This post from one year ago discussed a similar problem. Suggestions for returning LessWrong to a position of centrality included:

• Allowing and encouraging more links posts and the discussion of them, on topics of interest to rationalists, such as machine intelligence and transhumanism, as Hacker News does now.

• Allow and encourage posts on more political topics in Discussion, but probably not Main. Dangers here could be mitigated by banning discussion of current politicians, governments, and issues, or banning discussion on specific topics. I personally think this wouldn't work because moderation and banning would need to be strictly enforced, assuming the user base doesn't naturally follow the ban. Considering LessWrong has a history of fatigue among moderators, doing something like this which may effectively lower the sanity waterline here (for a temporary period) might ruin it more.

• Get rid of Open Threads and create a new norm that a discussion post as short as a couple sentences is acceptable.

I think creating new norms is a collective action problem. For whatever reason(s), maybe mostly fear of downvoting, thinking what would be posted isn't "appropriate enough" for LessWrong, and indifference, no single individual(s) are incentivized to take risks in posting more and more novel content. Or something like that. Generating a new norm of encouraging others to give more upvotes to posts which are on the edge of LessWrong's Overtown windown, or "appropriate content" criterion, may again be another collective action problem. Also, that seems risky.

I think some actions were provided in the previous threads, they just weren't made actionable. John Maxwell made some observations, which could be turned into actions.

• Users on Less Wrong could downvote less. I personally use both upvoting and downvoting sparingly on LessWrong, unless a comment or post really stands out as great or awful. This seems like a thing we can't get a whole community to do.

• Instead of merely upvoting a post or comment, leave a comment like "great post" as a comment, or whatever positive feedback, as this is more a motivator. This in turn may incentivize people to post more often over the long-term.

I bolded the last one because it seems actionable. I think another bottleneck is many suggestions to fix this sort of problem revolve around changing site mechanics, level of moderation, and encouragement from popular figures for a change in culture and/or behavior. Nobody seems to think we can fix all these things by contacting Trike Apps (who maintains and bulids LessWrong), and asking them to change the site mechanics. I don't think that would work, anyway. I think if one want to change how LessWrong works, one needs to contact the moderators of the site, its real owners, or whatnot, and bring proposals directly to them.

I've read over the course of the last year some articles online, not just on any blogs, but (relatively) major websites, discussing some issues mentioned in this thread. If I were to share those discussions on Less Wrong somehow, what would be the preferred way to do it, if at all? In a comment here, or would a separate post be at all appropriate?

I wonder if a movie with an AI box-based story would have any potential? Perhaps something treated as more of a psychological horror/thriller than as a guns-and-explosions action movie might help to distance people's intuitions from "AI is 'The Terminator', right?"

I think LessWrong has a lot of annoying cultural problems and weird fixations, but despite those problems I think there really is something to be gained from having a central place for discussion.

The current "shadow of LessWrong + SSC comments + personal blogs + EA forum + Facebook + IRC (+ Tumblr?)" equilibrium seems to have in practice led to much less mutual knowledge of cool articles/content being written, and perhaps to less cool articles/content as well.

I'd really like to see a revitalization of LessWrong (ideally with a less nitpicky culture and a lack of weird fixations) or the establishment of another central hub site, but even failing that I think people going back to LW would probably be good on net.

I do not have the time to engage in the social interactions required to even be aware of where all this posting elsewhere is going on, but I want to read it.

There's a Masterlist for rational Tumblr, but I'm not aware of a complete list of all rationalist blogs across platforms.

Perhaps the Less Wrong community might find it useful to start one? If it were hosted here on LW, it might also reinforce LW's position as a central hub of the rationality community, which is relevant to the OP.

A lot of us are on Tumblr now; I've made a few blog posts at the much more open group blog Carcinisation, there's a presence on Twitter, and a lot of us just have made social friendships with enough other rationalists that the urge to post for strangers has a pressure release valve in the form of discussing whatever ideas with the contents of one's living room or one's Facebook friends.

I don't like this.

I do not have the time to engage in the social interactions required to even be aware of where all this posting elsewhere is going on, but I want to read it. I've been regularly reading OB/LW since before LW existed and this diaspora makes me feel left behind.

