1) Make the current LW read-only. All content is still accessible, but commenting and voting is disabled. The discussion section is closed as well. Let things rest for a month or so.
2) Announce that during the next year, LW will have one post per week, at a specified time. There will be an email address where anyone can send their submissions, whereupon a horribly secretive and biased group of editors will select the best one each week, aiming for Eliezer quality or higher. The prominent posters you’ve contacted should create enough good content for the first couple months. Voting will be disabled for posts, and enabled only for comments. There will also be one monthly open thread for unstructured discussion.
I don’t think anything short of that would work. LW’s problem is the decline in quality, so the fix should be quality-oriented, not quantity-oriented.
LW’s problem is the decline in quality, so the fix should be quality-oriented, not quantity-oriented.
I think it went the other way: demands for quality, rigor, and fully developed ideas made posting here unsatisfying (compared to the alternatives) for a lot of previously good posters.
Well, I was one of those “previously good posters” (top 10 for a long time) and I left because of the decline in quality. I don’t remember exactly, but I think Eliezer also claimed to leave because of nastiness in the comments, not because people were asking him to be more rigorous.
The limiting factor of having an active community on LW is people’s desire to hang out here. I strongly believe that desire depends mostly on the average quality of posts they read, and doesn’t depend on their freedom to post. Eliezer had a fandom even in the OB days, when no one except him could post at all. Only Scott can post on SSC today, yet each of his posts gathers hundreds of comments. I’m just suggesting the same model here.
“Nastiness in the comments” and “people asking him to be more rigorous” aren’t mutually exclusive. I heard a lot of this in person, so I can’t easily provide references, but back when that was all going down I remember a lot of talk from Eliezer and other major contributors about how LW was getting unpleasantly nitpicky.
In Eliezer’s case this probably has something to do with the fastest-gun-in-the-west dynamic, where if you’re known as a public intellectual in some context you’re going to attract a lot of people looking to gain some status by making you look stupid. But I heard similar sentiments from e.g. Louie, and he was never Internet famous like Eliezer was.
A social club version of LW also has to compete with the whole net ;-)
IMO the best contributors on LW (Yvain, Alicorn, Wei...) joined mostly because of the quality of Eliezer’s posts, not because of the people. There were hardly any people back then. I might be misremembering, but I think Yvain started posting when LW was still read-only, by emailing his posts to Eliezer or something.
A social club version of LW also has to compete with the whole net ;-)
Yes, but here it has a pronounced advantage. Out of all more or less active forums known to me, LW has the least idiots. That’s a huge plus. Besides, I like weirdness.
because of the quality of Eliezer’s posts, not because of the people. There were hardly any people back then.
Yes, and at that point EY was “people” they wanted to talk to.
FWIW my feeling is much the same as Lumifer’s. However, people like me and Lumifer may not be the ones whose feelings matter here—if all the best people have abandoned LW because the quality is low, people who are still active participants probably (1) aren’t the best people, (2) aren’t producing the high quality of stuff that LW needs to attract and keep the best people, and (3) in any case aren’t the ones LW is having most trouble retaining.
(Counterargument: “first do no harm”. Countercounterargument, kinda: if LW is made read-only, who cares whether anyone is or isn’t interested in it? it will make no difference.)
I fear this would disincentivize our best potential posters, those like Scott who have their own blogs and following and post a lot there.
Restricting to one post per week will mean posters and topics will rarely repeat, and there will be no sequences, not even short ones. Everyone who wants to write a series of even 2 or 3 posts would have to do so on their own blog. Posts in response to the discussion on the previous post would also be impossible. Posts from several people in reply to one another, or on the same topical subject, would be almost impossible. This greatly limits the possible topics of discussion.
