Or maybe it’s deliberately trying not to be facebooky? By “facebooky”, I mean a website that tries to hack your brain through various stimuli, like optimizing suggestions, tracking your data, steering your interests, inferring personal information, clustering communities, and encouraging creators to focus on retention, CTR, clickbait, etc.

LessWrong obviously isn’t doing anything ad-related, since it’s non-profit. But maybe it is trying to earn utilons by using some facebooky strategies.

I actually find LW more facebooky than Substack, for example. It’s much easier to spend a lot of time here by following links both within and outside posts. On the other side, one anti-facebooky feature (which I really like) is the ability to control how often you get notifications about karma and comments.

P.S. I’m not trying to imply that being facebooky is inherently bad. Part of the reason Facebook makes so much money is that it did, in fact, generate some societal value, and it did it in part due to implementing some of the facebooky strategies.