This is a special post for quick takes by h0nesy. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
How have you felt on this platform? really work? Does it truly offer more than another group on any other social network?
This isn't a message from a moderator or anyone on the Less Worng team. I'm just someone with a question.
In my opinion, I do feel like I contribute. I'd even say I feel like an ant here. Like when you listened to the eighth-semester students chatting while you were still in your second semester.
2This is the place where I can most reliably just communicate. Basically anywhere else I either have to limit myself to particularly simple thoughts (e.g. Twitter) or to spend time extensively running ideas past people in order to figure out what context they're lacking or why my explanations aren't working (e.g. Real Life).
Here I have a decent chance of just sitting down and writing a 1-2k word blogpost which gets my point across successfully in one shot, without needing further questions.
It gives me peace of mind, knowing that there is a place where people try to talk and think reasonably. Because the rest of the internet doesn't seem like that, especially recently with all the bots and madness.
It's not like all people don't care about reasonable debate, but more like the ones who do, they have no idea how to achieve it. So many bad memes out there. We are all used to social networks that maximize engagement (and thereby waste everyone's time), if we tried to do it differently, most of us wouldn't even know where to start. And it's not just about software -- you need to get the software and the initial community right. Without good initial community it's hopeless. But the community needs the software to protect itself against spam and similar. (For example, Astral Codex Ten has a mostly good community, but no mechanism to get rid of the ones who refuse to follow the local norms, until Scott removes them manually -- but that's often too late, and it's trivial for them to just create another account.)