As has been discussedelsewhere, Less Wrong is currently fairly unapproachable to newbies. In particular, the learning curve is ridiculously steep. People who have read a few posts are told, in effect, to read the entire archives[TVTropes] before commenting.
Suppose there were a separate discussion area dedicated specifically to those who are just starting out, or perhaps who have taken a few of the first steps down the road. When posting there, it would be considered poor etiquette to expect others to have read later material, like expecting fourth-graders to know trigonometry, or high school graduates to be able to read Feynman diagrams. Ideally there would be a series of tiers of discussion, so that people can learn the material interactively, like in a classroom, rather than doing the equivalent of shutting themselves in a closet with a textbook.
In order to motivate people, of course, we should lock up the higher-level discussion areas behind tests of merit. We should also think of some sort of standard miracles people can do to publicly demonstrate their Level Six superpowers.
Secret discussion areas don’t scale. All you need is one defector (me) and everyone knows the secrets. A newbie area or a “let’s read the sequences” thread would be handy. A delayed RSS feed of the sequences would also be nice.
Hopefully community norms can be upheld with a thorough karma beating; downvoted. (This requires, of course, that the community in fact disapproves of spoilers.)
It is a fact of life on the Internet that there will always be spoilers available to any puzzle or story that someone has finished.
Trying to stop them from appearing is foolish; all you can do is put forth your best effort to encourage readers to refrain from scrolling down (and for this particular post your encouragement was quite weak, to put it mildly).
In a “real” implementation, what’s on the other side of the door would be not just a static text that can be reposted, but an ongoing living discussion. Then the locks can just be changed.
And yes, I did it badly. I might try to fix the implementation at some point. Do you think that should be an edit to this post, or an entirely new post, or the idea outright abandoned?
It’s hardly a spoiler. You are not telling an exciting story with a twist ending. You’re just suggesting to lock up parts of the community and test people before they get in. At worst, it’s a puzzle solution, and not to a particularly interesting puzzle.
I spent more time figuring out gpg than guessing the password. Now to save everyone else the time and effort.
SPOILER ALERT
The password is http://lesswrong.com/lw/p0/to_spread_science_keep_it_secret/ and the decrypted message is:
Secret discussion areas don’t scale. All you need is one defector (me) and everyone knows the secrets. A newbie area or a “let’s read the sequences” thread would be handy. A delayed RSS feed of the sequences would also be nice.
Hopefully community norms can be upheld with a thorough karma beating; downvoted. (This requires, of course, that the community in fact disapproves of spoilers.)
Srsly tho, you could at least rot13 that.
(This comment is now at −3. Point taken.)
It is a fact of life on the Internet that there will always be spoilers available to any puzzle or story that someone has finished.
Trying to stop them from appearing is foolish; all you can do is put forth your best effort to encourage readers to refrain from scrolling down (and for this particular post your encouragement was quite weak, to put it mildly).
In a “real” implementation, what’s on the other side of the door would be not just a static text that can be reposted, but an ongoing living discussion. Then the locks can just be changed.
And yes, I did it badly. I might try to fix the implementation at some point. Do you think that should be an edit to this post, or an entirely new post, or the idea outright abandoned?
It’s hardly a spoiler. You are not telling an exciting story with a twist ending. You’re just suggesting to lock up parts of the community and test people before they get in. At worst, it’s a puzzle solution, and not to a particularly interesting puzzle.