I hadn’t sufficiently considered the long term changes of LW to have occurred within the context of the overall changes in the internet before. Thank you very much for pointing it out. Reversing the harm of Moloch on this situation is extremely important.
I remember posting in the old vbulletin days where a person would use a screenname, but anonymity was much higher and the environment itself felt much better to exist in. Oddly enough, the places I posted at back then were not non-hostile and had a subpopulation who would go out of their way to deliberately and intentionally insult people as harshly as possible. And yet… for some reason I felt substantially safer, more welcome, and accepted there than I have anywhere else online.
To at least some extent there was a sort of compartmentalization going on in those places where serious conversation was in one area while pure-fluffy, friendly, jokey banter-talk was going on in another. Attempting to use a single area for both sounds like a bad idea to me and is the sort of thing that LessWrong was trying to avoid (for good reason) in order to maintain high standards and value of conversation but places like Tumblr allow and possibly encourage. (I don’t really know about tumblr since I avoid it, but that’s what it looks like from the outside.) There may also have been a factor that I had substantially more in common with the people who were around at that time whereas the internet today is full of a far mroe diverse set of people who have far less interest in acculturating into strange new environments.
Short-term thinking, slight pain/fear avoidance, and trivial conveniences that shifted everyone from older styles like vbulletin or livejournal to places like reddit and tumblr ultimately pattern matches to Moloch in my mind if it leads to things like less common widescale discussion of rationality or decreased development of rationalist-beloved areas. Ending or slowing down open, long-term conversations on important topics is very bad and I hope that LW does get reignited to change the progression of that.
I hadn’t sufficiently considered the long term changes of LW to have occurred within the context of the overall changes in the internet before. Thank you very much for pointing it out. Reversing the harm of Moloch on this situation is extremely important.
I remember posting in the old vbulletin days where a person would use a screenname, but anonymity was much higher and the environment itself felt much better to exist in. Oddly enough, the places I posted at back then were not non-hostile and had a subpopulation who would go out of their way to deliberately and intentionally insult people as harshly as possible. And yet… for some reason I felt substantially safer, more welcome, and accepted there than I have anywhere else online.
To at least some extent there was a sort of compartmentalization going on in those places where serious conversation was in one area while pure-fluffy, friendly, jokey banter-talk was going on in another. Attempting to use a single area for both sounds like a bad idea to me and is the sort of thing that LessWrong was trying to avoid (for good reason) in order to maintain high standards and value of conversation but places like Tumblr allow and possibly encourage. (I don’t really know about tumblr since I avoid it, but that’s what it looks like from the outside.) There may also have been a factor that I had substantially more in common with the people who were around at that time whereas the internet today is full of a far mroe diverse set of people who have far less interest in acculturating into strange new environments.
Short-term thinking, slight pain/fear avoidance, and trivial conveniences that shifted everyone from older styles like vbulletin or livejournal to places like reddit and tumblr ultimately pattern matches to Moloch in my mind if it leads to things like less common widescale discussion of rationality or decreased development of rationalist-beloved areas. Ending or slowing down open, long-term conversations on important topics is very bad and I hope that LW does get reignited to change the progression of that.