malcolmocean comments on Upcoming LW Changes - Less Wrong

46 Post author: Vaniver 03 February 2016 05:34AM

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Comment author: Vaniver 03 February 2016 07:26:43PM *  8 points [-]

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.

Comment author: malcolmocean 04 February 2016 09:42:29AM 0 points [-]

Regarding "Less Wrong council" and StackOverflow...

What about meta.lesswrong.com? :P a LW to talk about LW? Or are we already meta enough...

Comment author: username2 04 February 2016 12:33:30PM 3 points [-]

More than enough. Meta is already more popular than everything else.

Comment author: gwillen 05 February 2016 02:07:00AM 1 point [-]

Even if we are already meta enough, I think a meta subreddit is a great idea. Giving a particular topic a specialized and dedicated location does serve to promote that topic, but it can also serve to remove it from more general locations, especially if that is requested or enforced, which can be a feature. (For example, discussion of stackoverflow is not allowed on stackoverflow; it is relegated to meta where people who don't want it can ignore it.)