And yet… lukeprog hasn’t been seriously active on this site for 7 years, Wei Dai hasn’t written a post in over a year (even as he engages in productive discussions here occasionally), Turntrout mostly spends his time away from LW, Quintin Pope spends all his time away from LW, Roko comments much less than he used to more than a decade ago, Eliezer and Scott write occasional comments once every 3 months or so, Richard Ngo has slowed down his pace of posting considerably, gwern posts here very infrequently (and when he does, it’s usually just linking to other places), Duncan Sabien famously doesn’t spend time here anymore...
At least on my own account, I can say that Said Achmiz’s replies are not responsible for me not commenting/posting on LW2: he rarely replies to me, and we do all our arguing on IRC anyway.
He is probably indirectly responsible for me writing less here by his work on Gwern.net, but that should not be held against him.
(After all, LW2 would not look or function as it does without that work.)
From my perspective, I shifted off LW2 as a main writing outlet a long time ago for a mix of reasons about both LW2 and myself.
I don’t think there is any feature, or set of features, which could make me switch to writing primarily on LW2.
I was using LW1 for things I now use Gwernnet for—my bibliography comments or posts are now just tags (recent example, or just the bookmarks/newest-links page in general).
I am less interested in arguments or critiques when I have so much more of my own writings I would like to do, as now I suffer from an embarrassment of riches in things I’d like to write compared to 2015, and I get less out of arguing than I did when starting out.
(Being able to ban a LW1 user like Lumifer from my posts/comments would have changed this only slightly.)
And having my own website, and Said Achmiz to implement more complex features on demand, has obviously made me much more interested in writing primarily for my own site and tailoring the medium to the message.
(I can make “Bell, Crow, Moon” default to ‘dark-mode’ and randomize the illustration image, for example, or I can make “October The First Is Too Late” switch to dark-mode at a key point and hide the spoilers using ‘reader-mode’, which lets me write that page in a novel way, similar to “It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World”.)
And similar to Scott Alexander, the more committed I am to Gwernnet, the more I am incentivized to write for it, to explore designs and build the brand and consolidate everything in one place for the AIs etc.
(Even if I am not making anything like Scott’s $500k ⧸ (365⁄3) ≈ $5k per page I post!)
This might change a little now that we have finished developing a lightweight ‘blog’ feature for Gwernnet which makes writing effort-posts off-site much less of a waste, but nevertheless, my priority these days is building up Gwernnet—not LW2.
LW1 was, back then, much more of a general-tech-interest website: closer to Hacker News than Alignment Forum. The latest meta-analysis on the Replication Crisis in psychology? “Sure, why not.” Dubious new Russian nootropic cerebrolysin? “Yeah, we can discuss that, we have >40 years until AGI, after all… - wait, chapter 19 of Methods of Rationality just dropped!” LW2 had to narrow down in scope under the pressure of ever-shorter AI timelines. (No one would be too interested in starting CFAR today to ‘raise the sanity waterline’.) So that has had a cost in diversity. There would not be much point in submitting my, say, ~11 cat psychology pages to LW2, although LW1 probably would’ve loved them all as a ‘catquences’. I also have made a few strategic decisions, like deciding back in October 2020 to set up /r/MLScaling on Reddit to aim at a more centrist coverage of AI scaling which got down-in-the-weeds with every relevant paper or link rather than flood LW2 with that material, and leave AI safety discussions to LW2/EAF/AF.
Also, writing careers change over time. Personally, I would be suspicious of anyone who write a lot but was writing as much on LW2 in 2025 as they were on LW1 in 2015. I would be thinking to myself, “what are you doing here still? Where are you going? Have you not grown up at all, nor chafe at your limits? Remember: if the chick is not able to break the shell of his egg, he will die without having ever been born.”
(I won’t try to analyze Eliezer’s trajectory here. I don’t understand his post-MoR trajectory from LW1 to Arbital to… Facebook… to forum glowfic… to Twitter? Nor what happened to lukeprog. I would also note that Roko not posting here is a feature, not a bug; have you read his tweets over the past decade...?)
