Of all the suggestions so far, I think this is the most likely to succeed at reinvigorating the discussion and the community.
This plan will increase the average quality of the content (and therefore attract high-quality commenters), and also incentivize contributors to write high-quality posts in an attempt to score very scarce status points associated with being published on the website. These weekly posts will presumably be a Schelling point for discussion topics at Less Wrong meetups worldwide.
I assume people will put rejected material on their personal blogs, and that these posts will often be comparable in quality to what is currently posted under Discussion. Perhaps we can have a section of the website that functions as a content aggregator for the community.
It would be slightly ironic if it turns out that we can save Less Wrong by essentially turning it into a peer-reviewed journal, but I don’t think we should let that stop us
I suspect that #2 alone would do as much good as #1 + #2. (There might be value in some kind of enforced scarcity, but e.g. making #2 the only source of posts in Main would surely suffice.)
It is in any case dependent on finding enough people with enough ideas and time and writing skill to produce one “Eliezer-quality or higher” post per week. That seems to me to be rather more high-quality posts than LW is getting at present, so unless this plan is going to jumpstart everyone’s motivation more than seems plausible to me it’ll depend on cooperation from some people currently out in the rationalist diaspora. Is enough such cooperation likely to be forthcoming?
Of all the suggestions so far, I think this is the most likely to succeed at reinvigorating the discussion and the community.
This plan will increase the average quality of the content (and therefore attract high-quality commenters), and also incentivize contributors to write high-quality posts in an attempt to score very scarce status points associated with being published on the website. These weekly posts will presumably be a Schelling point for discussion topics at Less Wrong meetups worldwide.
I assume people will put rejected material on their personal blogs, and that these posts will often be comparable in quality to what is currently posted under Discussion. Perhaps we can have a section of the website that functions as a content aggregator for the community.
It would be slightly ironic if it turns out that we can save Less Wrong by essentially turning it into a peer-reviewed journal, but I don’t think we should let that stop us
I suspect that #2 alone would do as much good as #1 + #2. (There might be value in some kind of enforced scarcity, but e.g. making #2 the only source of posts in Main would surely suffice.)
It is in any case dependent on finding enough people with enough ideas and time and writing skill to produce one “Eliezer-quality or higher” post per week. That seems to me to be rather more high-quality posts than LW is getting at present, so unless this plan is going to jumpstart everyone’s motivation more than seems plausible to me it’ll depend on cooperation from some people currently out in the rationalist diaspora. Is enough such cooperation likely to be forthcoming?