I think LW's degradation is primarily in Main (interesting Main posts are rare these days), and has nothing to do with Open Threads. If anything, Open Threads help LW because they make community participation easier with a lower barrier to entry for posting.
The open threads aren't great lately, but they're almost the last remaining sign of life at LW. Instead of shutting down the open threads, I recommend doing discussion posts which point out the best parts of the open threads, and also doing some brain-storming about how to find good topics for posts.
Thanks for taking the initiative to make the new "Post Ideas thread, Nancy "Anti-Bystander Effect" Lebovitz
I am generally opposed to methods that propose to save LW by reducing activity instead of by increasing activity. My reasons for not writing more posts for LW have mostly to do with my current life situation and lack of unallocated time, which may or may not change in the near future. It may be worth discussing ways to make writing posts for Main (or discussion or wherever we'd like to target) easier or more fun.
I am generally opposed to methods that propose to save LW by reducing activity instead of by increasing activity.
+1. This is one of those terrible ideas that people keep proposing for online communities in general, and it pretty much never works out well. It resembles an appeal to fundamentalism, nostalgia for when a site was young. The primary fallacy is that when it was young, it didn't actually know what it was doing, and that's why it was interesting.
Edit: Now a blog post.
It sounded like he was just proposing that people post all content that currently goes in Open Threads in Discussion instead.
I think the barrier to posting a post in Discussion is higher than posting a comment in the Open Threads, and thus less of them will happen. I also think doing Open Threads on a monthly timescale, instead of a weekly one, will lead to less comments in the open thread.
I think a guide on "This is how you post to Discussion! :D" will be more effective at getting people to use Discussion the way ChristianKI wants than reducing the frequency of the Open Thread posts. (That's an example of what I think a method that increases activity looks like.)
There are also UI and systematic barriers. It is much easier to find the comment box than the Create new article button, for example, and there is a karma minimum for articles but there is not for comments.
Lesswrong has degraded because high-quality and previously prolific authors including Eliezer, Luke, and Yvain write much less for us. One quick way to improve the quality of LW would be for Yvain to cross-post from his personal blog here (which I would particularly benefit from since his blog doesn't let me comment and I'm almost certain this isn't because Yvain banned me.)
I second the idea of Slate Star Codex being crossposted here. Yvain makes good posts there, and LW is better formatted for discussion (better comment threading, etc).
While true that Scott's posts would make this site much more interesting, he stated his reasons for not posting here much anymore, and until his concerns are addressed simply copying his posts does not seem like a smart and honest solution.
he stated his reasons for not posting here much anymore
Do you have a link to where he did that? I recall reading it, but it was long enough ago that I don't remember the actual reasons, and I'm not finding it quickly.
[Edit] I think this is probably the right comment:
Less Wrong requires no politics / minimal humor / definitely unambiguously rationality-relevant / careful referencing / airtight reasoning (as opposed to a sketch of something which isn't exactly true but points to the truth.) This makes writing for Less Wrong a chore as opposed to an enjoyable pastime.
Right, that's the one. I'm no Yvain, but I do have a dozen or so post drafts which I think would be relevant, but they will probably never be completed because of the effort required for "careful referencing / airtight reasoning (as opposed to a sketch of something which isn't exactly true but points to the truth.) " On the other hand, I see sloppy posts in Discussion all the time, and I don't want to post stuff like that, so I am not sure what to do about it.
Some of my favorite posts have been speculation from people like Konkvistador or many of the sequence posts. Not everything needs to be a lukeprog post and I'm kind of sad about his domination of the style.
I'd guess that the decline is largely due to people posting content on personal blogs, Facebook, etc. Every day I see a lot of interesting, rationality-relevant posts on Facebook from people that are connected to LW. I think those posts would be better if posted (or cross-posted) on open threads here, since that would make them visible to more people and allow for better commenting.
This is something like the third time I've joined a community that seemed to think it was in decline. I have a theory: they were, and it is, and this is something I should expect.
Reasoning: A high-quality community will probably grow over time as new users discover it. As it grows, the quality of its user base will inevitably regress to the mean (i.e. decline). More people will experience the community during and after growth than before growth. Therefore, assuming I am a random community member, I should expect the community to be in decline during my tenure.
One could probably do some amusing math by taking growth rate at time T as a function of quality and population at T-1, and quality at time T as a function of quality at T-1 and population change between T and T-1. There is probably a word for that sort of setup but I don't know it.
About a year ago, there was a Post Request Thread that morphed into a Pitch-Your-Post thread where people mentioned topics they were thinking of posting on, and people upvoted the ones they wanted to see in discussion (and asked some clarifying questions ahead of time).
