Would you be willing to run a survey on Discussion also about Main being based on upvotes instead of a mix of self-selection and moderation? As well as all ideas that seem interesting to you that people suggest here?

There could be a research section, a Upvoted section and a discussion section, where the research section is also displayed within the upvoted, trending one.

Those are all phrased as "do you agree that people are saying X" or "do you agree that we could X" rather than "is X a good idea".

Would you be willing to run a survey on Discussion also about Main being based on upvotes instead of a mix of self-selection and moderation? As well as all ideas that seem interesting to you that people suggest here?

There could be a research section, a Upvoted section and a discussion section, where the research section is also displayed within the upvoted, trending one.

Another approach would be not allowing downvote to be open to all users. On the Stackexchage network for example, you need a certain amount of reputation to downvote someone. I'd bet that a very large majority of the discouraging/unnecessary/harmful downvotes come from users who don't have above, say, 5-15 karma in the last month. Perhaps official downvote policies messaged to a user the first time they pass that would help too.

This way involved users can still downvote bad posts, and the bulk of the problem is solved.

But it requires technical work, which may be an issue.

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.

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.

It doesn't help that even the most offhand posting is generally treated as if it was an academic paper and ~~reviewed~~ skewered accordingly :-p.

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.

A few tangential ideas off the top of my head:

If the moderation and self selection of Main was changed into something that attracts those who have been on LW for a long time, and discussion was changed to something like Newcomers discussion, LW could go back to being the main space, with a two tier system (maybe one modulated by karma as well).

1. People have been proposing for a while that we create a third section of LW for open threads and similar content.

2. We could have a section without any karma scores for posts/upvote only, though we could still keep the same system for comments.

3. We could allow Discussion posts to be Promoted while still using the Discussion karma system.

4. We could have Promotion somehow be based on popular vote (not necessarily karma), instead of a moderator's judgement.

they would be essentially blank slates

I don't think this is how it works with people. Especially smart ones with full 'net access.