Lesswrong 2.0 is a project by Oliver Habryka, Ben Pace, and Matthew Graves with the aim of revitalizing the Lesswrong discussion platform. Oliver and Ben are currently working on the project full-time and Matthew Graves is providing part-time support and oversight from MIRI.

Our main goals are to move Lesswrong to a modern codebase, add an effective moderation system, and integrate the cultural shifts that the rationality community has made over the last eight years. We also think that many of the distinct qualities of the Lesswrong community (e.g. propensity for long-form arguments, reasoned debate, and a culture of building on one another's conceptual progress) suggest a set of features unique to the new Lesswrong that will greatly benefit the community.

We are planning to be improving and maintaining the site for many years to come, but whether the site will be successful ultimately depends on whether the community will find it useful. As such, it is important to get your feedback and guidance on how the site should develop and how we should prioritize our resources. Over the coming months we want to experiment with many different content-types and page designs, while actively integrating your feedback, in an attempt to find a structure for Lesswrong that is best suited at facilitating rational discourse.

What follows is a rough summary of how we are currently thinking about the development of Lesswrong 2.0, and what we see as the major pillars of the Lesswrong 2.0 project. We would love to get your thoughts and critiques on these.

Table of Contents:

I. Modern Codebase

II. Effective Moderation

III. Discourse Norms

IV. New Features

V. Beta Feedback Period

I. Modern Codebase

The old lesswrong is one of the only successful forks of the reddit codebase (forked circa 2009). While reddit's code served as a stable platform while our community was in its initial stages, it has become hard to develop and extend because of its age, complexity and monolithic design.

Lesswrong 2.0, on the other hand, is based on modern web technologies designed to make rapid development much easier (to be precise React, GraphQL, Slate.js, Vulcan.js and Meteor). The old codebase was a pain to work with, and almost every developer who tried to contribute gave up after trying their hands at it. The new Lesswrong codebase on the other hand is built with tools that are well-documented ...

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