One part of what’s going on may be that the site allows anyone to register and vote, and so there’s a feedback loop where people who are less like the core demographic and more like the rest of the internet come in and vote for posts that appeal more to average people from the internet, which in turn causes more average people from the internet to register and vote, and all this creates a pressure for the site to want to become every other site.
Another part of what’s going on may be that the site has been focusing more and more on the idea that rationality gives you easy and obvious personal superpowers (as opposed to just helping you figure out what goal to strive toward and with what strategies), and while I’m not saying there’s no truth to that, it doesn’t strike me as being why most of us originally got interested in these issues, and a lot of the support for it feels like it was selected to support an easily-marketable bottom line.
One part of what’s going on may be that the site allows anyone to register and vote, and so there’s a feedback loop where people who are less like the core demographic and more like the rest of the internet come in and vote for posts that appeal more to average people from the internet, which in turn causes more average people from the internet to register and vote, and all this creates a pressure for the site to want to become every other site.
Another part of what’s going on may be that the site has been focusing more and more on the idea that rationality gives you easy and obvious personal superpowers (as opposed to just helping you figure out what goal to strive toward and with what strategies), and while I’m not saying there’s no truth to that, it doesn’t strike me as being why most of us originally got interested in these issues, and a lot of the support for it feels like it was selected to support an easily-marketable bottom line.