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Alicorn comments on Poll - Is endless September a threat to LW and what should be done? - Less Wrong
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So far, I've been more annoyed on LessWrong by people reacting to fear of "cultural erosion" than by any extant symptoms of same.
The fear is that this is due to a selection effect. Of the people I know through LW, a disappointing number have stopped reading the site. One of my hobbies, for over a decade now, has been posting on forums, and so the only way I'd stop reading / posting on LW is if I find a forum more relevant to my interests. (For the curious, I've moved from 3rd edition D&D to xkcd to here over that timeframe, and only post in xkcd's MLP and gaming threads these days.) For many of the former LWers I know, forum-posting isn't one of their hobbies, and they came here for the excellent content, primarily by EY. Now that there aren't blog posts that they want to read frequently enough, they don't come, and I'm not sure that any of them even know that EY has started posting a new sequence.
I think that this fear is mostly misplaced, because the people in that class generally aren't the people posting the good content, and I think any attempt to improve LW should be along the lines of "more visible good content" and not "less bad content," but it's important for evaporative cooling reasons to periodically assess the state of content on LW.
Not only do communities have a life cycle, people's membership in communities does. People give all sorts of reasons for leaving a community (e.g. boredom, other interests, deciding the community is full of assholes, an incident they write over one megabyte of text complaining about), but the length of participation is typically 12 to 18 months regardless. Anything over that, you're a previous generation.
So I wouldn't be disappointed unless they stopped before 12-18 months.
Why not both?
Speaking for myself, a lot of bad content would make me less likely to post good content. My instincts tell me -- if other people don't bother here with quality, why should I?
I separate those because I think the second is a distraction. It seems to me that the primary, and perhaps only, benefit from reducing bad content is increasing the visibility of good content.
It still seems like there are incentives- better posts will yield more karma- and I suspect it matters who the other people who don't bother are. Right now, we have spammers (particularly on the wiki) who don't bother at all with being helpful. Does that make you more likely to post commercial links on the wiki? If everyone you thought was more insightful than you stopped bothering to write posts and comments, then it seems likely that you would wonder what the benefit to putting more effort into LW was. More high quality posts seems useful as an aspirational incentive.
I wonder if it would make a big difference to add email notifications... perhaps the type where you only receive the notification when something over X number of karma is posted?
That would keep users from forgetting about the site entirely. And draw more attention and karma (aka positive reinforcement) to those who post quality things.
Hmm that would also keep older users logging in, which would help combat both trending toward the mean and new users outstripping acculturation capacity.
I think that would bring back only the most marginally interested users, and would be likely to annoy a good many people who'd drifted away.
Notification of posts with karma above a chosen threshold might be better.
For that matter, a customizable LW which you could choose to only see posts with karma above a threshold might be good. It would be even better if posts could also be selected/deselected by subject, but that sounds like a hard problem.
I am annoyed by both. Not enough to consider leaving this weedy garden yet.
Same here, but I have no clue how to address this problem. I suspect making discussion posts complaining about people complaining about cultural erosion would be the wrong approach.
(nevermind)
The possibility still warrants consideration, even if it isn't actively harming the site
I think the idea is that considering the possibility is actively harming the site.
Which would be .. problematic.
If we've gotten to the point where we refuse to think because we're afraid of where it'll lead, then this place really is dead.
That granted, there are conversations it's not worth having.
probably, but this isn't one of them.
I suspect you are correct, and if it doesn't go very very badly indeed, I am very confident of it.