Nate Soares' blog seems excellent, of what I've read. I don't read all of it. He posts approximately once or twice per week, and writes his blog posts in the form of sequences, like Eliezer or Luke have done in the past. He doesn't seemed to have slowed in recent weeks in coming into his role as executive director of MIRI. I'm unsure if he'll blog less frequently as he comes into his new role at MIRI in full. Anyway, if he intends to keep blogging every couple weeks, you/we could ask him to cross-post as many blog posts as he feels like to Less Wrong, as most content on his blog seems more than appropriate. He could act as a lightning rod or new hero to revitalize Less Wrong, at least for a time. I don't know how lazy other users are. Maybe most of never read a post if it's not directly in Main or Discussion. Maybe most of us never click on links on the lower sidebar(s), but would be more inspired to build upon or respond to articles posted directly on Less Wrong.

I've previously talked about how I think Less Wrong's culture seems to be on a gradual trajectory towards posting less stuff and posting it in less visible places. For example, six years ago a post like this qualified as a featured post in Main. Nowadays it's the sort of thing that would go in an Open Thread. Vaniver's recent discussion post is the kind of thing that would have been a featured Main post in 2010.

Less Wrong is one of the few forums on the internet that actually discourages posting content. This is a feature of the culture that manifests in several ways:

• One of the first posts on the site explained why it's important to downvote people. The post repeatedly references experiences with Usenet to provide support for this. But I think the internet has evolved a lot since Usenet. Subtle site mechanics have the potential to affect the culture of your community a lot. (I don't think it's a coincidence that Tumblr and 4chan have significantly different site mechanics and also significantly different cultures and even significantly different politics. Tumblr's "replies go to the writer's followers" mechanic leads to a concern with social desirability that 4chan's anonymity totally lacks.)

• On reddit, if your submission is downvoted, it's downvoted in to obscurity. On Less Wrong, downvoted posts remain on the Discussion page, creating a sort of public humiliation for people who are downvoted.

• The Main/Discussion/Open Thread distinction invites snippy comments about whether your thing would have been more appropriate for some other tier. On most social sites, readers decide how much visibility a post should get (by upvoting, sharing, etc.) Less Wrong is one of the few that leaves it down to the writer. This has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that important but boring scholarly work can get visibility more easily.

• Upvotes substitute for praise: instead of writing "great post" type comments, readers will upvote you, which is less of a motivator.

My experience of sitting down to write a Less Wrong post is as follows:

1. I have some interesting idea for a Less Wrong post. I sit down and excitedly start writing it out.

2. A few paragraphs in, I think of some criticism of my post that users are likely to make. I try to persevere for a while anyway.

3. Within an hour, I have thought of so many potential criticisms or reasons that my post might come across as lame that I am totally demoralized. I save my post as a draft, close the tab, and never return to it.

Contrast the LW model with the "conversational blogging" model where you sit down, scribble some thoughts out, hit post, and see what your readers think. Without worrying excessively about what readers think, you're free to write in open mode and have creative ideas you wouldn't have when you're feeling self-critical.

Anyway, now that I've described the problem, here are some offbeat solution ideas:

• LW users move away from posting on LW and post on Medium.com instead. There aren't upvotes or downvotes, so there's little fear of being judged. Bad posts are "punished" by being ignored, not downvoted. And Medium.com gives you a built-in audience so you don't need to build up a following the way you would with an independent blog. (I haven't actually used Medium.com that much; maybe it has problems.)

• The EA community pays broke postdocs to create peer-reviewed, easily understandable blog posts on topics of interest to the EA community at large (e.g. an overview of the literature on how to improve the quality of group discussions, motivation hacking, rationality stuff, whatever). This goes on its own site. After establishing a trusted brand, we could branch out in to critiquing science journalism in order to raise the sanity waterline or other cool stuff like that.

• Someone makes it their business to read everything gets written on every blog in the EA-sphere and create a "Journal of Effective Altruism" that's a continually updated list of links to the very best writing in the EA-sphere. This gives boring scholarly stuff a chance to get high visibility. This "Editor-in-Chief" figure could also provide commentary, link to related posts that they remember, etc. I'll bet it wouldn't be more than a part-time job. Ideally it would be a high status, widely trusted person in the EA community who has a good memory for related ideas.

Some of these are solutions that make more sense if the EA movement grows significantly beyond its current scope, but it can't hurt to start kicking them around.

The top tier quality for actually read posting is dominated by one individual (a great one, but still)

Are we talking about LW proper here? Arguably this has been true over a good chunk of the site's history: at one time it was Eliezer, then Yvain, then Lukeprog, etc.

