About a month ago, Anna posted about the Importance of Less Wrong or Another Single Conversational Locus, followed shortly by Sarah Constantin's http://lesswrong.com/lw/o62/a_return_to_discussion/
There was a week or two of heavy-activity by some old timers. Since there's been a decent array of good posts but not quite as inspiring as the first week was and I don't know whether to think "we just need to try harder" or change tactics in some way.
Some thoughts:
- I do feel it's been better to quickly be able to see a lot of posts in the community in one place
- I don't think the quality of the comments is that good, which is a bit demotivating.
- on facebook, lots of great conversations happen in a low-friction way, and when someone starts being annoying, the person's who's facebook wall it is has the authority to delete comments with abandon, which I think is helpful.
- I could see the solution being to either continue trying to incentivize better LW comments, or to just have LW be "single locus for big important ideas, but discussion to flesh them out still happen in more casual environments"
- I'm frustrated that the intellectual projects on Less Wrong are largely silo'd from the Effective Altruism community, which I think could really use them.
- The Main RSS feed has a lot of subscribers (I think I recall "about 10k"), so having things posted there seems good.
- I think it's good to NOT have people automatically post things there, since that produced a lot of weird anxiety/tension on "is my post good enough for main? I dunno!"
- But, there's also not a clear path to get something promoted to Main, or a sense of which things are important enough for Main
- I notice that I (personally) feel an ugh response to link posts and don't like being taken away from LW when I'm browsing LW. I'm not sure why.
Curious if others have thoughts.
Apollo/GraphQL. I expect us to pay a typical hosting company to host the server; it's unclear yet who.
Yes and no; Telescope's core is already fully functional and has a roughly similar data structure to Reddit, and so we can move posts to posts and linkposts to linkposts and comments to comments. So that part of the migration seems clear, and is the sort of thing that Trike has already done before (in moving from Overcoming Bias to Less Wrong).
But our customized version of Telescope will probably handle them differently than the core does. Suppose, for example, that we want to move from Less Wrong's html post creation to Markdown post creation, then we need to convert all the old posts (stored as html files) into Markdown source code for those files. And until we have the Markdown post creation the way we want it, it doesn't make sense to actually code it.
Yeah, I'm worrying about this. Switching before it's better than current LW is bad; switching once it's better than current LW is okay but might waste the "reopening!" PR event; switching once it's at the full feature set is great but possibly late.
How about doing a public beta for a month or two, with a warning that afterwards everything posted on the new server will be deleted (including new user accounts, etc.), data from old server will be imported, the old server will become read-only, and the new server will become the official one.