1) A crazy idea -- how about creating a "welcoming committee"; a group of people who would offer to spend some of their time welcoming the new LW members personally (on Skype). They would be volunteers who see the community aspect of LW as important, but also would have to be accepted by the LW vote as representatives of the community (instead of e.g. people who have incompatible ideas, and try to abuse LW for spreading their personal goals).
Now every new user would have an opportunity (and be encouraged) to request e.g. two 10-minutes talks with two members of the "welcoming committee". The new user would provide a short introduction about themselves (hobbies, what do they expect from LW), and the committee would contact them and have a talk. There would be an (unenforceable) expectation that in return, the new user will write an article on LW, and generally, start being active in the community, if they are compatible with the community.
2) A part of the impression of LW decay could be an artifact of how article publishing works here. The popularity of an author grows gradually, but when a well-known author leaves, it is visible. If we imagine the article qualit...
One more rarely mentioned thing.
There is an expression (mostly in business): "take ownership of a problem". If you take ownership of an issue, it is now yours -- you're responsible for it, it's up to you to find ways to deal with it, fix it, keep working whatever needs to be working, etc. You cannot say "not my problem, somebody else will fix it" any more.
No one "owns" LW.
I could be wrong but I would estimate that changing control of LW is basically about convincing EY.
The last time I discussed this with Trike Apps, their position was that LW is owned by MIRI, and thus Nate Soares is the final authority. I nevertheless expect that convincing EY is a key component of any competent plan.
I predict there will be a in-person conversation about this in roughly a week.
The biggest problem as I see it is loss of members and lack of talented new ones. I'm willing to bet if you plotted the histogram of user activity, you'd see virtually all of the posts and comments coming from a very small number of members. The 'Top Contributors' section in the side panel probably contains most of them, and has been relatively stable in composition over the past two years. If the first step in instrumental rationality is to identify reality in an objective way, then we have to realize this site has become an echo chamber for a small few, ...
One problem as I see it is that Self-help as a community driven thing never really took off here. I think a big reason why is the perceived high bar to post quality. Self-help involves engaging with lots of idle weird ideas that don't work out before you hit on something useful. I'll also note that most of the online communities that really seem to be "communities" have an off-topic area that attracts a lot of posts where people feel free to be more casual. When brought up in the context of LW people point to the IRC chatroom, but that is a very different type of interaction.
Before wanting to grow "the community" it makes sense to ask what "the community" happens to be. You can count Scott's blog into the community or you can decide that the community is only what's branded as LW.
This community is some kind of organization, and it has a goal. To be precise, it probably has two goals, as I see it: to make existing members more rational to get more members.
I wouldn't consider that to be the main goals.
For me one of the most important goals is developing the "art of rationality". A lot of discu...
I'd also like to see targeted interaction and outreach to the academic research community.
GiveWell has a good model of validating and checking intuitions against prominent people in development, but seems to opt for public intellectuals over less famous experts in the field who's thinking those public intellectuals may defer to. In the EA community, I feel this has lead to such confidence in deworming, when deworming is actually one of if not the most controversial topics in academic impact evaluation (nicknamed worm wars. And DALY's are the pariah outside...
I think it is important to answer why people go to LessWrong and whether it is perceived to be primarily a place where you go to improve one's rationality that happens to be an internet forum, or an internet forum where you can read interesting things, such as rationality (I think that experiencing an intellectual journey is somewhere in between, but probably closer to the latter). Because there are a lot of large forums where you can read a lot of interesting things - for example, r/askscience and r/askhistorians have hundreds of thousands subscribers an...
I made a post recently that Less Wrong Lacks Direction that seems very similar to point 3. Less Wrong has moderation, but it doesn't have leadership. There is almost no concerted group action. Everyone has their own ideas of what Less Wrong needs to do next, and they are all different.
I think Why our kind can't co-operate is an excellent article. Whenever you post an idea, you might get a few upvotes, but you'll also get a lot of comments saying that something else is a better idea instead.
The reason why Less Wrong is getting less readers is because Less ...
I'd also like to see targeted interaction and outreach to the academic research community.
GiveWell has a good model of validating and checking intuitions against prominent people in development, but seems to opt for public intellectuals over less famous experts in the field who's thinking those public intellectuals may defer to. In the EA community, I feel this has lead to such confidence in deworming, when deworming is actually one of if not the most controversial topics in academic impact evaluation (nicknamed worm wars. And DALY's are the pariah outside...
I am a lazy and selfish person. I want to get more rational myself, but I don't want to put any effort into helping others become more rational.
TLDR: I had idea to apply some tools I learned on coursera to our community in order to grow it better. I wanted to start some organized thinking about goals our community has, and offer some materials for people who are eager to work on it, but are maybe lost or need ideas.
Yesterday I did a course on coursera.org. It's called "Grow to Greatness: Smart Growth for Private Businesses, Part I". (I play lectures often at x2.5 so I can do 5 weeks course in one day)
Though this course seems obvious, it'd say pretty worth 3 hours, so look it up. (It's hard to say how much is hindsight and how much is actually too easy and basic) I got some ideas sorted, and I saw the tools. I'm not an expert now, obviously, but at least i can see when things are done in unprofessional manner, and it can help you understand what follows.
When growing anything (company, community, ...) you have different options. You should not opt for everything, because you will be spread thin. You should grow with measure, so that people can follow, and so that you can do it right. This is the essence of the course. Rest is focused on ways of growing.
This was informative part of this article. Rest is some thoughts that just came to my mind that I would like to share. Hopefully I inspire some of you, and start some organized thinking about this community.
This community is some kind of organization, and it has a goal. To be precise, it probably has two goals, as I see it:
Note that second focus is to grow.
I will just plainly write down some claims this course made:
In order to grow:
1. I guess no-one is against this. After all, we are all here to grow.
2. My guess is that our customers could be defined as new members. So, first steps someone makes here are responsibility of this organization. After, when they get into rationality more, when they start working on themselves, they become employees. That's at least how it works in my head. Book on sequences is a good step here since it helps to have it all organized in one pdf.
3. this is actually where it all started. We are just a bunch of people with common drive to be more rational. There are meetups, but that's it. I guess some people see EY as some kind of leader, but even if he were one, that's not an organization. My first idea is to create some kind of separation of topics, reddit-like. (With or without moderators, we can change that at any point if one option does not work.)
For example, I'm fed with AI topics. When i see AI, I literally stop reading. I don't even think it's rational to force that idea so much. I understand the core of this community is in that business, but:
So, I would STRONGLY encourage new topics, and I would like to see some kind of classification. If I want to find out about AI, I want to know where to look, and if I don't want to read about it, I want to know how to avoid it. If I want to read about self-improvement, I want to know where to find it. Who knows, after some rough classification people start to do finer ones, and discuss how to increase memory without being spammed with procrastination. I think this could help the first goal (to make existing members more rational) since it would give them some overview.
I also think this would reduce cult-ism, since it would add diversity, and loose the "meta".
4. Understatement. Anyone who worked, or read anything about work knows how important plan is. It is OBLIGATORY. Essential. (See course https://www.coursera.org/learn/work-smarter-not-harder/outline )
5. I think this is not very important to us. There are lots of people here. Many enthusiasts. However, this should be some kind of guideline to make a good plan, and to tell us how much resources to devote to each problem.
In conclusion, I understand these things are big. But growth means change. (There is some EY quote on this, I think:not every change is improvement, but every improvement is a change, correct me if I'm wrong.) Humans did not evolve this far by being better, but by socializing and cooperating. So I think we should move from herd to organization.