I have compiled many suggestions about the future of lesswrong into a document here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hH9mBkpg2g1rJc3E3YV5Qk-b-QeT2hHZSzgbH9dvQNE/edit?usp=sharing
It's long and best formatted there.
In case you hate leaving this website here's the summary:
Summary
There are 3 main areas that are going to change.
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Technical/Direct Site Changes
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new home page
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new forum style with subdivisions
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new sub for “friends of lesswrong” (rationality in the diaspora)
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New tagging system
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New karma system
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Better RSS
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Social and cultural changes
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Positive culture; a good place to be.
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Welcoming process
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Pillars of good behaviours (the ones we want to encourage)
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Demonstrate by example
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3 levels of social strategies (new, advanced and longtimers)
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Content (emphasis on producing more rationality material)
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For up-and-coming people to write more
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for the community to improve their contributions to create a stronger collection of rationality.
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For known existing writers
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To encourage them to keep contributing
- To encourage them to work together with each other to contribute
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How will we know we have done well (the feel of things)
How will we know we have done well (KPI - technical)
Initiatives for long-time users
Target: a good 3 times a week for a year.
Approach formerly prominent writers
Place to talk with other rationalists
Pillars of purpose
(with certain sub-reddits for different ideas)
Encourage a declaration of intent to post
(with certain sub-reddits for different ideas)
Why change LW?
Lesswrong has gone through great times of growth and seen a lot of people share a lot of positive and brilliant ideas. It was hailed as a launchpad for MIRI, in that purpose it was a success. At this point it’s not needed as a launchpad any longer. While in the process of becoming a launchpad it became a nice garden to hang out in on the internet. A place of reasonably intelligent people to discuss reasonable ideas and challenge each other to update their beliefs in light of new evidence. In retiring from its “launchpad” purpose, various people have felt the garden has wilted and decayed and weeds have grown over. In light of this; and having enough personal motivation to decide I really like the garden, and I can bring it back! I just need a little help, a little magic, and some little changes. If possible I hope for the garden that we all want it to be. A great place for amazing ideas and life-changing discussions to happen.
How will we know we have done well (the feel of things)
Success is going to have to be estimated by changes to the feel of the site. Unfortunately that is hard to do. As we know outrage generates more volume than positive growth. Which is going to work against us when we try and quantify by measurable metrics. Assuming the technical changes are made; there is still going to be progress needed on the task of socially improving things. There are many “seasoned active users” - as well as “seasoned lurkers” who have strong opinions on the state of lesswrong and the discussion. Some would say that we risk dying of niceness, others would say that the weeds that need pulling are the rudeness.
Honestly we risk over-policing and under-policing at the same time. There will be some not-niceness that goes unchecked and discourages the growth of future posters (potentially our future bloggers), and at the same time some other niceness that motivates trolling behaviour as well as failing to weed out potential bad content which would leave us as fluffy as the next forum. there is no easy solution to tempering both sides of this challenge. I welcome all suggestions (it looks like a karma system is our best bet).
In the meantime I believe being on the general niceness, steelman side should be the motivated direction of movement. I hope to enlist some members as essentially coaches in healthy forum growth behaviour. Good steelmanning, positive encouragement, critical feedback as well as encouragement, a welcoming committee and an environment of content improvement and growth.
While at the same time I want everyone to keep up the heavy debate; I also want to see the best versions of ourselves coming out onto the publishing pages (and sometimes that can be the second draft versions).
So how will we know? By trying to reduce the ugh fields to people participating in LW, by seeing more content that enough people care about, by making lesswrong awesome.
The full document is just over 11 pages long. Please go read it, this is a chance to comment on potential changes before they happen.
Meta: This post took a very long time to pull together. I read over 1000 comments and considered the ideas contained there. I don't have an accurate account of how long this took to write; but I would estimate over 65 hours of work has gone into putting it together. It's been literally weeks in the making, I really can't stress how long I have been trying to put this together.
If you want to help, please speak up so we can help you help us. If you want to complain; keep it to yourself.
Thanks to the slack for keeping up with my progress and Vanvier, Mack, Leif, matt and others for reviewing this document.
As usual - My table of contents
This feels wrong to me. I mean, I would like to have a website with a lot of high-quality materials. But given a choice between higher quality and more content, I would prefer higher quality. I am afraid that measuring these KPIs will push us in the opposite direction.
Reading spends time. Optimizing for more content to read means optimizing for spending more time here, and maybe even optimizing for attracting the kind of people who prefer to spend a lot of time debating online. Time spent reading is a cost, not a value. The value is what we get from reading the text. The real thing we should optimize for is "benefits from reading the text, minus time spent reading the text".
I think the subreddits should only be created after enough articles for given category were posted (and upvoted). Obviously that requires having one "everything else" subreddit. And the subreddits should reflect the "structure of the thingspace" of the articles.
Otherwise we risk having subreddits that remain empty. Or subreddits with too abstract names, or such that authors are confused where exactly which article belongs. (There will always be some difficult cases, but if the subreddit structure matches the typically written articles, the confusion is minimized.) For example, I wouldn't know whether talking about algorithms playing Prisonners' Dilemma belongs to "AI" or "math", or whether debates of procrastination among rationalists and how to overcome it are "instrumental" or "meta". By having articles first and subreddits later we automatically receive intensional definition of "things like this".
Perhaps we could look at some existing highly upvoted articles (except for the original Sequences) and try to classify those. If they can fit into the proposed categories, okay. But maybe we should have a guideline that a new subreddit cannot be created unless at least five already existing articles can be moved there.
Upvoting and downvoting should be limited to users already having some karma; not sure about exact numbers, but I would start with e.g. 100 for upvoting, and 200 or 300 for downvoting. This would prevent the most simple ways to game the system, which in its current form is insanely fragile -- a single dedicated person could destroy the whole website literally in an afternoon even without scripting. This is especially dangerous considering how much time it takes to fix even the smallest problems here.
EDIT:
It would be nice to have scripts for creating things like Open Thread automatically.
Definitely add PJ Eby to the list. I am strongly convinced that ignoring him was one of the largest mistakes of the LW community. I mean, procrastination is maybe the most frequently mentioned problem on this website, and coincidentally we have an expert on this who also happens to speak our language and share our views in general, but instead of thinking about how to cooperate with him to create maximum value, CFAR rather spent years creating their own curriculum from the scratch which only a few selected people have seen. (I guess a wheel not invented in the Bay Area is not worth trying, despite all the far-mode talk about the virtue of scholarship.)
But more content equals a higher chance that some of the content is worth reading. You can't get to gold without churning through lots of sand.
Instead I think there should be decent filtering. It shouldn't be sorted by new by default, but instead "hot" or "top month" et... (read more)