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Lumifer comments on Turning the Technical Crank - Less Wrong
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Comments (134)
Yep. That is THE problem that LW has to solve.
Notice how it doesn't care about which protocols are used to shuffle which bits back and forth.
Protocols have an impact on discussion, and discussion has an impact on what articles people write.
Otherwise, Eliezer could have posted his Sequences on 4chan.
Not protocols. High-level structure of a BBS/mailing list/forum/Twitter/etc. Protocols (in the technical sense) provide some constraints on what kind of structures can be built on their basis, but there are enough degrees of freedom to construct very different things on top of the same protocols.
So the difference between LW and 4chan is protocols..? X-)
And now that I actually write it down and compare it to previous online communities (including a few mixed online/offline) I've been part of and loved, and which have universally followed the same pattern of growth, overgrowth, loss of some driving valuable members without obvious replacement, slow decay into irrelevance (to me; at least 2 of them are going strong, just with a different feel than when I was involved)), I'm pretty pessimistic.
I'm going to put some effort into being OK with LW as it is, enjoying the parts I enjoy and being willing to follow those parts I'm missing to their new homes.
This fits my own prior experience of the life cycle of a community -- but when my previous community failed, a fragment of it broke off and rebuilt itself in a few form. That fragment still exists as a coherent tribe more than a decade later, and I still love it even if I disagree with certain, uh, technical decisions surrounding the splintering process.
So it's not impossible.
Oh, indeed - fragments or even whole (slightly altered) communities live on. Two of my prior identity-tied groups are still meeting and going strong, they're just not producing original research or even super-deep discussions on their topics. I still have fond feelings toward them, but I don't participate enough to consider them part of my identity.
This is primarily a reminder to myself that this is okay. I can enjoy LW for what it is rather than lamenting what it was.