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RobbBB comments on Less Wrong lacks direction - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (34)
I'm not sure "direction" is the right phrase. It's not like Eliezer told other people what posts to write--he had a goal and a thing to explain, and then he explained it. People didn't read his posts because he had authority; they read his posts because someone recommended them as being useful and interesting.
And similarly, I don't think the absence of roles is the issue: I think it's the absence of time and topics. Maybe there are people with something to write who aren't writing it because of some block that a clearly visible person could help remove--but it seems more likely to me that there are people with something to say but no time to say it, or with the time to write posts but little to talk about, and there are fewer intersections of those two as time goes on.
This assumes that the period when Eliezer was writing a lot was pretty optimal, and we should be trying to recapitulate that era of success. Maybe the thing Eliezer was trying to do has now succeeded, and we should be using the site in a very different way now? Or, if he didn't succeed, there may still be better goals to move toward than 'lots of people are active and have interesting discussions about miscellaneous topics a la early-LW'.
The OP states that, and I think I agree, in the sense that if there's a topic that would be as general and as interesting as the Sequences, then I would rather someone write a long text about it here than them not do that. I suspect, as I've argued elsewhere, that there isn't something in that class; there are lots of interesting things for people to do now, but they aren't going to be as common an interest.
I do think that there are changes LW could make to adapt to the new community and purpose for it, but I'm not sure here is the best place to discuss that.