Personally, I prefer to chat with friends and high-status strangers over internet randos. And I prefer to chat in person, where I can control and anticipate the conversation, rather than asynchronously via text with a bunch of internet randos who can enter and exit the conversation whenever they feel like it.
For me, this is why I rarely post on LessWrong.
Seeding and cultivating a community of high value conversations is difficult. I think the best way to attract high quality contributors is to already have high quality contributors (and perhaps having mechanisms to disincentivize the low quality contributors). It’s a bit of a bootstrapping problem. LessWrong is doing well, but no doubt it could do better.
That’s my initial reaction, at least. Hope it doesn’t offend or come off as too negative. Best wishes to you all.
Online discussions are much more scaleable than in-person ones. And the stuff you write becomes part of a searchable archive.
I also feel that online discussions allow me to organize my thoughts better. And I think it can be easier to get to the bottom of a disagreement online, whereas in person it’s easier for someone to just keep changing the subject and make themselves impossible to pin down, or something like that.
My hypothesis: They don’t anticipate any benefit.
Personally, I prefer to chat with friends and high-status strangers over internet randos. And I prefer to chat in person, where I can control and anticipate the conversation, rather than asynchronously via text with a bunch of internet randos who can enter and exit the conversation whenever they feel like it.
For me, this is why I rarely post on LessWrong.
Seeding and cultivating a community of high value conversations is difficult. I think the best way to attract high quality contributors is to already have high quality contributors (and perhaps having mechanisms to disincentivize the low quality contributors). It’s a bit of a bootstrapping problem. LessWrong is doing well, but no doubt it could do better.
That’s my initial reaction, at least. Hope it doesn’t offend or come off as too negative. Best wishes to you all.
Online discussions are much more scaleable than in-person ones. And the stuff you write becomes part of a searchable archive.
I also feel that online discussions allow me to organize my thoughts better. And I think it can be easier to get to the bottom of a disagreement online, whereas in person it’s easier for someone to just keep changing the subject and make themselves impossible to pin down, or something like that.