A blogger doesn’t always know in advance which of his posts will be the best ones. He just posts them and looks at the response. But then it’s too late to repost on LW (an LW that demands original content is very different from a blog aggregator that promotes existing posts). So the blogger would have to pre-select what to post on LW, and if he’s denied or waits too much in the one-per-week queue, they can pull the request and post it themselves. Posting your less-good content immediately, while waiting to publish what you hope-but-aren’t-sure is your best, isn’t fun.
Announce that during the next year, LW will have one post per week, at a specified time. There will be an email address where anyone can send their submissions, whereupon a horribly secretive and biased group of editors will select the best one each week, aiming for Eliezer quality or higher.
Functionally, this is turning LW into a magazine with one article per week. I think that’s a decent approach, though I have some reservations.
Remember the shift from OB to LW, and one of the big changes being that people went from having to email Hanson about posting something (and maybe getting shot down) to being able to post something themselves. I worry that this creates too much in the way of inconvenience and risk of failure for posters, and means that they’ll post it somewhere else instead of on LW.
But I think the tournament nature of it—there’s a post every week, and so we need people to contribute, and if your post doesn’t make it (or gets waitlisted or so on) it’s not because you’re absolutely bad, just relatively bad—does improve the idea significantly.
I’m also not sure how well this plays with the fragmentation in interests of people in the community.
Re: fragmentation of interests. Posts on LessWrong seem to easily slide into a number of clear categories (epistemic rationality, fighting akrasia, decision theory math, social events...) It would be great if the site was organized to group posts together, so that if I don’t know math and just want to follow the best self-help tips it would be easy to do so.
This can work very well with the “one post a week” idea, which I’m in favor of. Consistent schedule + high quality is what keeps people coming back. That’s why so many webcomics religiously stick to their posting schedule (like XKCD’s M-W-F). We can have a post every X days in each of 3-4 basic categories, so I’ll know that one Wednesday is AI-post day, the next Saturday is akrasia post day, the next Wednesday is social post day etc.
The main challenge would be getting enough good posts, two thoughts on that:
If the good writers contribute enough stuff upfront it can create a good buffer that will allow the editors to plan the best schedule, i.e. how many days between posts can be kept consistently.
I think a lot of people are already intimidated about posting given the very high standards. If quality is a concern more than quantity, I don’t think that people with something important to say will be too discouraged by having to submit to moderation. A lot of us have our own blogs, tumblrs, Facebooks etc. Since I know that LW has a much wider reach than my own blog, I wouldn’t mind trying to “win the week” on LW first, and posting on my platform as a fallback if I don’t make it.
Waiting for moderation on what you wrote requires delaying gratification, which is very hard… but not something that a real rationalist would have trouble overcoming, no? ;-)
I agree about fragmentation, but people’s interests were always diverse. One way or another, LW needs to find its voice. That’s a hard problem that the editors will have to work on.
But that’s exactly what happens! How can anyone not see that?
Bad content drives out good. Right now LW has settled into a state where people write tons of low quality posts, because they are just as visible as high quality posts. The tiny difference in visibility between main and discussion isn’t a strong enough incentive.
In the early days of LW, posts were manually promoted to main by Eliezer, and the discussion section didn’t exist. That led to high average quality which attracted many people.
OK, thought experiment. Let’s say Scott announces a contest for the best guest post on SSC. Do you think there will be many high quality submissions? I think yeah. Now let’s say Scott opens posting on SSC to everyone with a pulse. Do you think the quality will stay high for long? I think nope.
Of course restrictions aren’t the only thing necessary for high quality. You also need a seed of amazing content. Luckily, LW already has that :-)
First, you are conflating categories. SSC is a blog—a place where one person (or maybe a few) posts content and the visitors consume it. Comments are secondary and are not that important. LW is not a blog—maybe it was once long time ago and it still misleadingly calls itself a blog, but functionally it’s a forum attached to an archive.
One important difference is that blogs have ownership. I’m not talking about the legal sense, but rather about the feeling of responsibility/control/caring. When things are not owned by anyone in particular, there are… consequences. Consult the XX century history for particulars. LW used to be owned by EY. Right now it’s not owned by anyone in particular.
