I think the only reason LW now leans as heavily toward chat as it does is that not much is being written and published here.
Sounds reasonable to me. It’s like sometimes there are more good articles and sometimes there are fewer good articles (depending on how motivated or busy or burned out the few good authors are), but the amount of comments is more or less constant, or slowly increasing over time. So when e.g. Eliezer suddenly stops producing tons of text, instead of the whole website slowing down evenly, it just becomes more chatroom-y, because people are still used to spending certain amount of time and posting certain amount of comments per week.
Maybe it would be better to have a separate chat area, so that when great articles temporarily stop coming, people won’t react by converting their open-thread-level comments into articles.
Sounds reasonable to me. It’s like sometimes there are more good articles and sometimes there are fewer good articles (depending on how motivated or busy or burned out the few good authors are), but the amount of comments is more or less constant, or slowly increasing over time. So when e.g. Eliezer suddenly stops producing tons of text, instead of the whole website slowing down evenly, it just becomes more chatroom-y, because people are still used to spending certain amount of time and posting certain amount of comments per week.
Maybe it would be better to have a separate chat area, so that when great articles temporarily stop coming, people won’t react by converting their open-thread-level comments into articles.