Per some recent discussions with Elo and others, I'm working on a mockup of some new Home page designs. The current one has the following issues:
I had my spouse and some friends look at it, because they fulfill a few conditions: They have never seen the site before, and they are the type of person I'd like to encourage to contribute (smart, good writers, thoughtful). Their feedback was discouraging. They all indicated confusion or intimidation. Several rationalist-adjacent...
Count me as equal parts hopeful and skeptical.
I think the best part of LW was the content—articles by EY and the dude who writes at SSC being on the top of that list. Oh, and Luke wrote some cool stuff, too. There have been others, but the main consistent top posters are out as far as I can tell. If you can find good content, you will win in this LW reboot mission, even if no other changes are made.
Otherwise, I think you'll need huge changes to Make LW Great Again™. It's basically a good rationality/math-y reddit sub with an AI and EA focus. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not terribly novel or special either.
The pure cynic in me says almost nothing has demonstrably changed in the 3+ years (maybe more?) I've been reading here (other than the decline in good content) and I've no reason to believe this effort will yield anything.
Anyway, sincere kudos to you for your efforts. I like LW and support common sense efforts to improve it.
Couple ideas off the top off my head:
Come up with a 2.0 karma system. Reddit-style karma is cool and functional, but I bet the finest minds at LW could come up with something that fosters even more rational discussion. Maybe a drop-down box wit
I'm very happy about the prospect of reviving LW and maybe having some of the diaspora return!
Is there anything I can do to help with this? I love engaging in the comments, and I would love to (be able to) write posts that people appreciate, but I can't really do either for hardcore technical discussions of e.g. decision theory. I would be happy to start posting "things I'd love to discuss with rationalists", if & when a new social/thematic focus is agreed on. Examples: theories of e.g. biology or history from popular books I read; programming & tech topics; many subjects that would be at home in SSC posts (except in lower quality, obviously).
I could submit patches, but in practice I don't have the time to do so. I would happily donate some hundreds of dollars (e.g. for someone else to develop those patches), to increase the chance of reviving LW or to speed it up. I'm guessing it wouldn't be very useful unless others donate too, and you'll probably tell me to donate to MIRI instead, but I'm throwing it out there. What else can I do?
Just my personal opinion, but I think that you should write about "your" topics, e.g. if you are interested in biology and you know things that (a) can be interesting for intelligent laymen, (b) are not obvious for most people, and (c) you feel sufficiently certain that the information is correct, go ahead!
In my experience when people try to force themselves to write or talk about topics they don't deeply understand, but they feel they have some kind of "rationalist duty" to write yet another article or make yet another lecture about Kahneman or Bayes, it often ends badly.
The valuable part is your expertise, whether it is your profession or merely a hobby.
Nice to see someone taking the lead! I've been looking for something to work on, and I'd be proud to help rebuild LW. I'll send you a message.
Please stop me if I'm getting spammy (This will be my last non-reply comment on this post) but I just found this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/929/less_wrong_mentoring_network/
while I was looking through the FAQ for things to incorporate on the home page. I think this is still a great idea. I actually have some experience with mentoring programs, and would be willing to assist with a more formal process.
I'm interested in setting up the dev environment. But I'm running into technical issues setting up the VM etc. I expect more such questions will come up. What is the right place to discuss these? Perhaps a channel on the slack? Or do we want something more permanent to help new contributors?
Would you mind putting links to the issue tracker items as you update this post, and editing/updating the post to keep track of which issues have open/no assignment?
Added some details about technical changes, but not at the detail where someone could start producing code (for anything besides linkposts). My hope is to put more atomic things as issues; if there are, say, three changes to make to the tagging system, my current thought is that each of those deserves an issue (unless they depend on each other in a deep way).
The overarching theme with tags is this: we don't want to silo content for people, because that's a recipe for people missing out on content ("Wait, there's a main section?"). But we also wan...
I'm really excited about these changes but I do tend to lean toward optimism bias, so take it with a grain of salt.
My primary interest for the changes would be to make LW more accessible and welcoming to newbies, so lots of the changes proposed here are good. I'd especially welcome a prominent section for new people engaging with LW to guide them through the process well. Perhaps a specific project could be guiding newbies into engaging with LW well by tracking points where they might fall off?
It looks like new accounts are set up with a comment and post threshold of around -3 so that heavily downvoted posts are not displayed in the Discussion thread list and comments in threads are minimized unless you choose to expand them. However, it doesn't look like the default view when looking at the website without an account does the same. If we want to minimize exposure of heavily downvoted threads, it could be good to set up the website so that it doesn't display them on the Discussion thread list for a non-user.
At some point, when there is a clear vision of what is going to be built I'd suggest a crowd funding campaign in order to raise funds for development.
It looks like the development VM is up and running, thanks to changes just merged into the main repo. Thanks brendanlong and wezm!
