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drc500free comments on Intellectual insularity and productivity - Less Wrong
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Comments (169)
1) Insularity: I actually don't think LW is all that insular. Users often link to science articles, ask for opinions on other writers, discuss films and books, etc. Exactly what set of sites or communities is LW being compared to here when you call it insular?
2) Growth (in terms of users): This is quantifiable. http://www.google.com/trends/?q=less+wrong Looks like a big jump at the beginning of 2011, perhaps when HPMoR took off, and fairly constant since. Anyway, I'm not sure that becoming big in terms of raw users is all that much of a goal, although high-quality users certainly is (at least to me).
3) Growth (in terms of articles): I agree this is a problem. There are weird incentives with karma for main vs discussion for getting promoted and such, which probably turns off people from writing a "series" of posts.
4) Organization of content in useful chunks: Also agree that this is a problem. Though we often talk about Anki, the actual Anki flashcards available are quite poor (as I found when I tried to download ones for cognitive bias). Same with the organization of the so-called sequences.
I think #1 and #2 are not that important. I think #3 and #4 are ultimately site formatting problems. There have been many suggestions made, like tweaks to the karma system, subreddits, and etc. Given the ethos of the sequences, I'm surprised that some of these changes haven't been tested in a trial period to see whether it improves the quality of the content. That seems the obvious play.
For me, (1) and (2) are linked. I dabbled on LW, and presented some of my own ideas in the comments sections. None of them piqued anyone's interest, even if they were on pillar topics like FAI. I stopped being interested in LW, because:
I don't just come to a site like LW to self-improve. I come to engage with intelligent, rational people. I don't get the new site layout. The "Posts" vs "Discussion" split appears totally arbitrary now that they are parallel. Is this place a wiki or a forum or a social news site? Everything is very unfocused, and there isn't enough of a userbase to keep that many interesting discussions going. I check in maybe once a month now, and it looks more and more like a knowledge-management site than a discussion forum.
I agree that it can be difficult to get a start commenting on LW. The karma system favors regulars, because people skip over comments whose user names they do not recognize and/or have low votes, and this is a self-reinforcing process. Again I think experimenting, in this case with the way comments are presented, could be beneficial.
Fair enough. It is definitely a bit of a turn-off to get downvotes with no comments, but every community has their common ways of communicating.
I actually prefer Luke as an article writer. Eliezer is the better writer in terms of clarity and language skills, but Luke is a better researcher and brings up a lot of interesting ideas.
I agree that Main isn't very active lately, but Discussion tends to have fairly good discussions.
It definitely seems like Main is an announcement section for meetups, and Discussion is where discussions happen.
I'll check out some of Luke's articles!