I'm interested from hearing from everyone who reads this.
Who is checking LW's Discussion area and how often?
1. When you check, how much voting or commenting do you do compared to reading?
2. Do bother clicking through to links?
3. Do you check using a desktop or a smart phone? Do you just visit the website in browser or use an RSS something-or-other?
4. Also, do you know of other places that have more schellingness for the topics you think this place is centered on? (Or used to be centered on?) (Or should be centered on?)
I would ask this in the current open thread except that structurally it seems like it needs to be more prominent than that in order to do its job.
If you have very very little time to respond or even think about the questions, I'd appreciate it if you just respond with "Ping" rather than click away.
Polled.
I generally do only a quick skim of post titles and open threads (edit: maybe twice a month on average; I'll try visiting more often). I used to check LW compulsively prior to 2013, but now I think both LW and I have changed a lot and diverged from each other. No hard feelings, though.
I rarely click link posts on LW. I seldom find them interesting, but I don't mind them as long as other LWers like them.
I mostly check LW through a desktop browser. Back in 2011–2012, I used Wei Dai's "Power Reader" script to read all comments. I also used to rely on Dbaupp's "scroll to new comments" script after they posted it in 2011, but these days I use Bakkot's "comment highlight" script. (Thanks to all three of you!)
I've been on Metaculus a lot over the past year. It's a prediction website focusing on science and tech (the site's been mentioned a few times on LW, and in fact that's how I heard of it). It's sort of like a gamified and moderated PredictionBook. (Edit: It's also similar to GJ Open, but IMO, Metaculus has way better questions and scoring.) It's a more-work-less-talk kind of website, so it's definitely not a site for general discussions.
I've been meaning to write an introductory post about Metaculus… I'll get to that sometime.
Given that one of LW's past focus was on biases, heuristics, and the Bayesian interpretation of probability, I think some of you might find it worthwhile and fun to do some real-world practice on manipulating subjective probabilities based on finding evidence. Metaculus is all about that sort of stuff, so join us! (My username there is 'v'. I recognize a few of you, especially WhySpace, over there.) The site itself is under continual improvement and work, and I know that the admins have high ambitions for it.
Edit: By the way, this is a great post and idea. Thanks!
Is there any information on how well-calibrated the community predictions are on Metaculus? I couldn't find anything on the site. Also, if one wanted to get into it, could you describe what your process is?