Exactly. The voting system has an important role on this website. We should not abuse it because of something unrelated to its original role, because then it will be more difficult to use.
This said, we definitely should be friendly to 80,000 Hours, and here are a few quick ideas how to do it, without abusing the article voting system:
put a 80,000 Hours banner on LW homepage;
put a link to 80,000 Hours on the right side of LW screens;
put an RSS feed of 80,000 Hours on the right side of LW screens (like Overcoming Bias has now);
integrate RSS feed of 80,000 Hours with LW “Discussion” page; at the top it could display visually separated “Articles from friendly sites”, for example top 3 articles from each;
create an “Announcement” area on LW homepage where people from 80,000 Hours can put their message of limited length.
Each of these ideas (and you can think about some new ones) would provide 80,000 Hours visibility on LW homepage, without asking LW readers to compromise the LW voting system. Link to friends are OK—just not in the LW article queue.
We could use this discussion to brainstorm the best way to promote 80,000 Hours (and other friendly sites) on LW.
I think we should. Personally, I was put off for years from joining Less Wrong when it split off from Overcoming Bias because everytime I looked the home page was nothing but meetup announcements.
I wasn’t an active reader during the split—life had intervened. Indeed, for a while there I incorrectly believed Overcoming Bias had renamed itself Less Wrong following a redesign.
Local Meetup announcements are useful information promoting something we want that appears nowhere else. But I would still support them not being on discussion page if there was another space for them.
Exactly. The voting system has an important role on this website. We should not abuse it because of something unrelated to its original role, because then it will be more difficult to use.
This said, we definitely should be friendly to 80,000 Hours, and here are a few quick ideas how to do it, without abusing the article voting system:
put a 80,000 Hours banner on LW homepage;
put a link to 80,000 Hours on the right side of LW screens;
put an RSS feed of 80,000 Hours on the right side of LW screens (like Overcoming Bias has now);
integrate RSS feed of 80,000 Hours with LW “Discussion” page; at the top it could display visually separated “Articles from friendly sites”, for example top 3 articles from each;
create an “Announcement” area on LW homepage where people from 80,000 Hours can put their message of limited length.
Each of these ideas (and you can think about some new ones) would provide 80,000 Hours visibility on LW homepage, without asking LW readers to compromise the LW voting system. Link to friends are OK—just not in the LW article queue.
We could use this discussion to brainstorm the best way to promote 80,000 Hours (and other friendly sites) on LW.
Should we apply the same logic to local LW meetup announcements? If not, what is different?
I think we should. Personally, I was put off for years from joining Less Wrong when it split off from Overcoming Bias because everytime I looked the home page was nothing but meetup announcements.
Interesting—I don’t remember meetup announcements until a couple of years after the split.
I wasn’t an active reader during the split—life had intervened. Indeed, for a while there I incorrectly believed Overcoming Bias had renamed itself Less Wrong following a redesign.
Local Meetup announcements are useful information promoting something we want that appears nowhere else. But I would still support them not being on discussion page if there was another space for them.
Redesigning the article categories would be useful. “Main” and “Discussion” are not enough for the amount and structure of articles we have now.
A possible solution is “Top Articles”, “Articles”, “Forum”—the last category for meetups and recurrent topics.
People have complained before about the post list being overwhelmed with meetup announcements.