There was a week or two of heavy-activity by some old timers. Since there's been a decent array of good posts but not quite as inspiring as the first week was and I don't know whether to think "we just need to try harder" or change tactics in some way.
Some thoughts: - I do feel it's been better to quickly be able to see a lot of posts in the community in one place
- I don't think the quality of the comments is that good, which is a bit demotivating. - on facebook, lots of great conversations happen in a low-friction way, and when someone starts being annoying, the person's who's facebook wall it is has the authority to delete comments with abandon, which I think is helpful. - I could see the solution being to either continue trying to incentivize better LW comments, or to just have LW be "single locus for big important ideas, but discussion to flesh them out still happen in more casual environments"
- I'm frustrated that the intellectual projects on Less Wrong are largely silo'd from the Effective Altruism community, which I think could really use them.
- The Main RSS feed has a lot of subscribers (I think I recall "about 10k"), so having things posted there seems good. - I think it's good to NOT have people automatically post things there, since that produced a lot of weird anxiety/tension on "is my post good enough for main? I dunno!" - But, there's also not a clear path to get something promoted to Main, or a sense of which things are important enough for Main
- I notice that I (personally) feel an ugh response to link posts and don't like being taken away from LW when I'm browsing LW. I'm not sure why.
Walled gardens are probably necessary for honest discussion.
If everything is open and tied to a meatspace identity, contributors have to constantly mind what they can and can't say and how what they're saying could be misinterpreted, either by an outsider who isn't familiar with local jargon or by a genuinely hostile element (and we've certainly had many of those) bent on casting LW or that contributor in the worst possible light.
If everything is open but not tied to an identity, there's no status payoff for being right that's useful in the real world -- or if there is, it comes at the risk of being doxed, and it's generally not worth it.
The ideal would probably be a walled garden with no real name policy. I've considered writing a site along these lines for some time, with many walled gardens and individually customizable privacy settings like Facebook, but I'm not sure what model to base the posting on -- that is, should it look like a forum, like Facebook/Reddit, like Tumblr, or what?
About a month ago, Anna posted about the Importance of Less Wrong or Another Single Conversational Locus, followed shortly by Sarah Constantin's http://lesswrong.com/lw/o62/a_return_to_discussion/
There was a week or two of heavy-activity by some old timers. Since there's been a decent array of good posts but not quite as inspiring as the first week was and I don't know whether to think "we just need to try harder" or change tactics in some way.
Some thoughts:
- I do feel it's been better to quickly be able to see a lot of posts in the community in one place
- I don't think the quality of the comments is that good, which is a bit demotivating.
- on facebook, lots of great conversations happen in a low-friction way, and when someone starts being annoying, the person's who's facebook wall it is has the authority to delete comments with abandon, which I think is helpful.
- I could see the solution being to either continue trying to incentivize better LW comments, or to just have LW be "single locus for big important ideas, but discussion to flesh them out still happen in more casual environments"
- I'm frustrated that the intellectual projects on Less Wrong are largely silo'd from the Effective Altruism community, which I think could really use them.
- The Main RSS feed has a lot of subscribers (I think I recall "about 10k"), so having things posted there seems good.
- I think it's good to NOT have people automatically post things there, since that produced a lot of weird anxiety/tension on "is my post good enough for main? I dunno!"
- But, there's also not a clear path to get something promoted to Main, or a sense of which things are important enough for Main
- I notice that I (personally) feel an ugh response to link posts and don't like being taken away from LW when I'm browsing LW. I'm not sure why.
Curious if others have thoughts.