I would encourage you to seek other sources of validation. There are so many more options than you think! :)
Any examples? That is the one positive thing, lesswrong was a club to discuss Eliezer’s fanfiction, then it went dead for years with nothing but useless fake academic papers as posts, then Covid where it was great for that, then the AI breakthroughs started to actually happen and suddenly it wasn’t an intellectual topic anymore. But then in the last year, this experimental moderation system, which is also fine when it’s not applied manually without any kind of explanation.
Any examples? That is the one positive thing, lesswrong was a club to discuss Eliezer’s fanfiction, then it went dead for years with nothing but useless fake academic papers as posts, then Covid where it was great for that, then the AI breakthroughs started to actually happen and suddenly it wasn’t an intellectual topic anymore. But then in the last year, this experimental moderation system, which is also fine when it’s not applied manually without any kind of explanation.