One of the times the issue of overidentifying with LW came up here, about a year ago, I mentioned that my self-description is “LW regular [forum participant]”. It means that I post regularly, but does not mean that I derive any sense of identity from it. “LWer” certainly sounds more like “this is my community”, so I stay away from using it except toward people who explicitly self-identify as such. I also tend to discount quite a bit of what someone here posts, once I notice them using the pronoun “we” when describing the community, unless I know for sure that they are not caught up in the sense of belonging to a group of cool “rationalists”.
I think the “LWer” appellation is just plain accurate (but then I’ve used the term myself). Any blog with a regular group of posters & commenters constitutes a community, so LW is a community. Posting here regularly makes us members of this community by default, and being coy about that fact would make me feel odd, given that we’ve strewn evidence of it all over the site. But I suspect I’m coming at this issue from a bit of an odd angle.
One of the times the issue of overidentifying with LW came up here, about a year ago, I mentioned that my self-description is “LW regular [forum participant]”. It means that I post regularly, but does not mean that I derive any sense of identity from it. “LWer” certainly sounds more like “this is my community”, so I stay away from using it except toward people who explicitly self-identify as such. I also tend to discount quite a bit of what someone here posts, once I notice them using the pronoun “we” when describing the community, unless I know for sure that they are not caught up in the sense of belonging to a group of cool “rationalists”.
I think the “LWer” appellation is just plain accurate (but then I’ve used the term myself). Any blog with a regular group of posters & commenters constitutes a community, so LW is a community. Posting here regularly makes us members of this community by default, and being coy about that fact would make me feel odd, given that we’ve strewn evidence of it all over the site. But I suspect I’m coming at this issue from a bit of an odd angle.