I remember having read a discussion about this in a recent open thread; there was one particular response which I liked. Give me a moment...
Later: Found! User sixes_and_sevens asked people to think of eight categories in which to divide LessWrong. Emile came up with the following list:
Self-improvement, optimal living, life hacks
Philosophy
Futurism (Cryonics, the singularity
Friendly AI and SIAI, I mean, MIRI
Maths, Decision Theory, Game theory
Meetups
General-interest discussion (biased towards the interests of atheist nerds)
Meta
(If you liked the suggestions, you could go upvote his post instead of mine.)
My own minor correction to the list would be to merge Futurism & FAI into one category, and perhaps do the same with Philosophy and Math, Decision Theory, Game Theory etc. (so as to have all the theoretical stuff in the same place—the Sequences, for example, could go here), but other than that I agree with it.
As for Main, perhaps we could implement reddit’s recent & all-time best submissions lists, sorted by karma, percentage of upvotes, or a combination of both. An entire subreddit devoted to posts worthy of promotion seems not only unnecessary as long as we got a karma system, but a potential source of drama. As it is right now, users who wish to make a post are basically asked whether they believe they’re about to make a great post or not, and their choice invites others to judge whether they were being appropriately humble. (I don’t think it’s a mystery for anybody why sometimes “moved to Discussion” mod posts get so many upvotes.) I think it’s rather excessive to invite these considerations into the picture; just wait and see how much karma the post gets and that’s it.
ETA: If you do split up LW in multiple subreddits, would that mean that all past posts would have to be re-categorized? Or would they be archived, so as to avoid the tedium that recategorization would involve, and start afresh with the new categories? Or perhaps you’re thinking of keeping some analogue of the Main and Discussion categories, and transfer all past posts to their respective categories, while the new (non-Main, non-Discussion) subreddits that would be created would start out empty? (Judging by the structures of both ideas proposed in the OP, I’m inclined to believe the third hypothesis.)
I remember having read a discussion about this in a recent open thread; there was one particular response which I liked. Give me a moment...
Later: Found! User sixes_and_sevens asked people to think of eight categories in which to divide LessWrong. Emile came up with the following list:
(If you liked the suggestions, you could go upvote his post instead of mine.)
My own minor correction to the list would be to merge Futurism & FAI into one category, and perhaps do the same with Philosophy and Math, Decision Theory, Game Theory etc. (so as to have all the theoretical stuff in the same place—the Sequences, for example, could go here), but other than that I agree with it.
As for Main, perhaps we could implement reddit’s recent & all-time best submissions lists, sorted by karma, percentage of upvotes, or a combination of both. An entire subreddit devoted to posts worthy of promotion seems not only unnecessary as long as we got a karma system, but a potential source of drama. As it is right now, users who wish to make a post are basically asked whether they believe they’re about to make a great post or not, and their choice invites others to judge whether they were being appropriately humble. (I don’t think it’s a mystery for anybody why sometimes “moved to Discussion” mod posts get so many upvotes.) I think it’s rather excessive to invite these considerations into the picture; just wait and see how much karma the post gets and that’s it.
ETA: If you do split up LW in multiple subreddits, would that mean that all past posts would have to be re-categorized? Or would they be archived, so as to avoid the tedium that recategorization would involve, and start afresh with the new categories? Or perhaps you’re thinking of keeping some analogue of the Main and Discussion categories, and transfer all past posts to their respective categories, while the new (non-Main, non-Discussion) subreddits that would be created would start out empty? (Judging by the structures of both ideas proposed in the OP, I’m inclined to believe the third hypothesis.)