LessWrong team member / moderator. I've been a LessWrong organizer since 2011, with roughly equal focus on the cultural, practical and intellectual aspects of the community. My first project was creating the Secular Solstice and helping groups across the world run their own version of it. More recently I've been interested in improving my own epistemic standards and helping others to do so as well.
Sequences
Posts
Wikitag Contributions
I definitely do not stand by this as either explicit Lightcone policy or my own considered opinion, but, I feel like a bunch of forces on the internet nudge everyone towards the same generic site designs (mobile-first, darkmode ready, etc), and while I agree there is a cost, I do feel actively sad about the tradeoff in the other direction.
(like, there are a lot of websites that don't have a proper darkmode. And I... just... turn down the brightness if it's a big deal, which it usually isn't? I don't really like most websites turning dark at night. And again, if you set the setting once on LessWrong it mostly should be stable, I don't really buy that there are that many people who get the setting lost?)
I think the baseline site is pretty fine in darkmode, it's just that whenever we do artsy illustration stuff it's only really as-an-afterthought ported to darkmode. So, I think we have at least some preference for people's first experience of it to be on lightmode so that you at least for-a-bit get a sense of what the aesthetic is meant to be.
(the part where it keeps reverting whenever you lose localstorage does sound annoying, sorry about that)
1
1Mod note: this is an edge case on frontpaging (which mostly goes off of "is this timeless? would someone still care about this in 4-10 years?"). I think probably analysis of this bill will still be useful to read in the future, but, "a particular bill happening this year" is usually not frontpage.
I might separately criticize shortform video and twitter (sure, they definitely have benefits, I just think they also have major costs, and if we can alleviate the costs we should. This doesn't have to mean banning shortform and twitter).
But, I think that's (mostly) a different topic that the OP.
The question here is not "is it good you can post on twitter?", it's "is it good you can post on the version of twitter that was brought into being by "most people using small-screens." (or, more accurately: is it good that we're in the world where small-screen twitter is a dominant force shaping humanity, as opposed to an ecosystem where less-small-screen-oriented social media app is more dominant)
I think this framing was somewhat new to me and a useful explanation in contrast/in-addition-to The Schelling Choice is "Rabbit", not "Stag"
I've updated the post title to "Buckle up bucko, and get ready for multiple hard cognitive steps", because its what I expect I'll usually want the link to be when I link to this (so it's easier at a glance what it means in the context I'm linking to it. (I am considering making slightly more use of "initially name a post something more fun and attention getting while it's on the home page, but change the name slightly to something more linkable")