My conversation partner was excited about Roam as a multi-purpose tool for intellectual progress and collaboration, and listed some features they were considering that were moving in directions that were similar to directions the LessWrong team was considering. “Roam is gonna do all the things! Collaboration! Blogposts! It could replace google docs as a collaborative thinking tool”
[note: this was a friend who doesn’t work at Roam, I’m not sure how concrete those plans are]
And I had a few flinch reactions of “Aww, LessWrong was gonna do all the things!”, followed immediately by “okay every writing platform that tries to do all the things right-off-the-bat fails and probably both of the teams should be focused a bit more”. Both of these were followed by a more interesting observation:
One of LessWrong’s primary focuses is being an attention allocation platform. Whether it follows the simple “show latest posts, ordered by date” or a hackernews algorithm, or things like curated and recommendations, it’s fundamentally aiming to be a place where centralized conversation of some sort happens.
There’s a thing in EA/rationalsphere space where people notice that a thing isn’t being coordinated on, and their first impulse is to build a coordination platform to fix it. And this is usually a mistake because it’s real costly to get everyone to switch to a new platform, and if you screw it up you not only waste everyone’s time but make them less likely to switch to the next platform that might actually be good enough.
I think it’s somewhat dangerous (albeit necessary) that LessWrong is natural-attention-monopoly shaped, which makes it hard to directly compete with. I think this gives us something of an obligation to do a good job, and to enable things like GreaterWrong, and to be careful taking on too many different domains that we won’t have the capacity to be good at.
Single Player
But there’s something sort of nice and valuable about having other writing platforms whose primary focus is on the “singleplayer” aspects of writing/thinking/intellectual progress. (My underrstanding is that this is the general advice to startup founders trying to corner a market that requires network effects – start with something that doesn’t require network effects)
Right now Roam is young, I’m not sure how serious their plans are for adding collaboration and blogpost-type features (this was mentioned to me second-hand and might have just been a “interesting idea to consider” thing rather than a “concrete plan.”) But after some reflection I found it actually kind of reassuring that there were ways to build up competing platforms interacting with the same ecosystem, not via initially starting as similar products, but by starting from pretty different vantage points and then gradually adding various supporting social features.
FWIW I think Roam and LW have carved out separate parts of the space, and would love to see a collaboration experiment where Roam is the editor for LW comments and and posts, allowing for the referencing/transcluding aspects of Roam and the voting, discovery, collaboration features of LW.
I wrote this up awhile ago as a shortform post on the EA forum. My motivation to post it now was because of an interesting conversation contrasting https://roamresearch.com with lesswrong.com.
My conversation partner was excited about Roam as a multi-purpose tool for intellectual progress and collaboration, and listed some features they were considering that were moving in directions that were similar to directions the LessWrong team was considering. “Roam is gonna do all the things! Collaboration! Blogposts! It could replace google docs as a collaborative thinking tool”
[note: this was a friend who doesn’t work at Roam, I’m not sure how concrete those plans are]
And I had a few flinch reactions of “Aww, LessWrong was gonna do all the things!”, followed immediately by “okay every writing platform that tries to do all the things right-off-the-bat fails and probably both of the teams should be focused a bit more”. Both of these were followed by a more interesting observation:
One of LessWrong’s primary focuses is being an attention allocation platform. Whether it follows the simple “show latest posts, ordered by date” or a hackernews algorithm, or things like curated and recommendations, it’s fundamentally aiming to be a place where centralized conversation of some sort happens.
There’s a thing in EA/rationalsphere space where people notice that a thing isn’t being coordinated on, and their first impulse is to build a coordination platform to fix it. And this is usually a mistake because it’s real costly to get everyone to switch to a new platform, and if you screw it up you not only waste everyone’s time but make them less likely to switch to the next platform that might actually be good enough.
I think it’s somewhat dangerous (albeit necessary) that LessWrong is natural-attention-monopoly shaped, which makes it hard to directly compete with. I think this gives us something of an obligation to do a good job, and to enable things like GreaterWrong, and to be careful taking on too many different domains that we won’t have the capacity to be good at.
Single Player
But there’s something sort of nice and valuable about having other writing platforms whose primary focus is on the “singleplayer” aspects of writing/thinking/intellectual progress. (My underrstanding is that this is the general advice to startup founders trying to corner a market that requires network effects – start with something that doesn’t require network effects)
Right now Roam is young, I’m not sure how serious their plans are for adding collaboration and blogpost-type features (this was mentioned to me second-hand and might have just been a “interesting idea to consider” thing rather than a “concrete plan.”) But after some reflection I found it actually kind of reassuring that there were ways to build up competing platforms interacting with the same ecosystem, not via initially starting as similar products, but by starting from pretty different vantage points and then gradually adding various supporting social features.
FWIW I think Roam and LW have carved out separate parts of the space, and would love to see a collaboration experiment where Roam is the editor for LW comments and and posts, allowing for the referencing/transcluding aspects of Roam and the voting, discovery, collaboration features of LW.