Is this feature likely to be released in the near future?

I personally have a post sitting in drafts that is far too long to rely on footnotes, as it would break the reading experience. Sidenotes would be ideal for these kinds of posts, but it would be almost as good if you had an option to put them at the end of a paragraph in a little box or something, as that would translate well to the mobile reading experience. 

Agree, I am also confused about this as a bystander.

It wasn't announced on the list this year, so I'm not sure what the situation is. If I were to guess, I'd say the person who set things up last year didn't respond to email requests for information about this year's plans.

If you want to take the initiative to organize the Manchester meetup, you are welcome to do so.

Update: At 11:30 we are moving to foundation coffee on Whitworth Street

(Disclaimer: This is a brief low effort reply because I've spent a large amount of time on this topic with very little to show for it, but I also don't want to ignore questions which people have a reasonable expectation of getting a response.)

• UK immigration law is almost seamless if 1) you are just wanting to visit to get a taste of living here 2) are willing to visit for less than 6 months per year and are wealthy/willing to tolerate being in the defacto legal grey area of remote work on a tourist visa.
• Immigration to the UK is about as straightforward as immigrating to any other developed country in general. There are also specific circumstances when it becomes a lot easier that are likely to apply to a lot of people in this community (e.g. tech founders, tech workers on the occupational shortage list).
• There are rationalists/EAs and ACX fans here. I used to organise the meetups and I know of 30-50 people here and in the surrounding area, and there were 9 people present at the first ACX 2021 meetup.
  • However, the number of people in Manchester who are in paid roles at rationalist/ea orgs is, to my knowledge, zero. The general takeaway is that due to the large surrounding population (something like 11m within a 60 minute travel radius) there is naturally quite a few fans, but due to factors such as sub-critical mass and lack of institutional support from the community, there is no hardcore scene present here.
• While there are not hardcore scenes locally, such scenes do exist in places which are close by American geographic standards (e.g. London had ~150 at its ACX meetup and is only 2h30m away by train).

If you don't write a seperate post about it, you could reply to this comment with the results. (i have nothing further to add at this time.)

I think the question becomes much more social than technical. It's not about how to design the UI, it's about evolving cultural norms. I would say it's both, it's getting users to want to do something and having the UI make it easy for them to do it.

(As a side note, for some reason people have become more reluctant in the past decade to rebel against interfaces and the implicit messages sent by its design choices. Like, until about last year you could not get people to use Discord as a tool for serious work, even though it was better than Slack, simply because it was associated with gamers.)

I suppose a good starting point there would be to have a post talk in more detail about why this would be a good thing I think that would make sense as a next step.

From there, maybe the next step would be if you started to see post authors do things like making pledges or holding office hours. I think the first question that needs to be explored here is why they are not already doing something like this already. I've only ever made a single post to LessWrong, and to me sticking around in the comment section seemed like the obvious thing to do. I didn't do it out of a sense of duty, it just didn't make sense to me to spend all that time writing a post and not hang around afterwards to talk about it. (One serious possibility is that most people who write posts are a lot more introverted than I am, so instead of seeing it as a reward for their efforts, they view answering questions as a necessary evil.)

I think those things would be a step in the right direction, but I'd be surprised if they turned out to be sufficient. Remember, LessWrong already notifies the subset of the userbase most likely to reply (i.e. users who have already replied) when there are new comments, but those users choose to ignore them after ~2 weeks.

For things to actually change, I predict that we'd first need a widespread perception that this behaviour is a problem, then have various UI nudges put in place. The only way you'd get the desired behaviour change without that consensus is if the UI went beyond nudging and aggressively pushed it as the default.

I think points 2 and 3 are correct, but the thing I wanted to convey was that without strong explicit preferences for things to be different, it's unlikely that the necessary changes would be made.

I think that while 1 is often true in general, it is not true in this specific case. We already have the positive sum solution (notifications) which allows anyone to continue discussions for as long as they like without having to manually check for new replies, and this clearly isn't enough to unstick the norm of avoiding comment sections once a post is a few weeks old. This implies it would require a more drastic change, which likely involves making tradeoffs that will negatively impact people who are satisfied with the current homepage.