I strongly urge Lesswrong to resist calls to respond to deletion requests by routinely deleting things that have already been published. (I’m OK with deletion of a user name from the public LW archive.)
Lesswrong is unusual among online forums in how much time and mental energy it puts into reflecting on past public writings on the site. The annual review for example invites us to discuss posts the youngest of which are 11 months old.
I routinely copy URLs into text files on my computer so that I might return to them later. A quick search found 37 URLs that begin lesswrong.com/posts/ and 26 URLs that begin lesswrong.com/lw/. Picking one of the 37 URLs, I find it leads to a post made in 2018. Picking one of the 26 URLs, I find it leads to a comment made in 2010. (Part of the comment goes, <<Agreed. I’m often somewhat embarrassed to mention SIAI’s full name, or the Singularity Summit, because of the term “singularity” which, in many people’s minds—to some extent including my own—is a red flag for “crazy”.>>)
There has been a complete change in the software behind lesswrong.com between 2010 and now, but some programmer took the time to ensure that the URLs that worked on the old software would continue to work on the new software. A huge thank you whoever did that work! LW’s efforts to keep old URLs working have made me significantly more effective at reflecting and deliberating on the kinds of things that LW talks about.
Please don’t routinely or automatically grant deletion requests. That would make LW worse at helping people deliberate on timescales of years (e.g., revisiting a piece of writing after a number of years) which is important.
I strongly urge Lesswrong to resist calls to respond to deletion requests by routinely deleting things that have already been published. (I’m OK with deletion of a user name from the public LW archive.)
Lesswrong is unusual among online forums in how much time and mental energy it puts into reflecting on past public writings on the site. The annual review for example invites us to discuss posts the youngest of which are 11 months old.
I routinely copy URLs into text files on my computer so that I might return to them later. A quick search found 37 URLs that begin lesswrong.com/posts/ and 26 URLs that begin lesswrong.com/lw/. Picking one of the 37 URLs, I find it leads to a post made in 2018. Picking one of the 26 URLs, I find it leads to a comment made in 2010. (Part of the comment goes, <<Agreed. I’m often somewhat embarrassed to mention SIAI’s full name, or the Singularity Summit, because of the term “singularity” which, in many people’s minds—to some extent including my own—is a red flag for “crazy”.>>)
There has been a complete change in the software behind lesswrong.com between 2010 and now, but some programmer took the time to ensure that the URLs that worked on the old software would continue to work on the new software. A huge thank you whoever did that work! LW’s efforts to keep old URLs working have made me significantly more effective at reflecting and deliberating on the kinds of things that LW talks about.
Please don’t routinely or automatically grant deletion requests. That would make LW worse at helping people deliberate on timescales of years (e.g., revisiting a piece of writing after a number of years) which is important.