Really? I thought it was a self-identified term trying to smuggle in positive connotations, at least among the ingroup. I mean, justice is good, right, and who doesn't want to be a warrior... I don't really know any of those people so I defer, but I tend to prefer the overlapping (but not identical) term "Bigoteer" to strip "SJW"'s -positive- connotation, though the fact I have never wanted to keep a positive connotation exposes my bias.

I would just like to note / point out that "SJW" is not a particularly neutral way to refer to the group of people in question -- it smuggles in (at least for some readers, and I suspect for most) a distinctly negative connotation about the group described.

Obviously if that's your intention, then by all means use the language you prefer; but if some of the commenters didn't mean it that way, and are just trying neutrally discuss a movement, I'd encourage picking a different term for it. (I normally say "the social justice movement".)

I will borrow from Error's very apt disclaimer in another comment, and note that my feelings toward the movement in question are more or less neutral -- "an affect borne of opinions that cancel out rather than a simple lack of same."

when was the last time you skipped an article, comment or post because it was negative? (not that you are a typical user) (and maybe this is worthy of a poll in the OT)

This seems reasonable in general, aside from that minor quibble.

Regarding "Less Wrong council" and StackOverflow...

What about meta.lesswrong.com? :P a LW to talk about LW? Or are we already meta enough...

Anything that makes upvoting/downvoting more tedious would just discourage it.

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)

[upvote] [downvote]

And after clicking on "upvote", the row would change to:

[UPVOTE] [downvote] -- [interesting] [funny] [well-researched] ...

And after clicking on "downvote", the row would change to:

[upvote] [DOWNVOTE] -- [incorrect] [offensive] ...

I would caution away from a bias towards "the current situation seems vaguely bad, therefore Something Must Be Done."

I agree, and I am a firm believer in Don't Do Something, Just Stand There.

One of the things that is perhaps unclear from this post is just how much Standing There has been done; people were talking about this as a problem in 2013, I went from believing that a decline existed and it was okay to believing a decline existed and it wasn't okay in 2014, most of the in-person conversations about this happened in August of this year.

I would caution away from a bias towards "the current situation seems vaguely bad, therefore Something Must Be Done." There are lots of people still getting use out of LessWrong. I think it would be unfortunate that a bias towards Doing Something over Leaving It Be might cause a valuable resource to be ended without good cause. If the site can be reinvented, great, but if it can't -- don't hit the Big Red Button without honestly weighing the significant costs to the people who are still actively using the site.

(I briefly searched, to see if there's an article on LW about the idea of a bias towards Doing Something. It would of course be essentially the opposite of status quo bias; and yet I think it's a real phenomenon. I certainly feel like I observe it happening in discussions like this. Perhaps the real issue is in the resolution of conflicts between a small minority who are outspoken about Doing Something, and a large silent majority who don't express strong feelings because they're fine with the status quo. This is an attempt to express a thought that I've had percolating, not a criticism of this post.)

The close button on your web browser window will allow you to ignore all posters, but otherwise no; LW has no filtering/blocking features.

Another interesting release from 23andme that came out at the same time is their transparency report, which shows how many requests from law enforcement they have gotten for customer DNA access, and what percentage they have gone through with.

That's rather disappointing.

And that TRUSTe thing doesn't seem very trust-able. Why would anyone use this?

Fix the formatting.