General Thoughts on Less Wrong

Chris_Leong3 Apr 2022 4:09 UTC
44 points
14 comments2 min readLW link

General disclaimer: Obviously there’s always going to be more that could be done and it’s better to do a few things well, rather than many things poorly, but I still think it is worth being conscious of areas that could be improved[1].

  • I’m still strongly in favor of adding sub-communities. I know that there were worries before that there wasn’t sufficient volume, but I suspect that creating new spaces for discussion will create their own volume. Further, I suspect that carefully curating the subcommunities that people are allowed to create would prevent some of the risks of this causing division in the community. I think that the strongest argument here comes from looking at Reddit. Reddit simply wouldn’t be Reddit with its wondrous and diverse range of communities if it had tags instead of sub-communities.

  • The resources section of the community page still seems underdeveloped. I don’t this is a huge priority but this could be a good thing for an intern to work on.

  • Most Wiki pages still seem rather bare. I would love to see Less Wrong develop an internship program where interns spend a significant amount of their time focusing on improving pages on the Wiki. I could imagine a world where the Wiki pages ends up being one of the first places you head when you want to know about a topic.

  • Short-form: Most people still seem to be posting their thoughts to Facebook or Twitter. It feels awkwardly integrated to me, but some short-form posts are seeing reasonable levels of engagement. I think for this feature to really reach its full potential there has to be a separate item on the sidebar just for short-form[2] and that it should display these posts in a feed format very similar to Facebook. This feed should be customised based on who you follow and the posts that you’ve liked/​indicated that you aren’t interested in.

  • More generally, I have this vague sense that this community isn’t reaching its full potential. I guess a large part of this is that everyone (including me!) has their own distinct interests and perspectives and this means that we don’t coordinate very well on larger-scale (or even mid-scale) projects. Effective Altruism is a very similar community, but they seem to be much better at this. I don’t expect this to be resolved quickly. In the same way, it took far too long and many failed attempts for LW to be revived. That said, I have no idea what Lightcone is planning to do next.

  • The Less Wrong 2.0 team has a plan for how they’d like to see things develop and so far I think they’ve been pursuing quite reasonable strategies. One thing I’d like to see though is greater community engagement when formulating these plans. I’m not suggesting that they should just do whatever receives the most upvotes, but I would love to see at least yearly posts outlining their current strategy and key uncertainties for the community to comment on.

  1. ^

    I was originally going to post this at the end of 2021, but I forgot and it ended up stuck in my drafts. This is a reviewed and updated version. Ideally, I’d like to write one of these reflective posts every year.

  2. ^

    I’m not saying that it deserves a sidebar position without an attempt to develop it. Nor am I claiming that such a redevelopment should be undertaken as it would involve significant resources.

Chris_Leong3 Apr 2022 4:09 UTC
44 points
14 comments2 min readLW link