Discussion is filled with META, MEETUP, SEQ RERUN, links to boring barely-relevant articles
The website structure needs to be changed. "Main" and "Discussion" simply do not reflect the LW content today.
We should have a separate "Forum" (or some other name) category for all the non-article discussion threads like Open Thread, Media Thread, Group Rationality Thread, and stuff like this.
Then, the "Discussion" should be renamed to "Articles" (and possibly "Main" to "Main Articles") to make it obvious what belongs there.
Everything else should be downvoted; optionally with a comment: "This belongs to the Open Thread". (And if the author says they didn't know that Open Thread exists, there is something seriously wrong... about the structure of the website.)
I feel like I wrote this to the LW discussions at least dozen times...
there's nothing interesting to talk about anymore.
I think there are interesting things here. They are just drowned in too many less interesting things.
Let's look at the numbers: 6 articles so far on Dec 9th; 6 articles on Dec 8th; 4 articles on Dec 7th; 11 articles on Dec 6th; 8 articles on Dec 5th; and some of the articles from Dec 4th -- less than one week ago -- already don't fit on the first "Discussion" page. (The exact numbers may differ depending on your Preferences settings.) The page is scrolling insanely fast. If I stopped reading LW for one week, I would have problem to catch up with all the new stuff; I would probably just skip some of that. That's not good if we have too much stuff, but low average quality.
We don't downvote enough. Let me explain -- if someone makes a post that is not very good, but is not completely stupid or trolling also, it will almost certainly gain more upvotes that downvotes. Because it feels wrong to punish someone only for being uninteresting. But in terms of rewarding/punishing behavior, we probably should punish them. If we try to be too friendly, the site will become boring, precisely because most of the social talk is not about giving new information.
Perhaps it could help to use some timeless deciding. If you read an article, ask yourself a question: "If the next week here would be 10 new articles like this, would it make LW better or worse?" If the answer is worse, downvote it. Because although the same author will not write 10 more articles like this during the next week, other authors will.
TL;DR -- I think the Eternal September is most visible on the article level, because it is not obvious what kind of content belongs here. "Discussion" is horribly misleading -- we don't want discussion-level articles. That's what the comments and Open Threads are for.
Various people raised concerns that growth might ruin the culture after reading my "LessWrong could grow a lot" thread. There has been some discussion about whether endless September, a phenomenon that kills online discussion groups, is a significant threat to LessWrong and what can be done. I really care about it, so I volunteered to code a solution myself for free if needed. Luke invited debate on the subject (the debate is here) and will be sent the results of this poll and asked to make a decision. It was suggested by him in an email that I wait a little while and then post my poll (meta threads are apparently annoying to some, so we let people cool off). Here it is, preceded by a Cliff's notes summary of the concerns.
Why this is worth your consideration:
- Yvain and I checked the IQ figures in the survey against other data this time, and the good news is that it's more believable that the average LessWronger is gifted. The bad news is that LessWrong's IQ average has decreased on each survey. It can be argued that it's not decreasing by a lot or we don't have enough data, but if the data is good, LessWrong's average has lost 52% of it's giftedness since March of 2009.
- Eliezer documented the arrival of poseurs (people who superficially copycat cultural behaviors - they are reported to over-run subcultures) which he termed "Undiscriminating Skeptics".
- Efforts to grow LessWrong could trigger an overwhelming deluge of newbies.
- LessWrong registrations have been increasing fast and it's possible that growth could outstrip acculturation capacity. (Chart here)
- The Singularity Summit appears to cause a deluge of new users that may have similar effect to the September deluges of college freshman that endless September is named after. (This chart shows a spike correlated with the 2011 summit where 921 users joined that month, which is roughly equal to the total number of active users LW tends to have in a month if you go by the surveys or Vladmir's wget.)
- A Slashdot effect could result in a tsunami of new users if a publication with lots of readers like the Wall Street Journal (they used LessWrong data in this article) decides to write an article on LessWrong.
- The sequences contain a lot of the culture and are long meaning that "TLDR" may make LessWrong vulnerable to cultural disintegration. (New users may not know how detailed LW culture is or that the sequences contain so much culture. I didn't.)
- Eliezer said in August that the site was "seriously going to hell" due to trolls.
- A lot of people raised concerns.
Two Theories on How Online Cultures Die:
Overwhelming user influx.
There are too many new users to be acculturated by older members, so they form their own, larger new culture and dominate the group.
Trending toward the mean.
A group forms because people who are very different want a place to be different together. The group attracts more people that are closer to mainstream than people who are equally different because there are more mainstream people than different people. The larger group attracts people who are even less different in the original group's way for similar reasons. The original group is slowly overwhelmed by people who will never understand because they are too different.
Poll Link:
Endless September Poll.
Request for Feedback:
In addition to constructive criticism, I'd also like the following:
Your observations of a decline or increase in quality, culture or enjoyment at LessWrong, if any.
Ideas to protect the culture.
Ideas for tracking cultural erosion.