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A little bit of 4chan couldn't hurt LessWrong.
Now with that odd beginning behind, I want to explain what I mean. I enjoy this site a LOT, really A LOT, however it lacks a little bit in variety. When I was younger i liked 4chan because it had its own "culture": jokes, way of speaking etc. and when you got familiar with it, you could read about you were interested in manga, anime, video games within the culture you knew. Often when I search opinion about something, I would like an opinion from "culture" of LessWrong. Accuracy of opinions, facts etc, would be statistically higher than average, I would understand the culture, sometimes I would even recognize the people. It would be nice to either have an addition of maybe "subsections" in addition to the main "board" of LessWrong. It's very gratifying to read people that you know from one context, how they think in another. What do you think?
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1Could we get some of that value by making an occasional, uhm, Open Thread focused on a specific topic? For the topics you would want to get a subsection on; one topic at a time.
We need some coordination mechanism to prevent this from being annoying, but maybe a rule of thumb "don't make an Open Thread for the same topic more often than once in a month" could be a good start.
I think LessWrong used to be more like this. It certainly had some upsides to "have culture". There are also downsides. I certainly miss it but not sure whether I'd hit a button to change it.
As a somewhat neurodivergent person who can't stand twitter-style interactions because of the difficulty of pulling gems from out of the noise.... I would love it if someone built a bot that harvested the "best of rationality and science adjacent twitter/bluesky/mastodon" and put it into a simple website. Maybe using LessWrong's codebase?
I feel like I'm missing out by being unable to comfortably read Twitter.
Some thoughts on this:
- it could have a filter such that multiple semantically equivalent comments would always get merged into a single comment with an author-count
- rude or non-sequitor comments would get automatically deleted
- comments which have no info, just "applause" or "disapproval" would get turned into agreement/disagreement votes
All of this filtering seems like it could be adequately handled by a small-cheap LLM like Haiku or Gemini Flash in combination with some simple scripts.