I'm not suggesting that removing 70% of commenters would lead to a more vibrant community. I am suggesting that removing (or hiding) 70% of comments would lead to a more vibrant community. Intelligent commentary and discussion drown when articles accumulate more than hundreds of comments, for example.
My grandparent thread was inspired by Eliezer's, but after I pared it down to a couple of sentences it really isn't about attracting elites anymore. I'll flesh the idea of it out on a comment in the Open Thread (and later link to it here), if you'd like to continue discussion.
ETA I've fleshed out the idea on the Open Thread, so lets please move discussion there.
I'm not suggesting that removing 70% of commenters would lead to a more vibrant community. I am suggesting that removing (or hiding) 70% of comments would lead to a more vibrant community.
I think after you make a habit of removing 70% of comments, about 70% of your commenters would decamp for better pastures. Not to mention the quis custodiet ipsos custodes? problem.
Let me offer you an alternative: an ignore list. Anyone can make invisible any comment or any commenter he dislikes or thinks not worth his time, but the vanishing act is for his eyes only, ...
Is Less Wrong, despite its flaws, the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web? It seems to me that, to find reliably higher-quality discussion, I must turn to more narrowly focused sites, e.g. MathOverflow and the GiveWell blog.
Many people smarter than myself have reported the same impression. But if you know of any comparably high-quality relatively-general-interest forums, please link me to them!
In the meantime: suppose it's true that Less Wrong is the highest-quality relatively-general-interest forum on the web. In that case, we're sitting on a big opportunity to grow Less Wrong into the "standard" general-interest discussion hub for people with high intelligence and high metacognition (shorthand: "intellectual elites").
Earlier, Jonah Sinick lamented the scarcity of elites on the web. How can we get more intellectual elites to engage on the web, and in particular at Less Wrong?
Some projects to improve the situation are extremely costly:
Code changes, however, could be significantly less costly. New features or site structure elements could increase engagement by intellectual elites. (To avoid priming and contamination, I'll hold back from naming specific examples here.)
To help us figure out which code changes are most likely to increase engagement on Less Wrong by intellectual elites, specific MIRI volunteers will be interviewing intellectual elites who (1) are familiar enough with Less Wrong to be able to simulate which code changes might cause them to engage more, but who (2) mostly just lurk, currently.
In the meantime, I figured I'd throw these ideas to the community for feedback and suggestions.