To celebrate, I opened four new issues. Each is a fairly small feature that will help in some fashion:
Allowing linkposts seems like an easy way to "bring the diaspora back" to LW while still allowing everyone to maintain their own branding and control (and, if they insist on it, distance). It might also be easy!
Shutting down new posts to Main is a precursor to new content organization (which may be subreddits sepa
I think it would be good to have a limit of posts/per/day for people with karma 10 votes cast on their posts.
Personally I'm of the ilk that the wrong change is better than no changes at all, because at least things are moving again. Excited to see what happens!
On a tangential note: it would be cute for LW to acquire a collection of resident chat bots, preferably ones which could be dissected and rewired by all and sundry. Erecting defences against chat bots run amok would also be enlightening :-)
I'm disappointed that the details listed about social changes are so vague.
I would love to see some kind of Less Wrong council that meets regularly and discusses future directions. One problem at the moment is the lack of transparency about decisions - we generally don't know if an idea has even been considered or why they have been rejected.
I'm disappointed that the details listed about social changes are so vague.
I committed somewhere to have a post on this out on Tuesday, so I went with what I had ready at the time. Details will follow.
I would love to see some kind of Less Wrong council that meets regularly and discusses future directions. One problem at the moment is the lack of transparency about decisions - we generally don't know if an idea has even been considered or why they have been rejected.
What sort of medium do you think is best for this? A Slack chat? A regular thread here?
For almost everything, I'm happy with increased transparency. Whether we should move towards a more StackOverflow-like karma model where voting is an earned privilege is an example of something where an open discussion would be welcome, so everyone can get a sense of the pro and con arguments. But I can't guarantee transparency about all decisions, because there are some things that are much easier to discuss in private. For example, consider hg00's comment calling for the bans of VoiceOfRa (who was banned) and Lumifer (who isn't banned). It seems to me that the number of cases where a ban decision will be swayed by public discussion is nowhere near large enough to justify the costs of public discussions of ban decisions.
Disclaimer: I'm not a voice of authority, I'm just participating in the conversation and helping a little.
Social change is a lot "fuzzier" than technical change. Not only that, it requires looking at what makes a community successful, which Less Wrong communities ARE successful, and how we can continue to use this site to generate more successful communities. That's a time commitment.
Sometimes, technical changes ARE social changes. It's not the hill I'm dying on, by any means, but I really do think that changes to the voting structure and the home page will help people participate. A section of the site that is for "rationalists talking to rationalists" rather than "rationalists talking ABOUT rationality" may also be helpful.
Thanks to the reaction to this article and some conversations, I'm convinced that it's worth trying to renovate and restore LW. Eliezer, Nate, and Matt Fallshaw are all on board and have empowered me as an editor to see what we can do about reshaping LW to meet what the community currently needs. This involves a combination of technical changes and social changes, which we'll try to make transparently and non-intrusively.
Technical Changes
Changes will be tracked as issues on the LW issue tracker here. Volunteer contributions very welcome and will be rewarded with karma, and if you'd like to be paid for spending a solid block of high-priority time on this get in touch with me. If you'd like to help, for now I recommend setting up a dev environment (as laid out here and here).
Some technical changes (links to the issues in the issue tracker):
--Nick_Tarleton
This is something I care about quite a bit! Ideally, the three people above would scrutinize every change and determine whether or not it's worthwhile. In practice, they're all extremely busy, and as I'm only very busy I've been deputized to handle whether or not change will be accepted. If you're unsure about a change, talk to me.
Trike still maintains the site, and so it's still a Trike dev's call when a change will make its way to production (or if it's too buggy to accept). We've got a turnaround time guarantee from Matt for any time-sensitive changes (which I imagine few changes will be).
Social Changes
The rationalist community is a different beast than it was years ago, and many people have shifted away from Less Wrong. Bringing them back needs to involve more than asking nicely, or the same problems will appear again.
Epistemic rationality will remain a core focus of LessWrong, and the sorts of confusion that you find elsewhere will continue to not fly here. But the forces that push people from Main to Discussion to Open Threads to other sites need to be explicitly counteracted.
One aspect is that just like emotion is part of rationality, informality is part of the rationalist community.
--Alicorn
Another aspect is dealing with the deepening and specializing interests of the community.
A third aspect is focusing on effective communication. One of the core determinants of professional and personal success is being able to communicate challenging topics and emotions effectively with other humans. The applications for both instrumental and epistemic rationality are clear, and explicitly seeking to cultivate this skill without losing the commitment to rationality will both make LW a more pleasant place to visit and (one hopes) allow LWers to win more in their lives. But this is a long project, whose details this paragraph is too short to contain. I don't have a current anticipated date for when I'll be ready to talk more about this.
I expect to edit this post over the coming days, and as I do, I'll make comments to highlight the changes. Thanks for reading!