to the source and discuss it there. Maybe even add linkbacks to this site.
Just my 2c.
(I haven’t RTFA or most of the comments yet.)
When ESRogs started /r/RationalistDiaspora, that’s what I was hoping it would become.
I think the main thing that went wrong, is that not enough people saw it. It didn’t pick up critical mass, or even self-sustaining mass. Now, ESRogs seems to be the only submitter, and there’s not enough voting to act as a filter or to make links show up on my reddit front page.
But there’s nothing stopping it from becoming that thing, if a bunch of people did start using it all at once. To that end, I just submitted something.
If there’s going to be a single “hub” where links to rationalist stuff across the web gets posted, it seems like LW itself is a more obvious Schelling point than /r/RationalistDiaspora.
LW isn’t suitable as-is, I think. There’s more friction to submitting a link (you need to create a text post, put the link in there, and current norms dictate that you write a summary), more friction to following one (you need to click to the post, then click the link), and discussion is ordered by submission time and not votes. It’s like browsing /new on a subreddit that only allows self-posts.
It seems like it might be better to reduce that friction than to try to set up a completely different link-hub site somewhere else. LW’s codebase is basically a fork of reddit’s, IIRC; does that mean there could be a “Links” section (parallel to “Main” and “Discussion”, I guess) that behaves more like a typical subreddit?
(I have to say that on Reddit and HN I actually almost always prefer to go first to the local discussion rather than just following the external link—so I’m not so concerned about “more friction to following one [link]”. But that’s dependent on there usually being some local discussion.)
Perhaps. I’m not sure LW is the right place for it, especially while LW still has original content, and a culture that some find offputting.
Technically, Reddit is pretty customizable, in ways that I think would be difficult to migrate to LW. For example, suppose we wanted to implement Alicorn’s suggestion “granting OP some veto power about what sorts of comments and commenters are allowed under their post”.
On reddit, I think we can get a pretty good stab at it. Create some standard discussion norms, with wiki pages describing them. If someone submits a link with title starting [NO NRX], have automoderator assign it a specific piece of flair. Then use subreddit CSS to add some text prominently to the comments page, “discussion of neoreactionary ideas is forbidden in this thread”, linking to the wiki.
A developer could easily get something similar on LW. But I don’t think it would be so easy for a developer to copy the features of reddit which make a developer unnecessary.
Lesswrong is based on Reddit’s code. I would be easy to do that. Create a “link” section, and encourage people to post links there. Either to their own content, or others. I think this could work really well.