So, I think the right question is not ‘why don’t Scott, Gwern et al write as much on LW2 as they did on LW1?’. It would be weird if we did!
The right question is, ‘where’s the next generation of writers on LW2?’
When I look at ACX, LW2, EAF, my Twitter/Reddit/HN, it does feel like there is a general shortage of good new writers online everywhere, not just LW2.
In terms of ‘emerging bloggers’ (including in this Substack, ‘long tweets’ etc), it feels like it remains Millennial/GenX-dominated; I can think of few Zoomers/GenAlpha-type writers of note.
(Even relatively new writers who come to mind as being of interest, like TracingWoodgrains or Henrik Karlsson or Cremieux, tend to be older and to have simply recently ramped up writing and have been around for a while beforehand.)
There is no LW1 of today.
Maybe I’m just old and out of touch, and they’ve all moved to video? Videos are extremely popular… but so what? Lots of media are popular, in terms of profit or man-hours consumed, that doesn’t mean they are important to the long-term culture or the intellectual goals we have here. If there were incisive rationalist-related videos which were setting the zeitgeist, where are they? Where are the videos introducing new catchphrases I will be using 10 years from now once they’ve become endemic? Why does, eg, ACX seem to be so much more vastly influential?
Perhaps the answer is that the pipeline of writers has been jammed.
Maybe “the culture is stuck” and people are hiding in “the dark forest” because the hypersonic winds of social media tear apart everything of immediate value, and destroys the normal progression of writers from low stake safe writings like small comments or interactions like upvotes or editing wikis to longer comments & debates to effort-posts to eventually their own site/newsletter/community for riskier ‘real’ writing.
(Not that ‘video’ is the only culprit here—all walled gardens want to infantilize you.
A black hole like Discord provides no way to ‘graduate’ from Discord; it wants you to be trapped there forever, writing short comments destined to be forgotten as soon as the screen scrolls past them, emoting and upvoting, and never going anywhere, and using Discord 10 years from now just like you use it today...)
LW2 had to narrow down in scope under the pressure of ever-shorter AI timelines
I wouldn’t say the scope was narrowed, in fact the admin team took a lot of actions to preserve the scope, but a lot of people have shown up for AI or are now heavily interested in AI, simply making that the dominant topic. But, I like to think that people don’t think of LW as merely an “AI website”.
people don’t think of LW as merely an “AI website”.
The word “people” is doing heavy lifting here, I have found a lot of people online who think just that in tech adjacent circles. Besides gwern seems to be operating under similar premises, so I won’t be surprised if other (less informed) people also had similar takeaway as his.
If there were incisive rationalist-related videos which were setting the zeitgeist, where are they?
The YouTube channel Rational Animations seems pretty successful in terms of sheer numbers: 385K subscribers, which is comparable to YouTubers who talk about media and technology. Their videos “The True Story of How GPT-2 Became Maximally Lewd” and “The Goddess of Everything Else” have over two million views. Qualitatively, I have seen their biggest videos mentioned a few times where a LW post wouldn’t be. However, the channel principally adapts existing rationalist and AI-safety content. (Sort the videos by popular to see.) I think they’re good at it. Through their competence, new incisive rationalist-related videos exist—as adaptations of older incisive rationalist-related writing.
I don’t know of another channel like it, even though popular YouTube channels attract imitators, and it is hard to imagine them switching to new ideas. Part of it is the resources involved in producing animation compared to writing. With animation so labor-intensive, it makes sense to try out and refine ideas in text and only then adapt them to video. Posters on video-LW with original high-effort content would come to resent how much each mistake cost them compared to a textual post or comment. AI video generation will make it easier to create videos, but precise control over content and style will still demand significantly more effort than text.
A black hole like Discord provides no way to ‘graduate’ from Discord; it wants you to be trapped there forever, writing short comments destined to be forgotten as soon as the screen scrolls past them, emoting and upvoting, and never going anywhere, and using Discord 10 years from now just like you use it today...)
