I’m not really a very old user, maybe three years (and after becoming more active in real-life meetups I switched to an alt that used my real name, so I’m not as inactive as I look, though still pretty inactive these days). But I have to say, it subjectively feels like the quality of everything on lesswrong is lower than it was when I joined.
And I’ll tell you what I perceive the difference to be:
1) All my favorite writers stopped writing here. I have to go elsewhere to find their content. Previously, I felt that most of the stuff I read here was at a level above me in terms of insightfulness and level of philosophical rigor… and now, with a few exceptions, I don’t.
2) The user-base shifted such that it was no longer a homogeneous entity which I labeled as an in-group. People here don’t just automatically share my outlook on morality, epistemology, “free will”, consciousness, and even politics anymore. Previously, the core sequences were pretty in-line with what I initially believed, and the entire userbase shared those views. That’s not to say I don’t value diversity of opinion, but there is something special about a group that agrees with you on every core issue. The inferential distance just keeps growing wider and wider.
3) I can’t quite put my finger on it, but somehow commenting here gradually began to feel more like I was arguing a viewpoint, rather than cooperative mutual discovery, If I want to argue with people who are wrong on the internet,(heh, username) I can go do that anywhere.
Of course, this doesn’t mean LW is objectively worse. I was fairly impressed when i first started reading, so this might simply be regression to the mean (as in, maybe LW was always a random walk and I first joined because it hit the right buttons for me at some point in that walk, and now it’s moving away from that point.) Or it might just be rosy retrospection.
I’ve kind of accepted A...lesswrong kind of began “dying” for me a year ago. But I don’t recommended it as an action...it’s an unfortunate thing to happen.
I like option B the best. A lot of the good stuff I find here these days tends to be links to other things. C and D will probably increase the numbers we’re measuring, but won’t actually raise the content quality. With respect to C, Political discussion is wonderful on its own but has the side effect of causing the types of people who are primarily interested in talking about politics (as opposed to science or philosophy) to speak up more often, which drives down quality. With respect to D, that’s not changing anything other than the location of the activity. Who cares if it’s all in one thread or not? I think I disagree about it being harder to navigate.
I just want to second point (3) that you made. Constructive commenting, where you acknowledge the strengths of the post, and then point out the flaws and also suggest how to fix the flaws might go a long way in incentivizing discussion.
To elaborate further, the sheer absence of the blue-green, “arguments are soldiers” mentality which previously abounded (no doubt helped by the fact that everyone had a large set of shared core premises) made every conversation seem like a step forward. People did nit-pick excessively just as we do today, but somehow it felt like the good kind of nitpicking..
But it’s not that people were nicer or more diplomatic. They were a lot more playful back then, but they would still be fairly blunt even by internet standards. It was something else...I think it was simply that they were more interested in getting to the right answer than they were in “winning” in the rhetorical sense.
I guess to put it dramatically, LW has gradually been consumed by the Dark Arts, which has caused a lot of quality people to get bored and leave.
I’m not really a very old user, maybe three years (and after becoming more active in real-life meetups I switched to an alt that used my real name, so I’m not as inactive as I look, though still pretty inactive these days). But I have to say, it subjectively feels like the quality of everything on lesswrong is lower than it was when I joined.
And I’ll tell you what I perceive the difference to be:
1) All my favorite writers stopped writing here. I have to go elsewhere to find their content. Previously, I felt that most of the stuff I read here was at a level above me in terms of insightfulness and level of philosophical rigor… and now, with a few exceptions, I don’t.
2) The user-base shifted such that it was no longer a homogeneous entity which I labeled as an in-group. People here don’t just automatically share my outlook on morality, epistemology, “free will”, consciousness, and even politics anymore. Previously, the core sequences were pretty in-line with what I initially believed, and the entire userbase shared those views. That’s not to say I don’t value diversity of opinion, but there is something special about a group that agrees with you on every core issue. The inferential distance just keeps growing wider and wider.
3) I can’t quite put my finger on it, but somehow commenting here gradually began to feel more like I was arguing a viewpoint, rather than cooperative mutual discovery, If I want to argue with people who are wrong on the internet,(heh, username) I can go do that anywhere.
Of course, this doesn’t mean LW is objectively worse. I was fairly impressed when i first started reading, so this might simply be regression to the mean (as in, maybe LW was always a random walk and I first joined because it hit the right buttons for me at some point in that walk, and now it’s moving away from that point.) Or it might just be rosy retrospection.
I’ve kind of accepted A...lesswrong kind of began “dying” for me a year ago. But I don’t recommended it as an action...it’s an unfortunate thing to happen.
I like option B the best. A lot of the good stuff I find here these days tends to be links to other things. C and D will probably increase the numbers we’re measuring, but won’t actually raise the content quality. With respect to C, Political discussion is wonderful on its own but has the side effect of causing the types of people who are primarily interested in talking about politics (as opposed to science or philosophy) to speak up more often, which drives down quality. With respect to D, that’s not changing anything other than the location of the activity. Who cares if it’s all in one thread or not? I think I disagree about it being harder to navigate.
I just want to second point (3) that you made. Constructive commenting, where you acknowledge the strengths of the post, and then point out the flaws and also suggest how to fix the flaws might go a long way in incentivizing discussion.
To elaborate further, the sheer absence of the blue-green, “arguments are soldiers” mentality which previously abounded (no doubt helped by the fact that everyone had a large set of shared core premises) made every conversation seem like a step forward. People did nit-pick excessively just as we do today, but somehow it felt like the good kind of nitpicking..
But it’s not that people were nicer or more diplomatic. They were a lot more playful back then, but they would still be fairly blunt even by internet standards. It was something else...I think it was simply that they were more interested in getting to the right answer than they were in “winning” in the rhetorical sense.
I guess to put it dramatically, LW has gradually been consumed by the Dark Arts, which has caused a lot of quality people to get bored and leave.