Re: on-ramps, see the New User’s Guide to LessWrong and my main feedback on it. Though I’m not sure whether this guide is actually being used as a new user’s guide by anyone, e.g. I don’t know if any LW pages link to it.
If you aren’t logged in and show up on the LessWrong homepage, the second post listed is (as far as I know) always Welcome to LessWrong. That links the New User’s Guide in the first couple paragraphs, right after The Road To Wisdom and a three sentence explanation of the site.
If I was in charge I might make it the first post, but that trades off a bit against people showing up for something to read but never logging in. Having the first thing be a gradually rotating recommendation actually seems pretty good to me as well: I don’t know how the first recommendation is picked but right now it shows LessWrong Political Prerequisites for me. If it does something like rotate through the top twelve things everyone should know, one a month, I’d call that a pretty good nudge towards having common knowledge actually!
Amusing sidenote: when I loaded up the page in an incognito browser to check, the third post suggested was Fucking Goddamn Basics of Rationalist Discourse and I have such mixed feelings. On the one hand, I really like having a snappy two hundred and thirty three word overview of the expectations for posting! That’s way better than Read The Sequences, it’s a numbered list of short guidelines with links to longer explanations of each part! On the other hand, it’s the profane parody of a post I remember being kind of controversial when it was published and where the controversy was not so much “settled to consensus approval” as “turned into a Shiri’s Scissor before the author mostly left the site.” Like I said, mixed feelings if I imagine that being the third thing someone reads on LessWrong.
Re: on-ramps, see the New User’s Guide to LessWrong and my main feedback on it. Though I’m not sure whether this guide is actually being used as a new user’s guide by anyone, e.g. I don’t know if any LW pages link to it.
If you aren’t logged in and show up on the LessWrong homepage, the second post listed is (as far as I know) always Welcome to LessWrong. That links the New User’s Guide in the first couple paragraphs, right after The Road To Wisdom and a three sentence explanation of the site.
If I was in charge I might make it the first post, but that trades off a bit against people showing up for something to read but never logging in. Having the first thing be a gradually rotating recommendation actually seems pretty good to me as well: I don’t know how the first recommendation is picked but right now it shows LessWrong Political Prerequisites for me. If it does something like rotate through the top twelve things everyone should know, one a month, I’d call that a pretty good nudge towards having common knowledge actually!
Amusing sidenote: when I loaded up the page in an incognito browser to check, the third post suggested was Fucking Goddamn Basics of Rationalist Discourse and I have such mixed feelings. On the one hand, I really like having a snappy two hundred and thirty three word overview of the expectations for posting! That’s way better than Read The Sequences, it’s a numbered list of short guidelines with links to longer explanations of each part! On the other hand, it’s the profane parody of a post I remember being kind of controversial when it was published and where the controversy was not so much “settled to consensus approval” as “turned into a Shiri’s Scissor before the author mostly left the site.” Like I said, mixed feelings if I imagine that being the third thing someone reads on LessWrong.