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David_Gerard comments on Reading the Sequences before Starting to Post: Costs and Benefits - Less Wrong
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I read lots of the posts before joining, I didn't sit down to actually "Read the sequences" until I'd been here a few months.
At least it's not a terribly dense million words.
I can't say I came out of it thinking a huge amount I didn't already - to read the sequences is not, in fact, to take on board everything in them wholesale - but it was most educational in local jargon and cultural reference points. (e.g. Watching ciphergoth try to explain many-worlds decoherence to someone by moving his hands to illustrate configuration space and knowing what he was trying to depict because I remembered the precise diagrams he was attempting to render in gestures.)
I now have a browser window in which I'm slowly reading all of LessWrong in chronological order - all those posts by people who aren't EY. Again, the main result I expect from this is understanding the local lay of the land. Like reading the sequences, it's a project strictly for my "Internet as television" time. Approaching LessWrong itself as a casual cultural and anthropological study: how does this machine made of people actually work?
That's an amazing project, and I hope you eventually turn this knowledge into a post--I think the community would definitely benefit from a comprehensive study of its past.
What? No, no! Sorry, I meant in the sense of looking at it all for my own amusement, certainly nothing academic or likely even keeping details! I thought that was clear when I said this was strictly for "Internet as television" time - if it wasn't just for my own amusement, I wouldn't bother. Writing up anything (beyond something irritating and idiosyncratic on RW) is entirely too much like work. Besides, I've already blown it in observer effect ...
Well, if any insights happen to pop into your head during this "Internet as television" time, and you happen to write them down, I for one would be interested in reading them since you seem to have deep knowledge of other worthwhile online communities.
Well, it is a personal fascination. Mostly from trying to work out how the heck to get Wikipedia to work better. I doubt I have any greater wisdom than anyone else who's been online since Usenet to write a report of concerning LW.
(I have seen someone on LW call Wikipedia a triumph of rational planning. No, it really never was - we got lucky, lots and lots, as we were all making up encyclopedia writing as we went along. Lots of decisions could easily have gone either way. Nobody understands how this thing works or how to fix what doesn't work. We sort of make suggestions at the edges of things that seem to be good ideas, and the WMF spends money on the ones that require more than individual brilliance to implement.)