Ways to improve LessWrong

Adam Zerner

I think it'd be a good idea to keep a list of the ways we'd like to see LessWrong improve, sorted by popularity. Ie. email alerts for new responses.

So if you have an idea for how LessWrong could be better, post it in the comments. As people up/downvote, we'll get a sense for what the consensus opinions are.

I think there's a pretty good amount to be gained by improving LessWrong.

I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (like email alerts for new responses).
Conversations here are actually useful and productive. Facilitating conversation should thus lead to more of these useful and productive conversations (as opposed to leading to more of an unproductive type of conversation). (Sorry, I didn't word this well; hopefully you guys know what I mean.)
Perhaps something big would come out of this list (like meet-ups). Perhaps rationality hack-a-thons (whatever that means)?

I'm not a good enough coder now, but once I am, I think I'd like to do what I can to make LessWrong better. I'm starting a coding bootcamp (Fullstack Academy) on Monday. By the end of it, I should at least be competent.

Note: I say "ways to improve" instead of "features" because "ways to improve" is more general.

I think it'd be a good idea to keep a list of the ways we'd like to see LessWrong improve, sorted by popularity. Ie. email alerts for new responses.

So if you have an idea for how LessWrong could be better, post it in the comments. As people up/downvote, we'll get a sense for what the consensus opinions are.

I think there's a pretty good amount to be gained by improving LessWrong.

I think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit (like email alerts for new responses).
Conversations here are actually useful and productive. Facilitating conversation should thus lead to more of these useful and productive conversations (as opposed to leading to more of an unproductive type of conversation). (Sorry, I didn't word this well; hopefully you guys know what I mean.)
Perhaps something big would come out of this list (like meet-ups). Perhaps rationality hack-a-thons (whatever that means)?

Note: I say "ways to improve" instead of "features" because "ways to improve" is more general.

is to set up a Hacker News clone

So what features would this have? HN and other blogs basically just have link posts, text posts and comment threads for each post.

The largest problem (and/or existential threat) I can see with LW is its stagnation/decline, both in content, and in new insights generated here.

I haven't been around long enough to agree or disagree with this, but I could believe it. You say you've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this. What do you think of things other than just aggregating content from similar sites? I sense that there are opportunities for some larger more fundamental changes. Some ideas:

Increasing offline interaction (making it easy for LW users to room with each other, get rationality clubs set up in colleges, have hack-a-thons...)
Rethinking the simple threaded comments system. Here's my raw thoughts - http://lesswrong.com/lw/jr4/a_medium_for_more_rational_discussion/.
Encouraging more brainstorming. Right now I think people are hesitant to start a conversation unless they have pretty refined and insightful thoughts.
Better categorize things. To use an example, I think there would be more talk about life hacks if there was a life hacks section and there was a list of useful life hacks maintained by the community.
etc. etc.

the problem is that these suggestions have orders of magnitude higher cost of implementation. This is further compounded by the fact that 1. LW uses a fork of the reddit codebase, which was not built with modification in mind, and 2. the fact that the owners of LW are (a) hard to engage in a conversation about changes and (b) even harder to get them to actually apply it.

The suggestion I made above suffers from none of these, and is technically implementable in a weekend (tops) by a single developer -- me. Whether it will be successful or not is a differen... (read more)

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