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.
Inflation.
If everyone gets a gold star for most every post, gold stars lose any value.
I think this makes grossly false assumptions about how human psychology actually works.
Imagine applying that logic to, for example, computer games. Hey, let's get rid all achievements and ranks that are handed out willy nilly to people who just turn up and play the game. Instead, you will now only get any recognition for your efforts if you are a lot better than average.
It's funny how successful games almost always hand out lots of 'inflationary' gold stars just for turning up and playing. To build the user-base, you give people rewards for their efforts, not punishments for falling in the bottom 90%.