If you want LW to go back to being a blog, you need to find preferably one, but not more than 5-6 people who will commit to the care and feeding of LW and who will have power to change things to their liking. But, of course, future is uncertain so as the result the LW might flower and be rejuvenated, or it may crash and burn.
The alternative is to treat LW as social platform, a forum, where content is provided mostly by the participants. Yes, you do not get solely high-level content, you get a lot of low-level stuff, too, but that’s a filtering problem which has many well-known solutions. At the moment LW’s filtering capabilities are rather… rudimentary.
Yeah, I want LW to be a high quality blog and I’m aware of the risk involved. I’m not as interested in a forum, there’s tons of those already and none of them are very exciting. IMO exciting things are more worth creating than non-exciting things.
I find the comments at SSC to be useless. I mean, there may or may not be good content in there, but it’s nearly impossible to read/participate in those comments so I just don’t use them or read them or look at them.
Maybe like 1 out of 10 posts, I’ll find myself heading towards the comments and giving up after 5 minutes.
The problem with them is that there is no sorting mechanism, so unless I have the time to read several hundred comments I must resort to things like Ctrl-F’ing for the names of certain commenters I particularly like, or going to the most recent comments and hoping that if a discussion has survived this long then it’s probably going to be interesting.
I don’t see why you should shutdown the rest of the site to do this. What’s the benefit of not having a discussion section or restricting the total number of posts? The problem as I see it has nothing to do with the total number of posts, but with the fact that there are not many high quality posts. In regards to your second point, couldn’t you just do something similar with the existing promoted section. It should be fairly easy to set up an email address for people to submit potential promoted worthy posts and a group of reviewers who will review, select and post one article a week.
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?
I vote for both plans at once!
1) Make the current LW read-only. All content is still accessible, but commenting and voting is disabled. The discussion section is closed as well. Let things rest for a month or so.
2) Announce that during the next year, LW will have one post per week, at a specified time. There will be an email address where anyone can send their submissions, whereupon a horribly secretive and biased group of editors will select the best one each week, aiming for Eliezer quality or higher. The prominent posters you’ve contacted should create enough good content for the first couple months. Voting will be disabled for posts, and enabled only for comments. There will also be one monthly open thread for unstructured discussion.
I don’t think anything short of that would work. LW’s problem is the decline in quality, so the fix should be quality-oriented, not quantity-oriented.
I think it went the other way: demands for quality, rigor, and fully developed ideas made posting here unsatisfying (compared to the alternatives) for a lot of previously good posters.
Well, I was one of those “previously good posters” (top 10 for a long time) and I left because of the decline in quality. I don’t remember exactly, but I think Eliezer also claimed to leave because of nastiness in the comments, not because people were asking him to be more rigorous.
The limiting factor of having an active community on LW is people’s desire to hang out here. I strongly believe that desire depends mostly on the average quality of posts they read, and doesn’t depend on their freedom to post. Eliezer had a fandom even in the OB days, when no one except him could post at all. Only Scott can post on SSC today, yet each of his posts gathers hundreds of comments. I’m just suggesting the same model here.
“Nastiness in the comments” and “people asking him to be more rigorous” aren’t mutually exclusive. I heard a lot of this in person, so I can’t easily provide references, but back when that was all going down I remember a lot of talk from Eliezer and other major contributors about how LW was getting unpleasantly nitpicky.
In Eliezer’s case this probably has something to do with the fastest-gun-in-the-west dynamic, where if you’re known as a public intellectual in some context you’re going to attract a lot of people looking to gain some status by making you look stupid. But I heard similar sentiments from e.g. Louie, and he was never Internet famous like Eliezer was.
Truth.
A datapoint: I am entirely uninterested in a read-only LW. On this basis it has to compete with the whole ’net and, well, I don’t think it will win.
From my point of view “that desire” depends mostly on the quality of people you can talk to. You don’t need a social website to read blog posts.