In terms of weird fixations, there are quite a few strange things that the LW community seems to have as part of its identity - polyamory and cryonics are perhaps the best examples of things that seem to have little to do with rationality but are widely accepted as norms here.

If you think rationality leads you to poly or to cryo, I'm fine with that, but I'm not fine with it becoming such a point of fixation or an element of group identity.

For that matter, I think atheism falls into the same category. Religion is basically politics, and politics is the mind-killer, but people here love to score cheap points by criticizing religion. The fact that things like the "secular solstice" have become part of rationalist community norms and identity is indicative of serious errors IMO.

For me, one of the most appealing things about EA (as opposed to rationalist) identity is that it's not wrapped up in all this unnecessary weird stuff.

I've previously talked about how I think Less Wrong's culture seems to be on a gradual trajectory towards posting less stuff and posting it in less visible places. For example, six years ago a post like this qualified as a featured post in Main. Nowadays it's the sort of thing that would go in an Open Thread. Vaniver's recent discussion post is the kind of thing that would have been a featured Main post in 2010.

Less Wrong is one of the few forums on the internet that actually discourages posting content. This is a feature of the culture that manifests in several ways:

• One of the first posts on the site explained why it's important to downvote people. The post repeatedly references experiences with Usenet to provide support for this. But I think the internet has evolved a lot since Usenet. Subtle site mechanics have the potential to affect the culture of your community a lot. (I don't think it's a coincidence that Tumblr and 4chan have significantly different site mechanics and also significantly different cultures and even significantly different politics. Tumblr's "replies go to the writer's followers" mechanic leads to a concern with social desirability that 4chan's anonymity totally lacks.)

• On reddit, if your submission is downvoted, it's downvoted in to obscurity. On Less Wrong, downvoted posts remain on the Discussion page, creating a sort of public humiliation for people who are downvoted.

• The Main/Discussion/Open Thread distinction invites snippy comments about whether your thing would have been more appropriate for some other tier. On most social sites, readers decide how much visibility a post should get (by upvoting, sharing, etc.) Less Wrong is one of the few that leaves it down to the writer. This has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that important but boring scholarly work can get visibility more easily.

• Upvotes substitute for praise: instead of writing "great post" type comments, readers will upvote you, which is less of a motivator.

My experience of sitting down to write a Less Wrong post is as follows:

1. I have some interesting idea for a Less Wrong post. I sit down and excitedly start writing it out.

2. A few paragraphs in, I think of some criticism of my post that users are likely to make. I try to persevere for a while anyway.

3. Within an hour, I have thought of so many potential criticisms or reasons that my post might come across as lame that I am totally demoralized. I save my post as a draft, close the tab, and never return to it.

Contrast the LW model with the "conversational blogging" model where you sit down, scribble some thoughts out, hit post, and see what your readers think. Without worrying excessively about what readers think, you're free to write in open mode and have creative ideas you wouldn't have when you're feeling self-critical.

Anyway, now that I've described the problem, here are some offbeat solution ideas:

• LW users move away from posting on LW and post on Medium.com instead. There aren't upvotes or downvotes, so there's little fear of being judged. Bad posts are "punished" by being ignored, not downvoted. And Medium.com gives you a built-in audience so you don't need to build up a following the way you would with an independent blog. (I haven't actually used Medium.com that much; maybe it has problems.)

• The EA community pays broke postdocs to create peer-reviewed, easily understandable blog posts on topics of interest to the EA community at large (e.g. an overview of the literature on how to improve the quality of group discussions, motivation hacking, rationality stuff, whatever). This goes on its own site. After establishing a trusted brand, we could branch out in to critiquing science journalism in order to raise the sanity waterline or other cool stuff like that.

• Someone makes it their business to read everything gets written on every blog in the EA-sphere and create a "Journal of Effective Altruism" that's a continually updated list of links to the very best writing in the EA-sphere. This gives boring scholarly stuff a chance to get high visibility. This "Editor-in-Chief" figure could also provide commentary, link to related posts that they remember, etc. I'll bet it wouldn't be more than a part-time job. Ideally it would be a high status, widely trusted person in the EA community who has a good memory for related ideas.

Some of these are solutions that make more sense if the EA movement grows significantly beyond its current scope, but it can't hurt to start kicking them around.

The top tier quality for actually read posting is dominated by one individual (a great one, but still)

Are we talking about LW proper here? Arguably this has been true over a good chunk of the site's history: at one time it was Eliezer, then Yvain, then Lukeprog, etc.