I don't have a specific response, but I at least want to say I like hearing ideas for things to do with the site and I enjoyed reading all of these thoughts. Strong upvote.
As a long time reader (lurker?) and very occasional commenter, I like that I get exposed to topics that I either know little about, or are completely new to me. As an example, most of the math related posts go straight over my head, but sometimes one will tweak my interest and open up new things to think about.
It seems to me that creating sub-communities would reduce my exposure to ideas with which I’m not that familiar. If I’m basically subscribing to eg the buddhist-related sub-community, then I’m going to miss the occasional gem (for me) in the jeff_tk family related community. Or I’d have to subscribe to every sub-community, which seems like more admin hassle than just reading/scanning everything.
I’m curious as to what are considered to be the specific advantages (on LW) of creating sub-communities….
What do you think an 'intern' is? Like are you using the term loosely or do you think LW should, like, hire college students
Well, they don't have to be college students but they are the ones who are most likely to take you up on this opportunity. I guess I'm curious that you seem to find this idea surprising? I know there's a limit to what interns can get done but I suspect it's just about picking the right tasks.
I guess the reason I feel surprised by / dislike the idea is that Lightcone/LW is pretty bottlenecked on employee (and especially manager) time, so hiring interns just seems like a crazy idea to me that I would never have suggested (at least in Lightcone's current state). But it's not like everyone knows that, so it wasn't unreasonable for you to suggest it.
Yeah, I'm not really aware of the state of Lightcone/LW and I didn't necessarily mean to imply that all of these ideas should be implemented right away.
I do think it's a shame that LW, Alignment Forum, and EA Forum are three separate sites rather than a single one. Maybe there are weird political reasons for this but as a user I don't really care, I just want to be able to navigate between all of them and discover content and crosspost with ease. Some other possible subcommunities:
(I may just be listing all my weird geeky interests haha)
You can actually see Alignment Forum content directly on LessWrong. The content you see there is a subset of the content you see on LessWrong.
A bit hard to describe; kind of like ratfic, kind of like roleplay, kind of like a forum.
https://luminousalicorn.tumblr.com/post/145319779970/what-is-a-glowfic
Well, the Alignment Forum already is kind of its own separate community.
I noticed that the parenting channel on LW Slack seemed to get a lot of attention (I don't really know what was discussed there since I'm not a parent).
I could imagine creating a separate space for discussion about forecasting as well.
General disclaimer: Obviously there's always going to be more that could be done and it's better to do a few things well, rather than many things poorly, but I still think it is worth being conscious of areas that could be improved[1].
I was originally going to post this at the end of 2021, but I forgot and it ended up stuck in my drafts. This is a reviewed and updated version. Ideally, I'd like to write one of these reflective posts every year.
I'm not saying that it deserves a sidebar position without an attempt to develop it. Nor am I claiming that such a redevelopment should be undertaken as it would involve significant resources.