There no facebook sign in. There's for example "4 comment(s)" under an article but no hotlink to the comments.
In case you don't know, different people have a different ability to distinguish shades of blue and most people are not perfect. For me that "Create an account link"-text on the startpage is unreadable. Even beyond this the page is very uninviting.
If I read a topic I find under the topic "Promote content" but no "Post comment button or free text box". There some unlabled blue thing that shows that(you have to log in to post but only if you hover over it.
To further deter people from registering, at the end of comments where you get information that you have to login/register, the words login/register are in lower font size than the rest of the text. After all you don't want to draw attention to logining in or registering.
Those issues don't seem like a decision that anybody who designs a framework that intents to encourage community participation should make. For that reason it looked to me like it doesn't use a proper community platform.
If you have a corporate website, you might not want to encourage as much participation as possible and have some barrier to entry. You might use a website that looks that way. If your intend is to grow a community it doesn't seem like a good decision.
On Drupal.org they use a forum plugin for their forum: https://drupal.org/forum/22 I think using Drupal and not using a forum plugin when you want to built a forum but trying to do it your own way, counts as not using existing components.
On Drupal.org they use a forum plugin for their forum: https://drupal.org/forum/22 I think using Drupal and not using a forum plugin when you want to built a forum but trying to do it your own way, counts as not using existing components.
You seem to have very weak evidence that they actually did this. It seems tremendously unlikely to me. Drupal comes with a forum module and it has many third party forums available. I see no good reason to think that they failed to make use of these resources.
Creating an Optimal Future. It sounds very arrogant when I type it out. A more reasonable claim would be that it is possible to create a Less Wrong Future, but for reasons that will shortly become apparent that felt like stepping too hard on other people’s shoes. I suppose Working Towards an Optimal Future would be the best title for what I have in mind.
Let me backtrack and start at the beginning. I am not a rationalist. Well, I am not a rationalist as the term applies in this community. Not completely anyway. I have only read some of the Sequences and, although I’ve devoured HPMOR, I do understand and agree with a number of the criticisms that have been leveled toward it.
But I am here because of that Optimal Future I have mentioned. The way I see it, we are not currently on a trajectory that will lead to an optimal future and I am fairly confident that you agree with me on that. From what I have seen and heard from various online communities over the years, quite a few people do agree with me on that.
But the problem is, a few thousand people visit Less Wrong regularly, generating and evolving a unique memescape. And a few miles down the information highway, another few thousand people post to Humanity+ mailing lists; building up a different memescape. There is some overlap, naturally, but not nearly enough. And in another corner of the internet, environmentalist factions sit in their own forums and discuss a different set of problems affecting (trans)humanity’s future. In yet another corner, socialists imagine utopias built on free access to nanofabricators (while anarchists imagine a similar utopia sans the government).
All in all, there may be near to a million people looking at future problems and solutions. But as long as they do so in small fringe groups, the solutions they can think up are limited. Worse, “junk” memes start sweeping into the community, harming recruitment and giving the underlying philosophies a bad name. To push the metaphor about as far as it can go: these communities tend to get a bit inbred over time.
And a million voices fail to affect policies in any way, because for all the hopes and fears they share they fail to coordinate and collaborate. Meanwhile, the world continues to move along a sub-optimal trajectory.
Which, finally, leads us back to Optimal Future. In discussing the problems above with friends, we hit upon an obvious solution: build a place where all futurists and people who care about the future (but do not self identify as futurist) can discuss the relevant topics and hopefully find novel solutions through combining memes that one wouldn’t normally think to combine.
Which is why I am here now. The site has been built, but then that was always going to be the easiest part. The hard part is building a diverse and active community. That’s where you come in. LessWrong is one of the most active future thinking communities on the web, and also a fairly controversial one. Having you as part of the community could make a lot of difference to us. In exchange we can offer you a wider audience and some new perspectives.
So if you are curious as to how a Friendly AGI designed by anarchist would be different to one designed by Greens, feel like scaring communists with what horrors a corporate paperclip maximizer could commit, want to see how wide the spectrum of transhumanists really is, want to learn about cryptography or sousveillance, or feel like debating the pros and cons of open sourced AIs, come on down to optimalfuture.org and take a look at the bigger picture.
http://optimalfuture.org/