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philh comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong
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(I haven't RTFA or most of the comments yet.)
When ESRogs started /r/RationalistDiaspora, that's what I was hoping it would become.
I think the main thing that went wrong, is that not enough people saw it. It didn't pick up critical mass, or even self-sustaining mass. Now, ESRogs seems to be the only submitter, and there's not enough voting to act as a filter or to make links show up on my reddit front page.
But there's nothing stopping it from becoming that thing, if a bunch of people did start using it all at once. To that end, I just submitted something.
I would love there to be a single, canonical rationality-related link aggregator (with tags and other ways of categorizing!), but I don't want it to be on Reddit. Reddit has an implicit culture of transience. You can't discuss too old posts. Links are ordered chronologically. Links can't be grouped, categorized. It's hard to search for old or obscure links.
OTOH maybe a link aggregator should be transient, because the nature of blogs, news sites, Facebook feeds, and tumblr posts is transient too. Today Qiaochu Yuan or Scott Alexander found this particular article interesting; in a year's time this article is irrelevant.
There's also link rot, and many old links for interesting material are 404.
Maybe we shouldn't aggregate links at all, but aggregate the knowledge itself. Therefore something similar to LW wiki. But I strongly believe wiki is an overrated model for aggregating knowledge and it wouldn't work for aggregating rationality-related knowledge.
There should be a rationality knowledge base, something that transcends wikis, FAQs, tutorials, blog posts, link posts, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia outlines. Maybe it would require thinking intensely for 5 minutes (like how CFAR teaches), maybe it would require coming up with completely new concepts and code.
But this knowledge base would have to heavily incentivize people to contribute to it, otherwise the actual knowledge is never going to be written. Counter-intuitively, wikis are terrible at incentivizing contribution.
I think a knowledge aggregator fills a different purpose from a link aggregator. When someone has an idea they want to explore, they write something about it, and that can be put in a link aggregator. By default it's not yet ready for a knowledge aggregator. But it's more likely to become ready if people see it and discuss it.
I think transience is okay for a link aggregator.
Link flair isn't perfect, but it allows this.