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knb comments on Clearing An Overgrown Garden - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (14)
Less Wrong doesn't seem "overgrown" to me. It actually seems dried out and dying because the culture is so negative people don't want to post here. I believe Eliezer has talked about how whenever he posted something on LW, the comments would be full of people trying to find anything wrong with it.
Here's an example of what I think makes LessWrong unappealing. User Clarity wrote an interesting discussion level post about his mistakes as an investor/gambler and it was downvoted to oblivion. Shouldn't people be encouraged to discuss their failures as they relate to rationality? Do we really want to discourage this? No one even bothered to explain why they downvoted.
I think trying to impose strict new censorship rules and social control over communication is more likely to deal the death blow to this website than to help it. LessWrong really needs an injection of positive energy and purpose. In the absence of this, I expect LW to continue to decline.
"Overgrown" was probably a bad analogy, I tried too hard to reference the idea of well-kept gardens. What I was trying to say is that there are too many hostile elements who are making this website an unwelcoming place, by unnecessary criticism, ad hominem attacks and downvotes; and that those elements should have been removed from the community earlier. I actually think we agree on this.
OK, from reading this and other comments I accept that this was the weakest part of my post. Also, after re-reading the Wiki entry on Crocker's rule, I don't think I intended to suggest anything quite that extreme. Crocker's rules say that rudeness is acceptable simply in order to provide a precise and accurate signal of annoyance. This is certainly not what I had in mind.
I apologize for my incorrect usage of the term "Crocker's rules", and I recognize that this was probably not a good idea. I hope someone can come up with a policy that achieves the objectives I had in mind when I wrote that sentence.
I agree with this (I probably contribute a bit to the problem, I will try to do better).
edit: I think a lot of Clarity downvotes have to do w/ people not liking how that person comes across.
I think both. There's more post and comment volume than I remember from "the good old days", but it's much lower quality in terms of density of interesting contributions.
I don't agree with that as the main cause. I don't think it's a negative culture, so much as a lack of positive culture. The people doing interesting work on rationality, decisionmaking, and AI are mostly not doing it here anymore.