I generally agree with any and all criticisms of Discord, but its search is pretty good. If you know what to search for, you can dig out that old post. Of course, leaving memorable breadcrumbs you can search for three years later is, at best, an art, and in my case seems like something that’s purely luck-of-the-draw when it comes to improbable phrases that you’ve mentioned only once or a handful of times.
On the other hand, Discord usersdo tend to have a lower threshold of reading stamina; “I ain’t reading all that — I’m happy for you, or sorry that happened” seems to happen more often in Discord unless you’re in a Discord guild that’s pre-selected for people who can read long things — a Gaming Lawyers guild, perhaps.
If you know what to search for, you can dig out that old post. Of course, leaving memorable breadcrumbs you can search for three years later is, at best, an art
Yes, that has been my experience too. Sure, Discord (like Twitter) gives you fairly powerful search primitives, to a greater extent than most people ever notice. You can filter by user, date-ranges, that sort of thing… It was written by nerds for nerds, originally, and it shows. However, I have still struggled to find many older Discord comments by myself or others, because it is inherent to the nature of realtime shortform media that it can be extremely difficult to remember the exact breadcrumb, if any, or write in such a way that your hazy searches years later doesn’t pull up 500 other hits. (No one argues for doing all documentation as random IRC conversations “because you can just grep your IRC logs”, and I have also sometimes seriously struggled to find old IRC conversations despite remembering them fairly clearly.)
Without any kind of organization or summarization or FAQ/wiki-like accumulating document, this is inevitable. And Discord doesn’t particularly care about this because it wants you to spend all your time there, not consolidate knowledge or build on past comments or create public knowledge, so it optimizes for that, and no amount of Boolean queries can make up for a design which cares only about the most recent screen of comments.
Which is my point: everything is lost in the rain, despite your tears, and there is no path to growth or long content.
Discord (like Twitter) gives you fairly powerful search primitives, to a greater extent than most people ever notice. You can filter by user, date-ranges, that sort of thing… It was written by nerds for nerds, originally, and it shows.
It seems worth noting that 𝕏 search has been broken for quite a while, and shows no sign of improvement.
unless you’re in a Discord guild that’s pre-selected for people who can read long things — a Gaming Lawyers guild, perhaps.
I was on a few rationality adjacent discord and got politically corrected for typing short and frequent messages, which often amounted to a rambling. Eventually I became low status enough that people just ignored what I said or had nothing to add to my conversation.
Which is in strong contrast to other “I am your mogged sigma in ohio, wanna rizz me up with your gyatt skibidi? No? What the sigma? Sus, no cap or I will fanum tax.” types of replies I was used to.
In normal speak, it would amount to “I am your guy, do you want to date with me attractive woman? No? are you sure? Seems suspicious, if you lie I will steal your lifeline/destroy you.” . But with multiple levels of irony and humorous tone.
At least on my own account, I can say that Said Achmiz’s replies are not responsible for me not commenting/posting on LW2: he rarely replies to me, and we do all our arguing on IRC anyway. He is probably indirectly responsible for me writing less here by his work on Gwern.net, but that should not be held against him. (After all, LW2 would not look or function as it does without that work.)
From my perspective, I shifted off LW2 as a main writing outlet a long time ago for a mix of reasons about both LW2 and myself. I don’t think there is any feature, or set of features, which could make me switch to writing primarily on LW2.
I was using LW1 for things I now use Gwernnet for—my bibliography comments or posts are now just tags (recent example, or just the bookmarks/newest-links page in general). I am less interested in arguments or critiques when I have so much more of my own writings I would like to do, as now I suffer from an embarrassment of riches in things I’d like to write compared to 2015, and I get less out of arguing than I did when starting out. (Being able to ban a LW1 user like Lumifer from my posts/comments would have changed this only slightly.) And having my own website, and Said Achmiz to implement more complex features on demand, has obviously made me much more interested in writing primarily for my own site and tailoring the medium to the message. (I can make “Bell, Crow, Moon” default to ‘dark-mode’ and randomize the illustration image, for example, or I can make “October The First Is Too Late” switch to dark-mode at a key point and hide the spoilers using ‘reader-mode’, which lets me write that page in a novel way, similar to “It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World”.)
