Overall, I don’t expect most essays from Inkhaven Residents to be posted on LessWrong.
As a person whose preferred way of interacting with LessWrong is the All Posts page, this still sounds like potentially way too much volume! There’s a real risk this will temporarily break the ability of me and other people to at least read the title of everything posted on LessWrong (and I have, to the best of my knowledge, read at least once the title of literally every post on LessWrong).
Assuming that over time LessWrong grows in popularity, what’s your preferred longterm way to deal with this? (we could make different choices about this particular month, but I don’t think it’s really a workable longterm solution for people to read every post title on LW, and I’m not sure if All Posts Folk™ have a preference here other than just hoping LessWrong never gets that large.)
My real preference is that LessWrong doesn’t grow too much in popularity, or at least doesn’t grow a lot in terms of number of people posting and commenting, even if it grows in terms of influence. I’m already bummed that LessWrong got so big that I could no longer read every post (or at least skim every post), which is what I was able to do up until maybe 2019 or 2020 when post volume went up (my memory is hazy here, but there was definitely some point after the 2.0 relaunch that post volumes got high enough I was forced to abandon opening every post). At some point LessWrong stops being LessWrong if it’s no longer at least kind of a single community (this sort of already happened with EAF, which I’m bummed to see got worse for me in various ways over time as EA widened the tent and became less dominated by rationalist norms).
I don’t know how much that’s in the cards, and is probably not up to any of us. I like that LessWrong has relatively strong norms and is something like a closed community that welcomes visitors: anyone can come for the day, but if you want to live here you have to commit yourself to a certain lifestyle. I’m perhaps pushing the metaphor too far here, but it’s like living in a village where everyone has to agree to do this one weird thing, and anyone can visit, but you can only stay if you do the one weird thing, and most people can’t or don’t want to do that thing and so are kept out.
If LessWrong got big in some way, then I’d at least like some way to maintain that small feeling. This is hard to think about how to do it because the easy option is some kind of karma filter, but this makes it hard for new people who should be part of “core” LW without having to come up through some other process of farming karma that might optimize for something other than what is good about the core of LW. Maybe some combo of karma and votes and time discounting (but then maybe people like me who post lots of controversial things would fall out of the core, which some people might like but I wouldn’t)? I’m not really sure what the right solution is here to maintain something that looks like “LessWrong is all one community” and “LessWrong has more stuff on it than can fit in one community”.
Of course this specific event will also be short lived, and I’ve survived previous times of temporary high volume. Hopefully it will be offset by the quality of the posts (although part of me hopes they suck just because I only have so much time in the day to read great blog posts!).
As a person whose preferred way of interacting with LessWrong is the All Posts page, this still sounds like potentially way too much volume! There’s a real risk this will temporarily break the ability of me and other people to at least read the title of everything posted on LessWrong (and I have, to the best of my knowledge, read at least once the title of literally every post on LessWrong).
Assuming that over time LessWrong grows in popularity, what’s your preferred longterm way to deal with this? (we could make different choices about this particular month, but I don’t think it’s really a workable longterm solution for people to read every post title on LW, and I’m not sure if All Posts Folk™ have a preference here other than just hoping LessWrong never gets that large.)
It’s a good question to think about.
My real preference is that LessWrong doesn’t grow too much in popularity, or at least doesn’t grow a lot in terms of number of people posting and commenting, even if it grows in terms of influence. I’m already bummed that LessWrong got so big that I could no longer read every post (or at least skim every post), which is what I was able to do up until maybe 2019 or 2020 when post volume went up (my memory is hazy here, but there was definitely some point after the 2.0 relaunch that post volumes got high enough I was forced to abandon opening every post). At some point LessWrong stops being LessWrong if it’s no longer at least kind of a single community (this sort of already happened with EAF, which I’m bummed to see got worse for me in various ways over time as EA widened the tent and became less dominated by rationalist norms).
I don’t know how much that’s in the cards, and is probably not up to any of us. I like that LessWrong has relatively strong norms and is something like a closed community that welcomes visitors: anyone can come for the day, but if you want to live here you have to commit yourself to a certain lifestyle. I’m perhaps pushing the metaphor too far here, but it’s like living in a village where everyone has to agree to do this one weird thing, and anyone can visit, but you can only stay if you do the one weird thing, and most people can’t or don’t want to do that thing and so are kept out.
If LessWrong got big in some way, then I’d at least like some way to maintain that small feeling. This is hard to think about how to do it because the easy option is some kind of karma filter, but this makes it hard for new people who should be part of “core” LW without having to come up through some other process of farming karma that might optimize for something other than what is good about the core of LW. Maybe some combo of karma and votes and time discounting (but then maybe people like me who post lots of controversial things would fall out of the core, which some people might like but I wouldn’t)? I’m not really sure what the right solution is here to maintain something that looks like “LessWrong is all one community” and “LessWrong has more stuff on it than can fit in one community”.
Of course this specific event will also be short lived, and I’ve survived previous times of temporary high volume. Hopefully it will be offset by the quality of the posts (although part of me hopes they suck just because I only have so much time in the day to read great blog posts!).