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 want to make it very easy to filter on what you want to see and don't want to see, ideally building the equivalent of a personalized rationalist RSS. (Remember how you could read a bunch of blogs and then also comment on them in Google Reader?)
The main argument against tags and for subreddits is that different people will want different rules (what topics are appropriate, how people should talk to each other, etc.) and subreddits are a good way to make and enforce that distinction. If, say, the community neatly divided into "warm rationalists" and "cold rationalists" then we could have a warm subreddit and a cold subreddit which have parallel discussions on any shared topic. But there aren't similar clean distinctions between topics; we don't want, say, a SSC subreddit and a medicine subreddit because a post could easily fall in both categories.
I think that tags can solve the topic/norms problem too, but only if they're clearly visible. (If the boxes are a different color, or have a conspicuous border, or so on, then it'll be about as useful as having a different subdomain on the site.) But what exactly that'll look like requires a bit more discussion and familiarity with the codebase (to see what parts are easy and hard to accomplish at various levels).
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 want to make it very easy to filter on what you want to see and don't want to see, ideally building the equivalent of a personalized rationalist RSS. (Remember how you could read a bunch of blogs and then also comment on them in Google Reader?)
I think the appropriate historical allusion here is to the Blog Planet) aggregator and its lookalikes. Not that I'm p...
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!