And similar to Scott Alexander, the more committed I am to Gwernnet, the more I am incentivized to write for it, to explore designs and build the brand and consolidate everything in one place for the AIs etc. (Even if I am not making anything like Scott’s $500k ⧸ (365⁄3) ≈ $5k per page I post!) This might change a little now that we have finished developing a lightweight ‘blog’ feature for Gwernnet which makes writing effort-posts off-site much less of a waste, but nevertheless, my priority these days is building up Gwernnet—not LW2.
LW1 was, back then, much more of a general-tech-interest website: closer to Hacker News than Alignment Forum. The latest meta-analysis on the Replication Crisis in psychology? “Sure, why not.” Dubious new Russian nootropic cerebrolysin? “Yeah, we can discuss that, we have >40 years until AGI, after all… - wait, chapter 19 of Methods of Rationality just dropped!” LW2 had to narrow down in scope under the pressure of ever-shorter AI timelines. (No one would be too interested in starting CFAR today to ‘raise the sanity waterline’.) So that has had a cost in diversity. There would not be much point in submitting my, say, ~11 cat psychology pages to LW2, although LW1 probably would’ve loved them all as a ‘catquences’. I also have made a few strategic decisions, like deciding back in October 2020 to set up /r/MLScaling on Reddit to aim at a more centrist coverage of AI scaling which got down-in-the-weeds with every relevant paper or link rather than flood LW2 with that material, and leave AI safety discussions to LW2/EAF/AF.
Also, writing careers change over time. Personally, I would be suspicious of anyone who write a lot but was writing as much on LW2 in 2025 as they were on LW1 in 2015. I would be thinking to myself, “what are you doing here still? Where are you going? Have you not grown up at all, nor chafe at your limits? Remember: if the chick is not able to break the shell of his egg, he will die without having ever been born.”
(I won’t try to analyze Eliezer’s trajectory here. I don’t understand his post-MoR trajectory from LW1 to Arbital to… Facebook… to forum glowfic… to Twitter? Nor what happened to lukeprog. I would also note that Roko not posting here is a feature, not a bug; have you read his tweets over the past decade...?)
So, I think the right question is not ‘why don’t Scott, Gwern et al write as much on LW2 as they did on LW1?’. It would be weird if we did!
The right question is, ‘where’s the next generation of writers on LW2?’
When I look at ACX, LW2, EAF, my Twitter/Reddit/HN, it does feel like there is a general shortage of good new writers online everywhere, not just LW2. In terms of ‘emerging bloggers’ (including in this Substack, ‘long tweets’ etc), it feels like it remains Millennial/GenX-dominated; I can think of few Zoomers/GenAlpha-type writers of note. (Even relatively new writers who come to mind as being of interest, like TracingWoodgrains or Henrik Karlsson or Cremieux, tend to be older and to have simply recently ramped up writing and have been around for a while beforehand.) There is no LW1 of today.
Maybe I’m just old and out of touch, and they’ve all moved to video? Videos are extremely popular… but so what? Lots of media are popular, in terms of profit or man-hours consumed, that doesn’t mean they are important to the long-term culture or the intellectual goals we have here. If there were incisive rationalist-related videos which were setting the zeitgeist, where are they? Where are the videos introducing new catchphrases I will be using 10 years from now once they’ve become endemic? Why does, eg, ACX seem to be so much more vastly influential?
Perhaps the answer is that the pipeline of writers has been jammed. Maybe “the culture is stuck” and people are hiding in “the dark forest” because the hypersonic winds of social media tear apart everything of immediate value, and destroys the normal progression of writers from low stake safe writings like small comments or interactions like upvotes or editing wikis to longer comments & debates to effort-posts to eventually their own site/newsletter/community for riskier ‘real’ writing. (Not that ‘video’ is the only culprit here—all walled gardens want to infantilize you. A black hole like Discord provides no way to ‘graduate’ from Discord; it wants you to be trapped there forever, writing short comments destined to be forgotten as soon as the screen scrolls past them, emoting and upvoting, and never going anywhere, and using Discord 10 years from now just like you use it today...)
