With an increasing number of subreddits, have an "all" subreddit for those who want to check for overall new content, without clicking on each subforum in turn.

All - Main - Technical - Repositories - Meetups - Misc

I agree with shminux that keeping Main as a section one can post to is useless. I would have as places where one can post: 1) Theoretical rationality, 2) Applied rationality, 3) The Future, 4) Meetups, 5) Misc.

Then make it that ordinary posts above a certain high karma threshold (e.g. +20 or +30) get automatically Promoted to the front page, in addition to community-important things like a periodic list of meetups and, possibly, other posts at the discretion of the mods. Having Main as a separate section only causes this pointless self-callibration game in which people have to evaluate whether their posts are good enough for it, often failing and requiring posts to be moved from Main to Discussion or vice-versa.

I don't think this makes sense unless Main becomes only articles that have been promoted. Otherwise, it excludes any of the topics listed from being promoted.

And if Main becomes only articles that have been promoted, it would make more sense to have promotion be a filter on each subreddit, rather than its own subreddit.

I remember having read a discussion about this in a recent open thread; there was one particular response which I liked. Give me a moment...

Later: Found! User sixes_and_sevens asked people to think of eight categories in which to divide LessWrong. Emile came up with the following list:

• Self-improvement, optimal living, life hacks
• Philosophy
• Futurism (Cryonics, the singularity
• Friendly AI and SIAI, I mean, MIRI
• Maths, Decision Theory, Game theory
• Meetups
• General-interest discussion (biased towards the interests of atheist nerds)
• Meta

(If you liked the suggestions, you could go upvote his post instead of mine.)

My own minor correction to the list would be to merge Futurism & FAI into one category, and perhaps do the same with Philosophy and Math, Decision Theory, Game Theory etc. (so as to have all the theoretical stuff in the same place -- the Sequences, for example, could go here), but other than that I agree with it.

As for Main, perhaps we could implement reddit's recent & all-time best submissions lists, sorted by karma, percentage of upvotes, or a combination of both. An entire subreddit devoted to posts worthy of promotion seems not only unnecessary as long as we got... (read more)

1. Rationality
2. Self-improvement
3. Effective altruism
4. The future
5. Misc.

The rationale for having a separate section for posts that "might" be promoted escapes me, so I have omitted that subreddit in my proposal.

As an irregular consumer of LW, a fine grained sub system would be fantastically useful since, without having to sort through a lot of posts, I could scan the last couple of weeks or months of submissions on topics of interest.

But, rather than determining categories first, it might be useful to do rough counts of number of articles on a given topic, posting frequency, etc. You want to make sure that you have critical mass before you split things apart. Given this, as other people have suggested, retaining an "All" category, especially for the front page, seems very useful.

Open Threads, Media Threads, Rationality Diaries -- these are so obviously different from the remaining posts, and they already have a strong tradition, so I believe there should be one subreddit for them (for all the repeating threads together).

More meta: The subreddits should reflect a difference that already exists. One should be able to move the existing articles into the new subreddits. (Moving them would be useful to show readers what exactly is expected where. I don't expect admins to move thousands of articles, just perhaps the last month to create... (read more)

As terms, I like "Applied Rationality" more than "Instrumental Rationality" and "Epistemic Rationality" more than "Normative Rationality." As collections of topics, I think the collections outlined in Idea 2 ('perceiving reality' vs. 'achieving goals') are better.

Like many others, I think that having "Main" as a separate subreddit is a bad idea. I think there should be an explicit and prominent link to "all," and it would be awesome if you could see promoted posts both by subreddit and across all ... (read more)

Since it is relatively easy to create/delete subreddits, I recommend creating a few, and then making another similar thread to reassess the results.

Also, I think it would be good to have a social subreddit, where the point is to make friends and have more relaxed fun.

Thoughts:

• There's already a fragmentation issue -- If you're reading "Main" the "Recent Comments" only shows you the recent comments in "Main", if you're reading "Discussion", the "Recent Comments" only shows you the recent comments in "Discussion". I've no idea what the Search function actually retrieves and whether it works across subreddits. Until such is fixed, or until an "All" functionality is visibly added, be careful about splitting the forums further.

• I feel your division betw

This is a good idea! I am glad you're making improvements. I like the idea of starting with a small number of subreddits. Hooray for incremental change!

One suggestion I saw that I liked was promoting the Open Thread to a subreddit. Maybe combining it with the Stupid Questions Thread - so that there's one place for beginners to figure out what to post and stumble around while they work through War and Peace^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the Sequences.

