Maybe; there certanly are a lot of good rationalist bloggers who have at least at some point been interested in LessWrong. I don’t think bloggers will come back though unless the site first becomes more active then it currently is. (They may give it a chance after the Beta is rolled out, but if activity doesn’t increase quickly they’ll leave again.) Activity and an active community is necessary to keep a project like this going. Without an active community here there’s no point in coming back here instead of posting on your own blog.
I guess my concern here though is that right now, LessWrong has a “discussion” side which is a little active and a “main” side which is totally dead. And it sounds like this plan would basically get rid of the discussion side, and make it harder to post on the main side. Won’t the most likely outcome just be to lower the amount of content and the activity level even more, maybe to zero?
Fundamentally, I think the premise of your second bottleneck is incorrect. We don’t really have a problem with signal-to-noise ratio here, most of the posts that do get posted here are pretty good, and the few that aren’t don’t get upvoted and most people ignore them without a problem. We have a problem with low total activity, which is almost the exact opposite problem.
Maybe; there certanly are a lot of good rationalist bloggers who have at least at some point been interested in LessWrong. I don’t think bloggers will come back though unless the site first becomes more active then it currently is. (They may give it a chance after the Beta is rolled out, but if activity doesn’t increase quickly they’ll leave again.) Activity and an active community is necessary to keep a project like this going. Without an active community here there’s no point in coming back here instead of posting on your own blog.
I guess my concern here though is that right now, LessWrong has a “discussion” side which is a little active and a “main” side which is totally dead. And it sounds like this plan would basically get rid of the discussion side, and make it harder to post on the main side. Won’t the most likely outcome just be to lower the amount of content and the activity level even more, maybe to zero?
Fundamentally, I think the premise of your second bottleneck is incorrect. We don’t really have a problem with signal-to-noise ratio here, most of the posts that do get posted here are pretty good, and the few that aren’t don’t get upvoted and most people ignore them without a problem. We have a problem with low total activity, which is almost the exact opposite problem.