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.

Thanks for the encouragement! Would you mind offering your opinion on a few things though?

How many people would a complete overhaul take, and how long would it take (roughly)?
Why are the site owners reluctant to change?
What do you think of my rough cost-benefit argument? The things I said are my intuition, but I could easily be overlooking certain things, and I don't understand it well enough to be too confident in the intuition. So what do you think? (you seem to share the belief in the value of the benefits, but don't seem to think they outweigh the costs)

Also, I don't want to get anyone's hopes up about my contributions. I'm still learning to code and I don't know how good I'll be in 13 weeks when I finish my bootcamp and I can't tell how long it'll be before I'm capable enough to contribute to something like this.

I don't know, I haven't done the effort estimation. It just looks like more than I'd be willing to put in.
One hypothesis is that LessWrong.com is a low priority item to them, but they like having it around, so they are averse to putting in the required amount of thought to evaluate a change, and inclined to leave things as they are.
I think it is unlikely it will have as much benefit as you expect, and that the pain will be bigger than you expect. However, if you add the fact that your drive may help you learn to program, then the ROI tips the other way

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