This is a subject that strongly matters to me. I too would love to see a return to non-proprietary, open communication protocols, open source software and decentralized hosting - everywhere on the Internet, not just on Less Wrong. This is one of the few capital-C Causes in my area of professional competence that I would happily donate a lot of labor and/or money to, if only I knew of a way to promote it. But I don't, and I don't know of anyone who does.
To argue that the problem can be solved in the LW microcosm would need to either take advantage of LW-specific community features, or explicitly not solve the general problem (e.g. by not scaling, or by admitting that some things would always remain Web-only and non-interoperable). If either one is the case, please mention that explicitly.
Like gjm, I immediately want to jump the inferential distance to the usual unsolved problems. (E.g., how do you handle 'graceful degradation' for people who encounter a necessarily web/http link for the first time, so the community can grow and people with regular blogs can link to it?)
It might help if you add explicit disclaimers saying "please don't bring up issue X, that's for a future post". Are there things you don't want to talk about before a certain point? Is your sequence planned out enough (and short enough in practice) that I should refrain from anticipating certain issues, even in separate posts?
I fear that my comment(s) might appear negative, focusing on problems that I don't know how to solve before you even posted about them. I very much want this conversation (and the wider LW 2.0 one) to be constructive! If you think there's a better way for me to engage with it, please don't hesitate to tell me so. And thank you for taking the time to advocate a solution to a problem I deeply care about.
ETA: also, I would very much enjoy myself writing posts on subjects like "Your Web Browser Is Not Your Client" (or as it's sometimes known, The Web Is Not The Net), "The Proper Placement of User Features (is at the clientside)" aka "separation of protocols from implementation", and so on. I just didn't think it was on-topic for LW. But if you make it on-topic, then I might just join in.
The only LW-specific community feature my proposal takes advantage of is our cultural applause of "I cooperate in Prisoner's Dilemmas."
It scales in the specific sense that it allows for incoming users and authors to be added incrementally. It fails to scale in the sense that it can never be an open system in the same sense that Usenet is an open system. However, that is no worse than our existing situation.
Graceful degredation is a hard problem. Please don't bring up graceful degredation, that's for a future post. :-P
I am waffling on whether to e...
A few months ago, Vaniver wrote a really long post speculating about potential futures for Less Wrong, with a focus on the idea that the spread of the Less Wrong diaspora has left the site weak and fragmented. I wasn't here for our high water mark, so I don't really have an informed opinion on what has socially changed since then. But a number of complaints are technical, and as an IT person, I thought I had some useful things to say.
I argued at the time that many of the technical challenges of the diaspora were solved problems, and that the solution was NNTP -- an ancient, yet still extant, discussion protocol. I am something of a crank on the subject and didn't expect much of a reception. I was pleasantly surprised by the 18 karma it generated, and tried to write up a full post arguing the point.
I failed. I was trying to write a manifesto, didn't really know how to do it right, and kept running into a vast inferential distance I couldn't seem to cross. I'm a product of a prior age of the Internet, from before the http prefix assumed its imperial crown; I kept wanting to say things that I knew would make no sense to anyone who came of age this millennium. I got bogged down in irrelevant technical minutia about how to implement features X, Y, and Z. Eventually I decided I was attacking the wrong problem; I was thinking about 'how do I promote NNTP', when really I should have been going after 'what would an ideal discussion platform look like and how does NNTP get us there, if it does?'
So I'm going to go after that first, and work on the inferential distance problem, and then I'm going to talk about NNTP, and see where that goes and what could be done better. I still believe it's the closest thing to a good, available technological schelling point, but it's going to take a lot of words to get there from here, and I might change my mind under persuasive argument. We'll see.
Fortunately, this is Less Wrong, and sequences are a thing here. This is the first post in an intended sequence on mechanisms of discussion. I know it's a bit off the beaten track of Less Wrong subject matter. I posit that it's both relevant to our difficulties and probably more useful and/or interesting than most of what comes through these days. I just took the 2016 survey and it has a couple of sections on the effects of the diaspora, so I'm guessing it's on topic for meta purposes if not for site-subject purposes.
Less Than Ideal Discussion
To solve a problem you must first define it. Looking at the LessWrong 2.0 post, I see the following technical problems, at a minimum; I'll edit this with suggestions from comments.
I see these meta-technical problems:
Slightly Less Horrible Discussion
"Solving" community maintenance is a hard problem, but to the extent that pieces of it can be solved technologically, the solution might include these ultra-high-level elements:
As with the previous, I'll update this from the comments if necessary.
Getting There From Here
As I said at the start, I feel on firmer ground talking about technical issues than social ones. But I have to acknowledge one strong social opinion: I believe the greatest factor in Less Wrong's decline is the departure of our best authors for personal blogs. Any plan for revitalization has to provide an improved substitute for a personal blog, because that's where everyone seems to end up going. You need something that looks and behaves like a blog to the author or casual readers, but integrates seamlessly into a community discussion gateway.
I argue that this can be achieved. I argue that the technical challenges are solvable and the inherent coordination problem is also solvable, provided the people involved still have an interest in solving it.
And I argue that it can be done -- and done better than what we have now -- using technology that has existed since the '90s.
I don't argue that this actually will be achieved in anything like the way I think it ought to be. As mentioned up top, I am a crank, and I have no access whatsoever to anybody with any community pull. My odds of pushing through this agenda are basically nil. But we're all about crazy thought experiments, right?
This topic is something I've wanted to write about for a long time. Since it's not typical Less Wrong fare, I'll take the karma on this post as a referendum on whether the community would like to see it here.
Assuming there's interest, the sequence will look something like this (subject to reorganization as I go along, since I'm pulling this from some lengthy but horribly disorganized notes; in particular I might swap subsequences 2 and 3):
(Meta-meta: This post was written in Markdown, converted to HTML for posting using Pandoc, and took around four hours to write. I can often be found lurking on #lesswrong or #slatestarcodex on workday afternoons if anyone wants to discuss it, but I don't promise to answer quickly because, well, workday)
[Edited to add: At +10/92% karma I figure continuing is probably worth it. After reading comments I'm going to try to slim it down a lot from the outline above, though. I still want to hit all those points but they probably don't all need a full post's space. Note that I'm not Scott or Eliezer, I write like I bleed, so what I do post will likely be spaced out]