I wouldn’t say the scope was narrowed, in fact the admin team took a lot of actions to preserve the scope, but a lot of people have shown up for AI or are now heavily interested in AI, simply making that the dominant topic. But, I like to think that people don’t think of LW as merely an “AI website”.
The word “people” is doing heavy lifting here, I have found a lot of people online who think just that in tech adjacent circles. Besides gwern seems to be operating under similar premises, so I won’t be surprised if other (less informed) people also had similar takeaway as his.
The YouTube channel Rational Animations seems pretty successful in terms of sheer numbers: 385K subscribers, which is comparable to YouTubers who talk about media and technology. Their videos “The True Story of How GPT-2 Became Maximally Lewd” and “The Goddess of Everything Else” have over two million views. Qualitatively, I have seen their biggest videos mentioned a few times where a LW post wouldn’t be. However, the channel principally adapts existing rationalist and AI-safety content. (Sort the videos by popular to see.) I think they’re good at it. Through their competence, new incisive rationalist-related videos exist—as adaptations of older incisive rationalist-related writing.
I don’t know of another channel like it, even though popular YouTube channels attract imitators, and it is hard to imagine them switching to new ideas. Part of it is the resources involved in producing animation compared to writing. With animation so labor-intensive, it makes sense to try out and refine ideas in text and only then adapt them to video. Posters on video-LW with original high-effort content would come to resent how much each mistake cost them compared to a textual post or comment. AI video generation will make it easier to create videos, but precise control over content and style will still demand significantly more effort than text.
I generally agree with any and all criticisms of Discord, but its search is pretty good. If you know what to search for, you can dig out that old post. Of course, leaving memorable breadcrumbs you can search for three years later is, at best, an art, and in my case seems like something that’s purely luck-of-the-draw when it comes to improbable phrases that you’ve mentioned only once or a handful of times.
On the other hand, Discord users do tend to have a lower threshold of reading stamina; “I ain’t reading all that — I’m happy for you, or sorry that happened” seems to happen more often in Discord unless you’re in a Discord guild that’s pre-selected for people who can read long things — a Gaming Lawyers guild, perhaps.
Yes, that has been my experience too. Sure, Discord (like Twitter) gives you fairly powerful search primitives, to a greater extent than most people ever notice. You can filter by user, date-ranges, that sort of thing… It was written by nerds for nerds, originally, and it shows. However, I have still struggled to find many older Discord comments by myself or others, because it is inherent to the nature of realtime shortform media that it can be extremely difficult to remember the exact breadcrumb, if any, or write in such a way that your hazy searches years later doesn’t pull up 500 other hits. (No one argues for doing all documentation as random IRC conversations “because you can just grep your IRC logs”, and I have also sometimes seriously struggled to find old IRC conversations despite remembering them fairly clearly.)
Without any kind of organization or summarization or FAQ/wiki-like accumulating document, this is inevitable. And Discord doesn’t particularly care about this because it wants you to spend all your time there, not consolidate knowledge or build on past comments or create public knowledge, so it optimizes for that, and no amount of Boolean queries can make up for a design which cares only about the most recent screen of comments.
Which is my point: everything is lost in the rain, despite your tears, and there is no path to growth or long content.
It seems worth noting that 𝕏 search has been broken for quite a while, and shows no sign of improvement.
I was on a few rationality adjacent discord and got politically corrected for typing short and frequent messages, which often amounted to a rambling. Eventually I became low status enough that people just ignored what I said or had nothing to add to my conversation.
Which is in strong contrast to other “I am your mogged sigma in ohio, wanna rizz me up with your gyatt skibidi? No? What the sigma? Sus, no cap or I will fanum tax.” types of replies I was used to.
(Tangent: I had no idea what that sentence meant; Sonnet 4 says
in case anyone else was as confused)
I meant the latter with “gyatt” , the newer meaning.
(wikipedia)
In normal speak, it would amount to “I am your guy, do you want to date with me attractive woman? No? are you sure? Seems suspicious, if you lie I will steal your lifeline/destroy you.” . But with multiple levels of irony and humorous tone.
Also check this video .