Some top-level post topics that get much higher scrutiny:
1. Takes on AI
Simply because of the volume of it, the standards are higher. I recommend reading Scott Alexander's Superintelligence FAQ as a good primer to make sure you understand the basics. Make sure you're familiar with the Orthogonality Thesis and Instrumental Convergence. I recommend both Eliezer's AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities and Paul Christiano's response post so you understand what sort of difficulties the field is actually facing.
I suggest going to the most recent AI Open Questions thread, or looking into the FAQ at https://ui.stampy.ai/
2. Quantum Suicide/Immortality, Roko's Basilisk and Acausal Extortion.
In theory, these are topics that have room for novel questions and contributions. In practice, they seem to attract people who seem... looking for something to be anxious about? I don't have great advice for these people, but my impression is that they're almost always trapped in a loop where they're trying to think about it in enough detail that they don't have to be anxious anymore, but that doesn't work. They just keep finding new subthreads to be anxious about.
For Acausal Trade, I do think Critch's Acausal normalcy might be a useful perspective that points your thoughts in a more useful direction. Alas, I don't have a great primer that succinctly explains why quantum immortality isn't a great frame, in a way that doesn't have a ton of philosophical dependencies.
I mostly recommend... going outside, hanging out with friends and finding other more productive things to get intellectually engrossed in.
3. Needing help with depression, akrasia, or medical advice with confusing mystery illness.
This is pretty sad and I feel quite bad saying it – on one hand, I do think LessWrong has some useful stuff to offer here. But too much focus on this has previously warped the community in weird ways – people with all kinds of problems come trying to get help and we just don't have the resources to help all of them.
For your first post on LessWrong, think of it more like you're applying to a university. Yes, universities have mental health departments for students and faculty... but when we're evaluating "does it make sense to let this person into this university", the focus should be on "does this person have the ability to make useful intellectual contributions?" not "do they need help in a way we can help with?"
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Lots of new users have been joining LessWrong recently, who seem more filtered for "interest in discussing AI" than for being bought into any particular standards for rationalist discourse. I think there's been a shift in this direction over the past few years, but it's gotten much more extreme in the past few months.
So the LessWrong team is thinking through "what standards make sense for 'how people are expected to contribute on LessWrong'?" We'll likely be tightening up moderation standards, and laying out a clearer set of principles so those tightened standards make sense and feel fair.
In coming weeks we'll be thinking about those principles as we look over existing users, comments and posts and asking "are these contributions making LessWrong better?".
Hopefully within a week or two, we'll have a post that outlines our current thinking in more detail.
Generally, expect heavier moderation, especially for newer users.
Two particular changes that should be going live within the next day or so:
Broader Context
LessWrong has always had a goal of being a well-kept garden. We have higher and more opinionated standards than most of the rest of the internet. In many cases we treat some issues as more "settled" than the rest of the internet, so that instead of endlessly rehashing the same questions we can move on to solving more difficult and interesting questions.
What this translates to in terms of moderation policy is a bit murky. We've been stepping up moderation over the past couple months and frequently run into issues like "it seems like this comment is missing some kind of 'LessWrong basics', but 'the basics' aren't well indexed and easy to reference." It's also not quite clear how to handle that from a moderation perspective.
I'm hoping to improve on "'the basics' are better indexed", but meanwhile it's just generally the case that if you participate on LessWrong, you are expected to have absorbed the set of principles in The Sequences (AKA Rationality A-Z).
In some cases you can get away without doing that while participating in local object level conversations, and pick up norms along the way. But if you're getting downvoted and you haven't read them, it's likely you're missing a lot of concepts or norms that are considered basic background reading on LessWrong. I recommend starting with the Sequences Highlights, and I'd also note that you don't need to read the Sequences in order, you can pick some random posts that seem fun and jump around based on your interest.
(Note: it's of course pretty important to be able to question all your basic assumptions. But I think doing that in a productive way requires actually understand why the current set of background assumptions are the way they are, and engaging with the object level reasoning)
There's also a straightforward question of quality. LessWrong deals with complicated questions. It's a place for making serious progress on those questions. One model I have of LessWrong is something like a university – there's a role for undergrads who are learning lots of stuff but aren't yet expected to be contributing to the cutting edge. There are grad students and professors who conduct novel research. But all of this is predicated on there being some barrier-to-entry. Not everyone gets accepted to any given university. You need some combination of intelligence, conscientiousness, etc to get accepted in the first place.
See this post by habryka for some more models of moderation.
Ideas we're considering, and questions we're trying to answer:
Again, hopefully in the near future we'll have a more thorough writeup about our answers to these. Meanwhile it seemed good to alert people this would be happening.