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Tetronian comments on Less Wrong: Open Thread, December 2010 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: David_Gerard 06 December 2010 02:29PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 07 December 2010 12:27:08AM 3 points [-]

I agree for the reasons you've mentioned. Recently there has been a lot of discussion about what LessWrong should be about, and I think this is a good way to resolve that question.

Here's a suggestion: What if we divided the forum into sub-pages by topic?

Comment author: TheOtherDave 07 December 2010 05:05:22AM 4 points [-]

Agreed with Jack about the nuisance value of splitting up not being worth it for the current level of throughput.

If things do get significantly overloaded, a better (though harder to code) answer would be to allow individual users to define filters, and modify the site code to only display posts whose tags match the user's filters.

Comment author: steven0461 08 December 2010 10:39:57PM *  1 point [-]

I think the current level of throughput is low largely because there is no subsection of the kind James is arguing for; maybe there are arguments to be made that these topics are already appropriate in theory, but in practice I think the fear of being off-topic, the fear of being incorrectly perceived as off-topic, and the lack of active priming to post on these topics are inhibiting a lot of potential useful contributions, especially from more cautious members.

Comment author: Jack 07 December 2010 04:31:56AM *  3 points [-]

Here's a suggestion: What if we divided the forum into sub-pages by topic?

This kind of thing is a good long-term solution but is there enough discussion at this point to justify this kind of division? It would be inconvenient to have to click through every subforum I was interested in just to see if there was anything new.

Comment author: Document 08 December 2010 05:58:59AM *  0 points [-]

You can use http://lesswrong.com/r/all/recentposts/ if you don't mind manually skipping over threads from subforums you're not interested in. (On Reddit you can put together more specific combinations like this, or just configure your front page to show particular reddits, but neither of those seems to work here.)

Comment author: [deleted] 07 December 2010 06:26:59AM *  0 points [-]

That's true--I think TheOtherDave's suggestion above might be something of a compromise.