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Meta: Rationality News Area

6 Post author: XiXiDu 16 January 2011 05:26PM

A lot of links and media content has been posted lately. Would it make sense to create another area where people can submit relevant links, images or videos? If the discussion area was meant to keep the community blog clean and focused then one could devote the discussion area to questions, proofreading and mediocre posts while an additional media section could be destined for third party content:

Community Blog (main area)

Discussion Area

  • Questions
  • Proofreading
  • Mediocre content (not yet ready or not suitable for the main area)
  • Meta discussions about the community
  • Miscellaneous topics (e.g. AI, recommendations and questions about nutrition etc.)

Rationality News (recommended third party content)

  • News and media aggregation
  • Ranking and discovery
  • Relevant scientific research/studies
  • Important technological progress

There is a lot of good and bad stuff out there to learn from. Yet this content is often discovered by people who don't want, or are not able to write a post about it or start a discussion but would be willing to submit a link to the content. This would allow LW to offer a selection of relevant high quality third party news and media content without having the discussion area (RSS feed) cluttered with it.

LW could also employ a few moderators that can move posts to the appropriate area. For example, if a post in the main area is being downvoted or near zero after a week it will be moved to the discussion area. Or if someone posts a link to third-party content to the discussion area it is moved to the news (media) area. Users, especially newbies and outsiders would also benefit from it by not being exposed to inappropriate content but rather to the highest quality of content to be expected when browsing a certain area.

So what do you think, would a rationality news area be a worthwhile feature?

Comments (6)

Comment author: Larks 16 January 2011 07:11:08PM 5 points [-]

In the meantime we could have monthly News threads, so it would at least be all in one place

Comment author: jsalvatier 16 January 2011 05:52:04PM 5 points [-]

You mention moving threads on a regular basis. Does this work nicely with hyperlinking? Do links to the old location of the post redirect to the new location?

Comment author: wedrifid 16 January 2011 10:44:01PM 3 points [-]

No more sections to check please!

Comment author: Alicorn 16 January 2011 11:56:43PM 4 points [-]

Or at least some way to aggregate them on one page.

Comment author: timtyler 17 January 2011 11:03:19PM 1 point [-]

Aggregated using RSS: http://www.netvibes.com/lesswrong

Comment author: wedrifid 17 January 2011 01:32:56AM 0 points [-]

Even better!