It’s a blogging platform, it’s done by me with some support from Eliezer, and I’m doing it because it will help with x-risk. This is essentially identical to what we had in 2015.
Any platform that contributes to poisoning public discourse antagonizes coordination efforts. I think entering that space is a valid EA pursuit. Anyone who’s read meditations on moloch will do a better job of promoting the spread of truth and preventing spurious conflicts and than, EG, twitter.
That’s step 1. Steps 2 and after involve slowly converging towards the original Arbital vision. I just don’t think you can get there without mass adoption.
Is there actually any sort of obvious path from a microblogging platform to “the original Arbital vision”? I confess I don’t really see one, but maybe I haven’t understood what the original Arbital vision was.
Basically what we tried is: “let’s figure out how people are supposed to have truth-seeking conversations, build a platform that facilities that, and then grow it.” Step 1 is very hard. Step 3 is made harder because your platform only attracts truth-seeking people.
New approach: “build a platform that facilities communication, grow it, then shape the ongoing discussion to be more truth-seeking.” Step 1 is still hard, but not made harder. Step 3 sounds a lot more doable.
Arbital has vague positive affect from being an attempt to solve a big problem in a potentially really impactful way.
Yet Another Blogging Platform, without the special features envisioned originally, is not solving a big problem (or actually any problem), and has a maximum plausible impact of “makes you a bunch of money and you donate that somewhere”. Re-using the name is a self-serving attempt to redirect the positive affect from the ambitious, failed, altruistic project to the mundane, new, purely-capitalistic project.
Why aren’t you just admitting defeat and going on to build something different?
If you can’t succeed without first getting mass adoption, then you can’t succeed. See the ‘success’ of Medium, and how it required losing everything they set out to do.
If Arbital has failed, Arbital has failed. Building neoTumblr and hoping to turn it into Arbital later won’t make it fail any less, it will just produce neoTumblr.
Somewhat recently Medium laid off about a third of their team as they tried to re-orient to figure out what happened when their original vision went away.
Isn’t this a pretty well-worn path by now? Start with lofty visions, discover that your incentive system rewards for eyeballs and clicks, start to optimize for eyeballs and clicks, become shit soon afterwards.
I do think we see this pattern across a lot of content platforms, like YouTube, as well. My impression is that earnest creators who try to make quality things often get out-competed by attention-hijackers / things that optimize for the action rather than the intent (ala Goodhart’s Law).
Why?
Well, what does it have in common with the already-existing thing called Arbital?
It’s a blogging platform, it’s done by me with some support from Eliezer, and I’m doing it because it will help with x-risk. This is essentially identical to what we had in 2015.
A new microblogging platform will help with x-risk?
I mean, I know Tumblr is bad, but it’s hardly an existential threat.
Any platform that contributes to poisoning public discourse antagonizes coordination efforts. I think entering that space is a valid EA pursuit. Anyone who’s read meditations on moloch will do a better job of promoting the spread of truth and preventing spurious conflicts and than, EG, twitter.
That’s step 1. Steps 2 and after involve slowly converging towards the original Arbital vision. I just don’t think you can get there without mass adoption.
Is there actually any sort of obvious path from a microblogging platform to “the original Arbital vision”? I confess I don’t really see one, but maybe I haven’t understood what the original Arbital vision was.
Here are like 5 pages explaining all the visions: https://arbital.com/p/more_about_arbital/
Basically what we tried is: “let’s figure out how people are supposed to have truth-seeking conversations, build a platform that facilities that, and then grow it.” Step 1 is very hard. Step 3 is made harder because your platform only attracts truth-seeking people.
New approach: “build a platform that facilities communication, grow it, then shape the ongoing discussion to be more truth-seeking.” Step 1 is still hard, but not made harder. Step 3 sounds a lot more doable.
Why do you believe that your new microblogging service will get mass adoption?
It’s a complicated answer and also somewhat outside of the topic I want to discuss here (which is Arbital 1.0). For part of the answer see: http://lesswrong.com/lw/otq/whats_up_with_arbital/dqbc
Inside View much?
Arbital has vague positive affect from being an attempt to solve a big problem in a potentially really impactful way.
Yet Another Blogging Platform, without the special features envisioned originally, is not solving a big problem (or actually any problem), and has a maximum plausible impact of “makes you a bunch of money and you donate that somewhere”. Re-using the name is a self-serving attempt to redirect the positive affect from the ambitious, failed, altruistic project to the mundane, new, purely-capitalistic project.
Why aren’t you just admitting defeat and going on to build something different?
See my reply to gjm: http://lesswrong.com/lw/otq/whats_up_with_arbital/dqa0?context=3
If you can’t succeed without first getting mass adoption, then you can’t succeed. See the ‘success’ of Medium, and how it required losing everything they set out to do.
If Arbital has failed, Arbital has failed. Building neoTumblr and hoping to turn it into Arbital later won’t make it fail any less, it will just produce neoTumblr.
Could you detail what you mean about Medium? This doesn’t sound like a claim that is very easy to look up.
Somewhat recently Medium laid off about a third of their team as they tried to re-orient to figure out what happened when their original vision went away.
Isn’t this a pretty well-worn path by now? Start with lofty visions, discover that your incentive system rewards for eyeballs and clicks, start to optimize for eyeballs and clicks, become shit soon afterwards.
I do think we see this pattern across a lot of content platforms, like YouTube, as well. My impression is that earnest creators who try to make quality things often get out-competed by attention-hijackers / things that optimize for the action rather than the intent (ala Goodhart’s Law).
Noted, but I disagree.