Spending 60 seconds of thought onto it... :-) I'd suggest

• Main
• Mind (what's inside your head: biases, self-improvement, mind hacks, etc.)
• World (what's outside your head: actual reality, how it works, how to deal with it, etc.)
• Tools (queries, suggestions, reviews, etc.)
• Tech (technical forum dealing with probability, statistics, math, programming, etc.)
• Social (meetups, etc.)
• Misc (the overflow bucket)

plus more specific subreddits:

• AI
• X-risks
• Cryonics
• Whatever else is both specific enough and popular enough to deserve a subreddit

*Applied Rationality: for articles about what Jonathan Baron would call descriptive and prescriptive rationality, for both epistemic and instrumental rationality (stuff about biases, self-improvement stuff, etc.).

• Normative Rationality: for articles about what Baron would call normative rationality, for both epistemic and instrumental rationality (examining the foundations of probability theory, decision theory, anthropics, and lots of stuff that is called "philosophy").

I like the this way of dividing concept space, hate the name. People al... (read more)

One step more meta: Should we create subreddits for topics that are discussed there, or rather for the style of those articles? An example of style could be a "Research" subreddit, where you post an article only if the statements it contains are referenced (or if it is self-contained original mathematical research).

An example of a division based on article styles could be:

• Announcements
• Research
• Best articles
• Articles
• Discussion

Official announcements = announcements about MIRI or CFAR activities, progress reports, advertising for effec... (read more)

Because of overlaps and ambiguity, I wouldn't feel confident choosing a subreddit for a lot of posts I could see myself writing. And I think I've gained a pretty good understanding of most of the categories people have proposed. Someone newer to the site would probably be strongly discouraged from posting by having to figure out which of these arcane categories they belong in. I think that's a bug and not a feature; the kind of new person we want to discourage is the kind who's less thoughtful and cautious about categorization dilemmas.

I think shminux's id... (read more)

I like the idea of the various LW meetup groups having dedicated subreddits, instead of organizing elsewhere (usually google groups).

You can't interact with a subreddit through email, so some people would dislike that. But I prefer to interact with subreddits than with google groups, and I assume I'm not alone there.

+1 to 'Technical' (Math, Decision Theory, Physics, etc)

+1 to promotion from all subreddits

+1 to Main as "Best of", or just getting rid of Main.

+1 to MIRI/FAI/Singularity stuff as a separate subreddit from EA stuff

Also, several historical posts have spanned multiple topics - some thought to a solution to this would be useful (this is the only reason that I might support keeping Main.)

The distinction between "Rationality theory" and "Rationality Practice" is what I think most people are getting at with Life improvement/Self-Imp... (read more)

The categories of stuff on LW as I perceive them (in no particular order) are:

Philosophy

-Values and ethics (human, utilitarian, alien, or otherwise)

-Game Theory (subset of instrumental rationality)

-Epistemology (epistemic rationality)

Activism

-Effective Altruism (Givewell, 8000hours, meta charity)

-X-risk reduction

-investment in far future

Personal Development

-happiness-boosting

-Fighting Akrasia (procrastination, motivation, willpower)

-optimizing your organism (body, mind, nootropics, supplements,exercise, etc)

-good habits and heuristics (especially organiza... (read more)

I'm way late to the party and I haven't read the comments yet but here's my idea; the goal here is to more trying to target types of readers rather than types of subject matter, which makes more sense pragmatically given the goal is people having to read less:

Main - things everyone need to see.

All - automatically generated taking everything from everywhere and redirecting.

Articles & Sequences - the same kind of stuff you see in Main, except lower barrier of entrance, and no meetups

Entertainment - discussion threads for rationalist fiction, quotes thr... (read more)

Personally, I'd really like a subreddit, or at least a tag, for articles that are directly and straightforwardly applicable to everyday life. Ones that say, "here's a problem that lots of people have, and here's how to solve it".

I like idea 1 much better than idea 2. I can't imagine a person who would read articles on instrumental rationality but not epistemic rationality. However, I think there are people on here who care about the applied rationality but not normative rationality and vice versa. This doesn't really apply to me, since I will be reading everything anyway, but I think that Idea 1 is both more useful for readers and more easy for posters to decide where their post should go.

I would however create a few more distinctions in Misc. I think that Meetup posts should get ... (read more)

This may sound odd, but could there be a subreddit for competitive video games and rational strategies/playstyles?