A social club version of LW also has to compete with the whole net ;-)
IMO the best contributors on LW (Yvain, Alicorn, Wei...) joined mostly because of the quality of Eliezer’s posts, not because of the people. There were hardly any people back then. I might be misremembering, but I think Yvain started posting when LW was still read-only, by emailing his posts to Eliezer or something.
Yes, but here it has a pronounced advantage. Out of all more or less active forums known to me, LW has the least idiots. That’s a huge plus. Besides, I like weirdness.
Yes, and at that point EY was “people” they wanted to talk to.
FWIW my feeling is much the same as Lumifer’s. However, people like me and Lumifer may not be the ones whose feelings matter here—if all the best people have abandoned LW because the quality is low, people who are still active participants probably (1) aren’t the best people, (2) aren’t producing the high quality of stuff that LW needs to attract and keep the best people, and (3) in any case aren’t the ones LW is having most trouble retaining.
(Counterargument: “first do no harm”. Countercounterargument, kinda: if LW is made read-only, who cares whether anyone is or isn’t interested in it? it will make no difference.)
I fear this would disincentivize our best potential posters, those like Scott who have their own blogs and following and post a lot there.
Restricting to one post per week will mean posters and topics will rarely repeat, and there will be no sequences, not even short ones. Everyone who wants to write a series of even 2 or 3 posts would have to do so on their own blog. Posts in response to the discussion on the previous post would also be impossible. Posts from several people in reply to one another, or on the same topical subject, would be almost impossible. This greatly limits the possible topics of discussion.
A blogger doesn’t always know in advance which of his posts will be the best ones. He just posts them and looks at the response. But then it’s too late to repost on LW (an LW that demands original content is very different from a blog aggregator that promotes existing posts). So the blogger would have to pre-select what to post on LW, and if he’s denied or waits too much in the one-per-week queue, they can pull the request and post it themselves. Posting your less-good content immediately, while waiting to publish what you hope-but-aren’t-sure is your best, isn’t fun.
Functionally, this is turning LW into a magazine with one article per week. I think that’s a decent approach, though I have some reservations.
Remember the shift from OB to LW, and one of the big changes being that people went from having to email Hanson about posting something (and maybe getting shot down) to being able to post something themselves. I worry that this creates too much in the way of inconvenience and risk of failure for posters, and means that they’ll post it somewhere else instead of on LW.
But I think the tournament nature of it—there’s a post every week, and so we need people to contribute, and if your post doesn’t make it (or gets waitlisted or so on) it’s not because you’re absolutely bad, just relatively bad—does improve the idea significantly.
I’m also not sure how well this plays with the fragmentation in interests of people in the community.
Re: fragmentation of interests. Posts on LessWrong seem to easily slide into a number of clear categories (epistemic rationality, fighting akrasia, decision theory math, social events...) It would be great if the site was organized to group posts together, so that if I don’t know math and just want to follow the best self-help tips it would be easy to do so.
This can work very well with the “one post a week” idea, which I’m in favor of. Consistent schedule + high quality is what keeps people coming back. That’s why so many webcomics religiously stick to their posting schedule (like XKCD’s M-W-F). We can have a post every X days in each of 3-4 basic categories, so I’ll know that one Wednesday is AI-post day, the next Saturday is akrasia post day, the next Wednesday is social post day etc.
The main challenge would be getting enough good posts, two thoughts on that:
If the good writers contribute enough stuff upfront it can create a good buffer that will allow the editors to plan the best schedule, i.e. how many days between posts can be kept consistently.
I think a lot of people are already intimidated about posting given the very high standards. If quality is a concern more than quantity, I don’t think that people with something important to say will be too discouraged by having to submit to moderation. A lot of us have our own blogs, tumblrs, Facebooks etc. Since I know that LW has a much wider reach than my own blog, I wouldn’t mind trying to “win the week” on LW first, and posting on my platform as a fallback if I don’t make it.
