As someone who was inspired by your post from a year ago, and who was thinking of contributing to LessWrong as a public archipelago, here are some things that stopped me from contributing much. Maybe other people have these things in common with me and why they wanted to but failed to contribute in the last year.
1. There is less interest in the rationality community for the things I would be interested in writing about on LessWrong, or the rationality community is actively disinterested in things I am interested in writing about. This demotivates me to post on LW. I am in private group chats and closed Facebook groups largely populated by members of the rationalist diaspora. These discussions don’t take place on LessWrong, not only because there might be relatively few people who would participate in LessWrong, but because they’re discussions of subjects the rationality community is seen as hostile, indifferent, or disinterested in, such as many branches of philosophy. This discourages these discussions on the public archipelago. I expect there is a lot of people who don’t post on LessWrong because they share this kind of perception. It’s possible to find people with whom to have private discussions, but having them be on a public archipelago on LW, it if was possible to satisfy people, would make it easier and better from my viewpoint.
2. One particular worry I and others have is that, as in mainstream culture more and more things become politicized, more and more types of conversations on LW would be discouraged as ‘politically mindkilling.’ I personally wouldn’t know what to expect as what the norms are here, though I am not as worried as others because I don’t see it as much of a loss for there to be fewer half-baked speculations on political subjects online. A fear that the list of subjects discouraged as being too overtly ‘political’ could endlessly grow is discouraging.
3. The number of people who are interested in the subjects I am interested in on LessWrong is too small to motivate me to write more. I haven’t explored this as much, and I think I have been too lazy in not trying. Yet a decent quantity of feedback, of sufficiently engaging and deep quality, seems like to me what would motivate I know to participate more on LW. One possibility is getting people I find who are not currently part of the rationality community, or a typical LW user, to read my posts on LW, and build something new out of it. I think this is fine to talk about, and I really agree with the shift since LW2.0 to develop LW as its own thing, still working with but distinct and independent from MIRI and AI alignment, CFAR, and the rationality community. So cleaving new online spaces on LW, which maybe can be especially tailored due to how much control I have over my own posts as a user, is something I am still open to trying.
As someone who was inspired by your post from a year ago, and who was thinking of contributing to LessWrong as a public archipelago, here are some things that stopped me from contributing much. Maybe other people have these things in common with me and why they wanted to but failed to contribute in the last year.
1. There is less interest in the rationality community for the things I would be interested in writing about on LessWrong, or the rationality community is actively disinterested in things I am interested in writing about. This demotivates me to post on LW. I am in private group chats and closed Facebook groups largely populated by members of the rationalist diaspora. These discussions don’t take place on LessWrong, not only because there might be relatively few people who would participate in LessWrong, but because they’re discussions of subjects the rationality community is seen as hostile, indifferent, or disinterested in, such as many branches of philosophy. This discourages these discussions on the public archipelago. I expect there is a lot of people who don’t post on LessWrong because they share this kind of perception. It’s possible to find people with whom to have private discussions, but having them be on a public archipelago on LW, it if was possible to satisfy people, would make it easier and better from my viewpoint.
2. One particular worry I and others have is that, as in mainstream culture more and more things become politicized, more and more types of conversations on LW would be discouraged as ‘politically mindkilling.’ I personally wouldn’t know what to expect as what the norms are here, though I am not as worried as others because I don’t see it as much of a loss for there to be fewer half-baked speculations on political subjects online. A fear that the list of subjects discouraged as being too overtly ‘political’ could endlessly grow is discouraging.
3. The number of people who are interested in the subjects I am interested in on LessWrong is too small to motivate me to write more. I haven’t explored this as much, and I think I have been too lazy in not trying. Yet a decent quantity of feedback, of sufficiently engaging and deep quality, seems like to me what would motivate I know to participate more on LW. One possibility is getting people I find who are not currently part of the rationality community, or a typical LW user, to read my posts on LW, and build something new out of it. I think this is fine to talk about, and I really agree with the shift since LW2.0 to develop LW as its own thing, still working with but distinct and independent from MIRI and AI alignment, CFAR, and the rationality community. So cleaving new online spaces on LW, which maybe can be especially tailored due to how much control I have over my own posts as a user, is something I am still open to trying.