I think it'd be a good idea to keep a list of the ways we'd like to see LessWrong improve, sorted by popularity. Ie. email alerts for new responses.
So if you have an idea for how LessWrong could be better, post it in the comments. As people up/downvote, we'll get a sense for what the consensus opinions are.
I think there's a pretty good amount to be gained by improving LessWrong.
- I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (like email alerts for new responses).
- Conversations here are actually useful and productive. Facilitating conversation should thus lead to more of these useful and productive conversations (as opposed to leading to more of an unproductive type of conversation). (Sorry, I didn't word this well; hopefully you guys know what I mean.)
- Perhaps something big would come out of this list (like meet-ups). Perhaps rationality hack-a-thons (whatever that means)?
Note: I say "ways to improve" instead of "features" because "ways to improve" is more general.
This is reminding me of something I heard about, but don't know how to find-- a resource about informal but legal methods of hacking the government.
The example (and the only bit I remember) was about a woman who had an issue she couldn't get noticed by her local government. Then she got advice from someone who noticed that a politician who could affect the issue was in an uncontested election. So the woman with the issue signed up to be the opposition from the other party. The politician called her and said, "What do you want?" The woman has been active in politics ever since.
How to interface with your local government depends a lot of knowing how your local government works. For Berlin I can tell you where you can go if you want to talk with the politicians that matter about an issue but the same solution might be totally different for another location.