Waiting for moderation on what you wrote requires delaying gratification, which is very hard… but not something that a real rationalist would have trouble overcoming, no? ;-)
I agree about fragmentation, but people’s interests were always diverse. One way or another, LW needs to find its voice. That’s a hard problem that the editors will have to work on.
I don’t think the existance of the discussion-section prevents high quality posts in the main section.
But that’s exactly what happens! How can anyone not see that?
Bad content drives out good. Right now LW has settled into a state where people write tons of low quality posts, because they are just as visible as high quality posts. The tiny difference in visibility between main and discussion isn’t a strong enough incentive.
In the early days of LW, posts were manually promoted to main by Eliezer, and the discussion section didn’t exist. That led to high average quality which attracted many people.
It’s not that restrictions led to high quality posts. It’s that the availability of high quality posts allowed restrictions.
Don’t cargo-cult.
OK, thought experiment. Let’s say Scott announces a contest for the best guest post on SSC. Do you think there will be many high quality submissions? I think yeah. Now let’s say Scott opens posting on SSC to everyone with a pulse. Do you think the quality will stay high for long? I think nope.
Of course restrictions aren’t the only thing necessary for high quality. You also need a seed of amazing content. Luckily, LW already has that :-)
First, you are conflating categories. SSC is a blog—a place where one person (or maybe a few) posts content and the visitors consume it. Comments are secondary and are not that important. LW is not a blog—maybe it was once long time ago and it still misleadingly calls itself a blog, but functionally it’s a forum attached to an archive.
One important difference is that blogs have ownership. I’m not talking about the legal sense, but rather about the feeling of responsibility/control/caring. When things are not owned by anyone in particular, there are… consequences. Consult the XX century history for particulars. LW used to be owned by EY. Right now it’s not owned by anyone in particular.
If you want LW to go back to being a blog, you need to find preferably one, but not more than 5-6 people who will commit to the care and feeding of LW and who will have power to change things to their liking. But, of course, future is uncertain so as the result the LW might flower and be rejuvenated, or it may crash and burn.
The alternative is to treat LW as social platform, a forum, where content is provided mostly by the participants. Yes, you do not get solely high-level content, you get a lot of low-level stuff, too, but that’s a filtering problem which has many well-known solutions. At the moment LW’s filtering capabilities are rather… rudimentary.
Yeah, I want LW to be a high quality blog and I’m aware of the risk involved. I’m not as interested in a forum, there’s tons of those already and none of them are very exciting. IMO exciting things are more worth creating than non-exciting things.
The critical question is whose blog? Who will have ownership?
“The whole community” is not a good answer.
There are even more non-exciting blogs :-P
SSC is heavily dependent on comments, to the point where they are arguably not even secondary any more.
Interesting.
I find the comments at SSC to be useless. I mean, there may or may not be good content in there, but it’s nearly impossible to read/participate in those comments so I just don’t use them or read them or look at them.
Maybe like 1 out of 10 posts, I’ll find myself heading towards the comments and giving up after 5 minutes.
SSC has a very vigorous comment section, but for me at least Scott’s articles are an order of magnitude more valuable than the comments.
The problem with them is that there is no sorting mechanism, so unless I have the time to read several hundred comments I must resort to things like Ctrl-F’ing for the names of certain commenters I particularly like, or going to the most recent comments and hoping that if a discussion has survived this long then it’s probably going to be interesting.
I don’t see why you should shutdown the rest of the site to do this. What’s the benefit of not having a discussion section or restricting the total number of posts? The problem as I see it has nothing to do with the total number of posts, but with the fact that there are not many high quality posts. In regards to your second point, couldn’t you just do something similar with the existing promoted section. It should be fairly easy to set up an email address for people to submit potential promoted worthy posts and a group of reviewers who will review, select and post one article a week.
I would like to upvote this more than once. Supplement: If 2) doesn’t work, stop doing it.
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?