About a month ago, Anna posted about the Importance of Less Wrong or Another Single Conversational Locus, followed shortly by Sarah Constantin's http://lesswrong.com/lw/o62/a_return_to_discussion/
There was a week or two of heavy-activity by some old timers. Since there's been a decent array of good posts but not quite as inspiring as the first week was and I don't know whether to think "we just need to try harder" or change tactics in some way.
Some thoughts:
- I do feel it's been better to quickly be able to see a lot of posts in the community in one place
- I don't think the quality of the comments is that good, which is a bit demotivating.
- on facebook, lots of great conversations happen in a low-friction way, and when someone starts being annoying, the person's who's facebook wall it is has the authority to delete comments with abandon, which I think is helpful.
- I could see the solution being to either continue trying to incentivize better LW comments, or to just have LW be "single locus for big important ideas, but discussion to flesh them out still happen in more casual environments"
- I'm frustrated that the intellectual projects on Less Wrong are largely silo'd from the Effective Altruism community, which I think could really use them.
- The Main RSS feed has a lot of subscribers (I think I recall "about 10k"), so having things posted there seems good.
- I think it's good to NOT have people automatically post things there, since that produced a lot of weird anxiety/tension on "is my post good enough for main? I dunno!"
- But, there's also not a clear path to get something promoted to Main, or a sense of which things are important enough for Main
- I notice that I (personally) feel an ugh response to link posts and don't like being taken away from LW when I'm browsing LW. I'm not sure why.
Curious if others have thoughts.
One important difference between LW and SSC: Everyone knows that SSC is Scott's blog. Scott is a dictator, and if he wants to announce his own opinions visibly, he can post them in a separate article, in a way no one else can compete with. It would be difficult to misrepresent Scott's opinions by posting on SSC.
LW is a group blog (Eliezer is no longer active here). So in addition to talk about individual users who post here, it also makes sense to ask what does the "hive mind" think, i.e. what is the general consensus here. Especially because we talk here about Aumann agreement theorem, wisdom of crowds, etc. So people can be curious about the "wisdom of the LW crowd".
Similarly, when a third party describes SSC, they cannot credibly accuse Scott of what someone else wrote in the comments; the dividing line between Scott and his comentariat is obvious. But it is quite easy to cherry-pick some LW comments and say "this is what the LW community actually believes".
There were repeated attempts to create a fake image of what the LW community believes, coming as far as I know from two sources. First, various "SJWs" were offended that some opinions were not banned here, and that some topics were allowed to be discussed calmly. (It doesn't matter whether the problematic opinion was a minority opinion, or even whether it was downvoted. The fact that it wasn't immediately censored is enough to cause outrage.)
Second, the neoreactionary community decided to use these accusations as a recruitment tool, and they started spreading a rumor that the rationalist community indeed supports them. There was a time when they tried to make LW about neoreaction, by repeatedly creating discussion threads about themselves. Such as: "Political thread: neoreactionaries, tell me what do you find most rational about neoreaction"; obviously fishing for positive opinions. Then they used such threads as a "proof" that rationalists indeed find neoreaction very rational, etc. -- After some time they gave up and disappeared. Only Eugine remained here, creating endless sockpuppets for downvoting anti-nr comments, and upvoting pro-nr comments, persistently maintaining the illusion of neoreaction being overrepresented (or even represented) in the rationalist comminity.
tl;dr -- on LW people can play astroturfing games about "what the rationalist community actually believes", and it regularly happens, and it is very annoying for those who recognize they are being manipulated; on SSC such games don't make sense, because Scott can make his opinion quite clear
They can accuse Scott of being the sort of fascist who would have a [cherry-picking two or three comments that aren't completely in approval of the latest Salon thinkpiece] far-right extremist commentariat. And they do.