It's the reason I wrote my post on tips for public speaking (I wouldn't have bothered crossposting and slightly reworking if there hadn't been an indication of interest).
Technically, the Open Thread can serve this purpose, but not everyone checks it that often, and isn't reading in the mindset of "Do I want a post on it." If you'd like to try to draw posts out of the woodwork, go ahead an post a new Post Request Thread.
I doubt that suggesting a solution before even stating the problem is a good way to start your post.
I would start by quantifying this feeling of LW degradation, before attempting to solve a problem that may or may not exist, or may be a symptom of some other issue. Surely there are a few relevant metrics we can come up with. I have several in mind and shared some of them on #lesswrong, but I'd rather hold off until other speak up, to avoid priming.
I concur with those who say the open threads are the last vestige of interesting discussion on LW (with the exception of the occasional technical post in Main).
The open threads are the last remaining useful part of the site (they're the only thing I come here for now it looks like the rationality quote threads have stopped), and they've become much better since becoming weekly. I think you have the causation backwards.
As several people have pointed out, the problem is high barrier to good posters, like Yvain. For various reasons either practical or emotional or whatever they don't post anymore. However, many of the quality Commenters, as opposed to "posters" hang on. Removing Open Threads won't do anything to get people to write interesting Posts, unless you think there are a lot of open thread comments that should be posts. It will just reduce opportunities for quality commenters to talk to each other.
Online communities often deteriorate when they become more popular. Some of it is because of regression to the mean. Another reason is that people in small groups tend to put in more effort for the group because everyone knows everyone else, while people in large groups just look out for themselves and treat interactions as one-shot. If you agree with that view of the problem, then the right solution might be something like subreddits.
The clearest way to improve discussions here, which has been called for numerous times, is reorganizing the subreddits and adding a few new ones. So far we haven't even got a separate subreddit for meetups, which should be uncontroversial, although I hear it is under development. Despite the simplicity of this proposed change, apparently the codebase makes it difficult. How much would it cost to expedite the development, if that's a possibility, and could we let people donate money directly toward this feature? If it's too expensive, how about cheap altern...
There are points in favor of this, but doing away with Open Threads altogether doesn't seem optimal. Open Threads have a lower barrier-to-entry and were the first things I had the courage to post in when first coming to this site. And some things in the open thread just aren't interesting enough for their own thread. A question that can be answered in two posts doesn't need its own thread.
It's not necessarily a case of having a lower standard. As I said, a question with an immediate answer (and thus no discussion) doesn't make for an interesting discussion thread.
Interesting thought. Though I personally think it would be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at this juncture.
An explanation that struck me recently is that "rationality" memes have infected a much broader audience such that now people don't all have to come to the LW watering hole to get their fix of sanity. Tim Ferriss references Kahneman in his podcast. "Heuristics and biases" is no longer a fringe thing that nobody is interested in. It's also somewhat less weird to be Singulatarian, now that you can point to IBM's Watson and self-driving cars and Kurzweil working at Google, whereas five years ago you just sounded crazy.
So, it's not necessarily that LW is getting worse in any absolute sense, it's just that the world is catching up. LW is just less special.
Interesting opinion. I rarely browse open threads, mainly because I find them a mess, and it takes a longer time to find if there's anything which would interest me in there. Discussion posts have their own page with neatly ordered titles, you get an idea at a glance, and can on a first filter sort through around 20 topics in around 2 seconds.
I agree. The strict moderation and frequent downvoting (that restricts visibility) limit the potential for a lot of interesting threads. Given the very low frequency of new threads, allowing more wouldn't be washing away the good content or anything. Reddit, which this site mirrors in form, thrives on turnover of content. Encouraging more threads instead of "post it in the open thread" would help.
The open threads aren't great lately, but they're almost the last remaining sign of life at LW. Instead of shutting down the open threads, I recommend doing discussion posts which point out the best parts of the open threads, and also doing some brain-storming about how to find good topics for posts.
Thanks for taking the initiative to make the new "Post Ideas thread, Nancy "Anti-Bystander Effect" Lebovitz
There are various people who feel that Lesswrong degraded in the last year. In the same timeframe more and more discussions moved into the open thread model and open threads became weekly instead of monthly.
I suggest to counteract that trend by opening all discussions per default on Discussion instead of opening them in weekly open threads. Having the topics in discussion makes it easy to browse the list of topics and choose the headline that are of interest, even if the thread got opened two weeks ago.