We know there has been evaporation happening. So the question is… who left, and who stayed?
Well… Less Wrong is, well, boring. Nothing interesting is happening here.
Without interesting things happening, people won’t come see what’s going on. Without people coming to see what’s going on, nobody will want to write things for Less Wrong, because almost nobody will be around to read them. Without people writing things—well, nothing interesting is going to happen, because new things are a kind of interesting, and perhaps the only kind Less Wrong really allows.
There’s a bootstrapping problem. Eliezer bootstrapped Less Wrong the first time around, and the more prominent people from that era developed followings and reputations here, then, well, left, because they had more control elsewhere. Nobody stepped in to replace them; new interesting people, by and large, reach SSC (and its brethren blogs) and stop there.
But… SSC gets its biggest influxes in traffic when Scott Alexander talks about exactly those sorts of things we explicitly forbid talking about here—identity, politics, etc.
There’s a balancing act between talking about things people feel really strongly about—the things they’re mindkilled about—and never talking about anything interesting at all. The biggest drama I haven’t personally introduced is whether or not some guy who did something bad several years ago might still be hanging around under a new username.
But… SSC gets its biggest influxes in traffic when Scott Alexander talks about exactly those sorts of things we explicitly forbid talking about here—identity, politics, etc.
I am optimistic about Omnilibrium as a place with LWish norms where people can talk about politics and other ‘fun’ topics. I think this is also one of the reasons why I think I’m more bullish on the diaspora and people branding their own blogs than other people are—someone needs to have skilled hands before I endorse them talking about a touchy subject.
As much as I like Omnilibrium as a concept, there’s a lot of work needed to productize the site. A lot of the style is whitespace, there are boxes instead of icons (notably the bookmark icon), there’s no password reset (and the site barfed on my >20 character autogenerated password so that if I lose my current browser profile, I’m going to lose my account there), etc. But even worse, people didn’t move there en masse so the site was never bootstrapped.
I’m not convinced that the karma system as it exists today actually performs its desired task anymore because a good chunk of the voting seems to be done by the unquiet spirits. Back when I cared about karma here, it was because it reflected the opinions of people that I very much respected. I don’t feel that way anymore.
One possible[*] solution would be to port the Omnilibrium algorithm back to LessWrong, customizing the scoring for each user, but this might be a place where we should hold off proposing solutions.
[*] As in, “Well I suppose that’s technically possible, but...”
We know there has been evaporation happening. So the question is… who left, and who stayed?
Well… Less Wrong is, well, boring. Nothing interesting is happening here.
Without interesting things happening, people won’t come see what’s going on. Without people coming to see what’s going on, nobody will want to write things for Less Wrong, because almost nobody will be around to read them. Without people writing things—well, nothing interesting is going to happen, because new things are a kind of interesting, and perhaps the only kind Less Wrong really allows.
There’s a bootstrapping problem. Eliezer bootstrapped Less Wrong the first time around, and the more prominent people from that era developed followings and reputations here, then, well, left, because they had more control elsewhere. Nobody stepped in to replace them; new interesting people, by and large, reach SSC (and its brethren blogs) and stop there.
But… SSC gets its biggest influxes in traffic when Scott Alexander talks about exactly those sorts of things we explicitly forbid talking about here—identity, politics, etc.
There’s a balancing act between talking about things people feel really strongly about—the things they’re mindkilled about—and never talking about anything interesting at all. The biggest drama I haven’t personally introduced is whether or not some guy who did something bad several years ago might still be hanging around under a new username.
So… who left, and who stayed?
I am optimistic about Omnilibrium as a place with LWish norms where people can talk about politics and other ‘fun’ topics. I think this is also one of the reasons why I think I’m more bullish on the diaspora and people branding their own blogs than other people are—someone needs to have skilled hands before I endorse them talking about a touchy subject.
As much as I like Omnilibrium as a concept, there’s a lot of work needed to productize the site. A lot of the style is whitespace, there are boxes instead of icons (notably the bookmark icon), there’s no password reset (and the site barfed on my >20 character autogenerated password so that if I lose my current browser profile, I’m going to lose my account there), etc. But even worse, people didn’t move there en masse so the site was never bootstrapped.
I’m not convinced that the karma system as it exists today actually performs its desired task anymore because a good chunk of the voting seems to be done by the unquiet spirits. Back when I cared about karma here, it was because it reflected the opinions of people that I very much respected. I don’t feel that way anymore.
One possible[*] solution would be to port the Omnilibrium algorithm back to LessWrong, customizing the scoring for each user, but this might be a place where we should hold off proposing solutions.
[*] As in, “Well I suppose that’s technically possible, but...”