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cleonid comments on Open Thread, Apr. 06 - Apr. 12, 2015 - Less Wrong
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Comments (128)
Slate Star Codex fulfills this niche for me.
The lack of up- and down-voting and the limited threading kills it value for me, personally.
Cross post the ones you want to discuss here.
Yes, who's going to go through hundreds of comments to find the good ones. And based on the content they're replying to, there's probably some really good stuff in the comment section that's relatively unseen because of this.
1) Will its name be another pun on "Less Wrong", like it happened with More Right?
2) I still don't understand why it wouldn't simply be easier to create more subreddits for LW on different discussion topics, like it has been proposed a billion times in the past, as opposed to more and more websites springing up.
Doing any changes in LW software (based on Reddit software) is very hard. The software has a nice functionality, but it is a maintenance nightmare.
But we could just create a new subreddit on Reddit, and link it from here. (My preference is that it should not contain "lesswrong" or "rational" in the title. Just in case it goes very wrong.)
I understand. That's bound to happen anytime people request major features; coming up with cool new ideas is one thing, implementing them is quite another.
However, it's among the most popular feature requests I've noticed so far. Having themed subreddits would improve functionality for many users, and I'm not even talking about the specific suggestion in cleonid's comment. How many hours/days of coding or testing are we talking about?
(BTW, new account?)
I tried it once. In theory, it should have been super easy. In practice, after a few days of trying to make the damned software run on my computer, I gave up. Of course if I can't make it run, I cannot test any changes I make.
I think the code is freely available, so if you feel heroic, try it at home. Or use the Reddit code, which is almost the same thing.
I believe it would be easier to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Give me a year's salary, and I would be happy to rewrite the whole thing in Java, and then to maintain in. Any other way just seems more difficult. :(
Yep, I realized I write too much about my work. I do not suspect my colleagues to read LW, but they could still put my name on google and find something work-related in top results. So I am slightly reducing the risk in the future.
Could this be worth a kickstarter? My feeling is maybe yes for LW, and obviously possible if redditors would want a modifiable version of their code.
I would love to try it. The problem is, I never did a project of this size, so I don't know if I am overconfident. I think that when I wrote "year", that already compensated for the planning fallacy (my first reaction was something like "three months"). Or, maybe I spend the whole year doing this, and at the end we find out that the project is ready and works, but maybe it is much slower than the original version. Etc.
What would be a good solution? Maybe first build a smaller prototype, measure the speed, and decide whether to move on. But this careful iterative programming does not seem compatible with the kickstarter approach.
So, uhm, maybe the small prototype first, and then the kickstarter?
Is rewriting everything from scratch obviously better than forking some other existing forum software (e.g. Discourse) and adding features?
That of course depends on how much that "other existing forum software" is complicated, and how many features need to be changed to fit our needs.
To answer your question, it is not "obviously better"; you just have to make a probabilistic estimate. Sometime people make the mistake of reinventing the wheel, when a good (or even superior) version already exists. But sometimes also people spend a lot of time investigating existing options, only to find out that all of them have some major problem. (And this process can also cost a lot of time, and when it fails, you are left empty-handed at the end.) I have seen both of these situations in real life. The "don't reinvent the wheel" part gets very popular on internet, but people underestimate that even when a solution is already available, it can take a lot of time to learn how to use it properly (that means, not just use the software as an ordinary user, but also as an administrator, and even to be able to customize it; those are an order of magnitude more complex tasks).
I guess a reasonable first step would be to set a deadline, for example a month or two, to explore the existing alternatives. (But you have to set a deadline, because there will always be yet another obscure alternative you have not thoroughly examined yet.) Maybe a month would be enough, if we consider the fact that LW already runs for a few years and it was not replaced by an existing superior alternative.
I know even less about this sort of project than you do. My level of ignorance is shown by taking your claim that you could do it in a year at face value and only thinking about whether you could raise the money.
A test project sounds very reasonable. So does thinking about where you could go for competent advice about the difficulty and the risks of the project turning out badly.
I see. Too bad though; maybe future attempts, by you if you wish to try again or by others, would go better.
I wish I could reasonably undertake this myself, but 1) I never learned much coding beside the basics; 2) I remember maybe 5% of what I did learn; 3) these days I'm less motivated than a baby panda on Valium.
What about a baby panda on Viliam?
I don't think lesswrong has enough volume for it actually... it would spread out the discussion too much.
Easier for whom? The people making the proposals are not the same people who have the power to edit the LW site code, and my sense is that the people who have that power are generally no longer interested in (and/or do not have time for) making any significant use of it.
2) We are thinking of creating a new format for the discussions (based on the principles of collaborative filtering) that will be less vulnerable to various mind-killing mechanisms.
How would it differ from LW-style upvotes & downvotes?
Among other things, it will include an individualized recommendation system. In a political debate, the regular upvotes & downvotes system has many problems (for instance, it encourages partisanship).
Maybe "Frozen Mind," both as an awkward synonym for "cold head" and as opposed to "Mind-Killed?"
For me this (1) suggests killed rather than unkilled minds and (2) also suggests something to do with cryonics. Too distracting, I think.
[EDITED to fix an obvious typo.]
There was, at one point, an invite-only mailing list to discuss mind-killing issues. It did not see much use, and I am fundamentally pessimistic about forums that are open to the public that discuss politics.
as a definite no voter, the usefulness is not aimed at me, thats fine. you won't see me there. But it looks like there exists some interest.