Eliezer Yudkowsky and Paul Graham have a lot in common. They're both well-known bloggers who write about rationality and are influential in Silicon Valley. They're both known for Bayesian stuff (Graham was a pioneer of Bayesian spam filtering). They both played a role in creating discussion sites which are, in my opinion, among the best on the internet (Less Wrong for Eliezer, Hacker News for Paul Graham). And they've both stopped posting to the sites they created, but they both still post to... Twitter, which is, in my opinion, one of the worst discussion sites on the internet. (Here is one of many illustrations.)
It seems like having so many celebrities, scientists, and politicians is a major asset for Twitter. What is it about Twitter which makes big names want to post there? How could a rival site attract big names without also importing Twitter's pathologies?
Twitter does a few things I can't do with other platforms.
1. I can quickly search through all of someone's thoughts on a particular subjects, and all of people's thoughts on those thoughts, and peoples thoughts on those thoughts, etc.
2. I can comment on someone else's specific thought on a subject, and start a conversation thread on it.
3. I can subscribe to someone's thoughts, without them needing to write essays, etc. It provides a very low friction way to share thoughts.
4. I can build off of my previous thoughts, creating an int... (read more)
If you want to explore the community more, I recommend reading the Library, checking recent Curated posts, seeing if there are any meetups in your area, and checking out the Getting Started section of the LessWrong FAQ.
The Open Thread sequence is here.