I was in a research retreat recently with many AI alignment researchers, and found that the vast majority of them do not participate (post or comment) on LW/AF or participate to a much lesser extent than I would prefer. It seems important to bring this up and talk about whether we can do something about it. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to ask them about why that is the case as there were other things to talk about, so I'm going to have to speculate here based on my personal experiences and folk psychology. (Perhaps the LW team could conduct a survey and get a better picture than this.)
Criticism that feels overly harsh or is otherwise psychologically unpleasant
Downvotes
Not getting enough upvotes as one feels deserved
Not getting enough engagement
More adversarial (zero-sum) nature of public discussion / preferring private discussions for more collaborative nature
Feeling like "losing" a debate when the other person gets more upvotes than you
More effort needed to write comments than to talk to people IRL
Not real-time / time lag between replies
Feeling ignored when someone stops responding
Others?
ETA: Potentially leaving a record of being wrong in public
One meta problem is that different people have different sensitivities to these disincentives, and having enough disincentives to filter out low-quality content from people with low sensitivities just necessarily means some potential high-quality content from people with high sensitivities are also kept out. But it seems like there are still some things worth doing or experimenting with. For example:
Support for real-time collaborative discussion which subsequently get posted and voted upon as one unit (with votes going equally to both participants)
Disabling downvotes on AF
Having more indications/reminders of how much posting to LW/AF benefits the individual posters and the wider community, in terms of making intellectual progress and spreading good ideas. I'm not sure what form this could take, but maybe things like an indication of how many times a post is read.
My previous feature suggestion to help with the "feeling ignored" problem
Being less critical of new users and engaging more positively with them
There's a separate issue that some people don't read LW/AF as much as I would prefer but I have much less idea what is going on there.
On a tangentially related topic, is LW making any preparations (such as thinking about what to do) for a seemingly not very far future where automated opinion influencers are widely available as hirable services? I'm imagining some AI that you can hire to scan internet discussion forums and make posts or replies in order to change readers' beliefs/values in some specified direction. This might be very crude at the beginning but could already greatly degrade the experience of participating on public discussion forums.
Personally, I prefer to chat with friends and high-status strangers over internet randos. And I prefer to chat in person, where I can control and anticipate the conversation, rather than asynchronously via text with a bunch of internet randos who can enter and exit the conversation whenever they feel like it.
For me, this is why I rarely post on LessWrong.
Seeding and cultivating a community of high value conversations is difficult. I think the best way to attract high quality contributors is to already have high quality contributors (and perhaps having mechanisms to disincentivize the low quality contributors). It's a bit of a bootstrapping problem. LessWrong is doing well, but no doubt it could do better.
That's my initial reaction, at least. Hope it doesn't offend or come off as too negative. Best wishes to you all.
Online discussions are much more scaleable than in-person ones. And the stuff you write becomes part of a searchable archive.
I also feel that online discussions allow me to organize my thoughts better. And I think it can be easier to get to the bottom of a disagreement online, whereas in person it's easier for someone to just keep changing the subject and make themselves impossible to pin down, or something like that.
I was in a research retreat recently with many AI alignment researchers, and found that the vast majority of them do not participate (post or comment) on LW/AF or participate to a much lesser extent than I would prefer. It seems important to bring this up and talk about whether we can do something about it. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to ask them about why that is the case as there were other things to talk about, so I'm going to have to speculate here based on my personal experiences and folk psychology. (Perhaps the LW team could conduct a survey and get a better picture than this.)
One meta problem is that different people have different sensitivities to these disincentives, and having enough disincentives to filter out low-quality content from people with low sensitivities just necessarily means some potential high-quality content from people with high sensitivities are also kept out. But it seems like there are still some things worth doing or experimenting with. For example:
There's a separate issue that some people don't read LW/AF as much as I would prefer but I have much less idea what is going on there.
On a tangentially related topic, is LW making any preparations (such as thinking about what to do) for a seemingly not very far future where automated opinion influencers are widely available as hirable services? I'm imagining some AI that you can hire to scan internet discussion forums and make posts or replies in order to change readers' beliefs/values in some specified direction. This might be very crude at the beginning but could already greatly degrade the experience of participating on public discussion forums.