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Vaniver comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong
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Comments (312)
I vote for both plans at once!
1) Make the current LW read-only. All content is still accessible, but commenting and voting is disabled. The discussion section is closed as well. Let things rest for a month or so.
2) Announce that during the next year, LW will have one post per week, at a specified time. There will be an email address where anyone can send their submissions, whereupon a horribly secretive and biased group of editors will select the best one each week, aiming for Eliezer quality or higher. The prominent posters you've contacted should create enough good content for the first couple months. Voting will be disabled for posts, and enabled only for comments. There will also be one monthly open thread for unstructured discussion.
I don't think anything short of that would work. LW's problem is the decline in quality, so the fix should be quality-oriented, not quantity-oriented.
Functionally, this is turning LW into a magazine with one article per week. I think that's a decent approach, though I have some reservations.
Remember the shift from OB to LW, and one of the big changes being that people went from having to email Hanson about posting something (and maybe getting shot down) to being able to post something themselves. I worry that this creates too much in the way of inconvenience and risk of failure for posters, and means that they'll post it somewhere else instead of on LW.
But I think the tournament nature of it--there's a post every week, and so we need people to contribute, and if your post doesn't make it (or gets waitlisted or so on) it's not because you're absolutely bad, just relatively bad--does improve the idea significantly.
I'm also not sure how well this plays with the fragmentation in interests of people in the community.
Re: fragmentation of interests. Posts on LessWrong seem to easily slide into a number of clear categories (epistemic rationality, fighting akrasia, decision theory math, social events...) It would be great if the site was organized to group posts together, so that if I don't know math and just want to follow the best self-help tips it would be easy to do so.
This can work very well with the "one post a week" idea, which I'm in favor of. Consistent schedule + high quality is what keeps people coming back. That's why so many webcomics religiously stick to their posting schedule (like XKCD's M-W-F). We can have a post every X days in each of 3-4 basic categories, so I'll know that one Wednesday is AI-post day, the next Saturday is akrasia post day, the next Wednesday is social post day etc.
The main challenge would be getting enough good posts, two thoughts on that:
If the good writers contribute enough stuff upfront it can create a good buffer that will allow the editors to plan the best schedule, i.e. how many days between posts can be kept consistently.
I think a lot of people are already intimidated about posting given the very high standards. If quality is a concern more than quantity, I don't think that people with something important to say will be too discouraged by having to submit to moderation. A lot of us have our own blogs, tumblrs, Facebooks etc. Since I know that LW has a much wider reach than my own blog, I wouldn't mind trying to "win the week" on LW first, and posting on my platform as a fallback if I don't make it.
Waiting for moderation on what you wrote requires delaying gratification, which is very hard... but not something that a real rationalist would have trouble overcoming, no? ;-)
I agree about fragmentation, but people's interests were always diverse. One way or another, LW needs to find its voice. That's a hard problem that the editors will have to work on.