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OrphanWilde comments on Upcoming LW Changes - Less Wrong Discussion
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Count me as equal parts hopeful and skeptical.
I think the best part of LW was the content—articles by EY and the dude who writes at SSC being on the top of that list. Oh, and Luke wrote some cool stuff, too. There have been others, but the main consistent top posters are out as far as I can tell. If you can find good content, you will win in this LW reboot mission, even if no other changes are made.
Otherwise, I think you'll need huge changes to Make LW Great Again™. It's basically a good rationality/math-y reddit sub with an AI and EA focus. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not terribly novel or special either.
The pure cynic in me says almost nothing has demonstrably changed in the 3+ years (maybe more?) I've been reading here (other than the decline in good content) and I've no reason to believe this effort will yield anything.
Anyway, sincere kudos to you for your efforts. I like LW and support common sense efforts to improve it.
Couple ideas off the top off my head:
Come up with a 2.0 karma system. Reddit-style karma is cool and functional, but I bet the finest minds at LW could come up with something that fosters even more rational discussion. Maybe a drop-down box with a few broad categories for "Why did you vote this way?" on every upvote or downvote so the commentor receives better feedback? It seems to me the system, while it has its value, is still often times just "yay!" or "boo!" buttons. Maybe you could devise something better?
How about an extensive blogroll system with some sort of interactive component ("vote" via radio button, or an upvote/downvote) to indicate which articles/blogs LWers found worth reading? LW could have some value as a meta-level "hub" site for the rationality blog universe.
Get rid of the Main/Discussion dichotomy altogether. It's super broken. Or maybe just organically let posts that get north of X upvotes be marked with a "This is good stuff" status star and place them in a more prominent spot.
Good luck. I look forward to the coming changes!
Hm. I like the elimination of the Main/Discussion dichotomy - my historic recommendations have been more division between categories, but it seems more useful separating content out by upvotes and upvote/downvote percentages, to produce three categories (high-upvote, high-variability, and undistinguished), using the high-upvote group as the splash page for new users.
As for the drop-down - I'm inclined to say "No." Anything that makes upvoting/downvoting more tedious would just discourage it.
Making it easy to cross-link content, and having a prominent place for a link to the author's blog/tumblr/whatever, might encourage cross-posted content, particularly high-quality cross-posted content, which could (bootstrapping problem) reward high-quality posts with increased traffic to their blogs, tumblrs, or favored causes (say, EA).
It could be implemented in a way that doesn't make it more tedious.
For example, the first click could be upvote or downvote. The vote would be counted, and it would display a list of additional icons (different lists for upvotes and downvotes). The optional second click could choose one of those icons. But even if you skip the second step, your vote still counts; the second click can only add more "flavor". If many people click the same secondary icon, it will be displayed next to the comment karma.
So before voting the icons would be like: (of course, pictures instead of words)
And after clicking on "upvote", the row would change to:
And after clicking on "downvote", the row would change to:
I think one of the biggest opportunities with this would be to give more weight to votes that come with a reason. (In fact, I'd be tempted to design such a system to silently ignore votes made with no reason -- let the user make them, display them in the interface, just don't use them for anything.)