1) A crazy idea -- how about creating a "welcoming committee"; a group of people who would offer to spend some of their time welcoming the new LW members personally (on Skype). They would be volunteers who see the community aspect of LW as important, but also would have to be accepted by the LW vote as representatives of the community (instead of e.g. people who have incompatible ideas, and try to abuse LW for spreading their personal goals).
Now every new user would have an opportunity (and be encouraged) to request e.g. two 10-minutes talks with two members of the "welcoming committee". The new user would provide a short introduction about themselves (hobbies, what do they expect from LW), and the committee would contact them and have a talk. There would be an (unenforceable) expectation that in return, the new user will write an article on LW, and generally, start being active in the community, if they are compatible with the community.
2) A part of the impression of LW decay could be an artifact of how article publishing works here. The popularity of an author grows gradually, but when a well-known author leaves, it is visible. If we imagine the article quality graph, it could be a curve with a lot of small growth (which we don't notice) and an occasional sharp drop (noticed by many).
For example, someone new would come, post an article in Discussion with 5 karma, a month later another with 15 karma, yet a month later an article with 30 karma would get to Main, then five more articles in Main... and then the person would decide to start their own blog. What would be our impression of this whole process? Probably that LW is getting worse than before, because yet another important author has left. (We wouldn't contrast the end situation with what was before the author came to LW.)
3) Related to recent article by Robin Hanson and the discussion below it: people often don't read sources for information per se, but for information useful socially. For example, if you could read two articles in a newspaper, equally useful, but one published today and another published a year ago, you would prefer to read the article written today, because then you can go out and have a debate with people about it.
Analogically, LessWrong became "old news". The great old articles (from Sequences, but also by Yvain, lukeprog, etc.) are old. Reading them now for the first time is lower-status than having them read when they were published. MIRI and CFAR themselves are "old news"; they exist, just like they have existed years before. There is no new exciting topic for the new readers. It is like joining an already huge pyramid scheme at the bottom.
This could potentially be helped by creating sub-communities on LW. The new members were not here when LW started, but they can still participate at starting some subgroup, and get status there. (Similarly how people who start a local LW meetup can get high status for that.)
I like the idea of a welcome committee and am willing to spearhead it.
TLDR: I had idea to apply some tools I learned on coursera to our community in order to grow it better. I wanted to start some organized thinking about goals our community has, and offer some materials for people who are eager to work on it, but are maybe lost or need ideas.
Yesterday I did a course on coursera.org. It's called "Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses, Part I". (I play lectures often at x2.5 so I can do 5 weeks course in one day)
Though this course seems obvious, it'd say pretty worth 3 hours, so look it up. (It's hard to say how much is hindsight and how much is actually too easy and basic) I got some ideas sorted, and I saw the tools. I'm not an expert now, obviously, but at least i can see when things are done in unprofessional manner, and it can help you understand what follows.
When growing anything (company, community, ...) you have different options. You should not opt for everything, because you will be spread thin. You should grow with measure, so that people can follow, and so that you can do it right. This is the essence of the course. Rest is focused on ways of growing.
This was informative part of this article. Rest is some thoughts that just came to my mind that I would like to share. Hopefully I inspire some of you, and start some organized thinking about this community.
This community is some kind of organization, and it has a goal. To be precise, it probably has two goals, as I see it:
Note that second focus is to grow.
I will just plainly write down some claims this course made:
In order to grow:
1. I guess no-one is against this. After all, we are all here to grow.
2. My guess is that our customers could be defined as new members. So, first steps someone makes here are responsibility of this organization. After, when they get into rationality more, when they start working on themselves, they become employees. That's at least how it works in my head. Book on sequences is a good step here since it helps to have it all organized in one pdf.
3. this is actually where it all started. We are just a bunch of people with common drive to be more rational. There are meetups, but that's it. I guess some people see EY as some kind of leader, but even if he were one, that's not an organization. My first idea is to create some kind of separation of topics, reddit-like. (With or without moderators, we can change that at any point if one option does not work.)
For example, I'm fed with AI topics. When i see AI, I literally stop reading. I don't even think it's rational to force that idea so much. I understand the core of this community is in that business, but:
So, I would STRONGLY encourage new topics, and I would like to see some kind of classification. If I want to find out about AI, I want to know where to look, and if I don't want to read about it, I want to know how to avoid it. If I want to read about self-improvement, I want to know where to find it. Who knows, after some rough classification people start to do finer ones, and discuss how to increase memory without being spammed with procrastination. I think this could help the first goal (to make existing members more rational) since it would give them some overview.
I also think this would reduce cult-ism, since it would add diversity, and loose the "meta".
4. Understatement. Anyone who worked, or read anything about work knows how important plan is. It is OBLIGATORY. Essential. (See course https://www.coursera.org/learn/work-smarter-not-harder/outline )
5. I think this is not very important to us. There are lots of people here. Many enthusiasts. However, this should be some kind of guideline to make a good plan, and to tell us how much resources to devote to each problem.
In conclusion, I understand these things are big. But growth means change. (There is some EY quote on this, I think:not every change is improvement, but every improvement is a change, correct me if I'm wrong.) Humans did not evolve this far by being better, but by socializing and cooperating. So I think we should move from herd to organization.