“Assuming user is of right type/attitude, too many users for acculturation capacity.”
Imagine this: There are currently 13,000 LessWrong users (well more since that figure was for a few months ago and there’s been a Summit since then) and about 1,000 are active. Imagine LesWrong gets Slashdotted—some big publication does an article on us, and instead of portraying LessWrong as “Cold and Calculating” or something similar to Wired’s wording describing the futurology Reddit where SingInst had posted about AI “A sub-reddit dedicated to preventing Skynet” they actually say something good like “LessWrong solves X Problem”. Not infeasible since some of us do a lot of research and test our ideas.
Say so many new users join in the space of a month and there are now twice as many new active users as older active users.
This means 2⁄3 of LessWrong is clueless, posting annoying threads, and acting like newbies. Suddenly, it’s not possible to have intelligent conversation about the topics you enjoy on LessWrong anymore without two people throwing strawman arguments at you and a third saying things that show obvious ignorance of the subject. You’re getting downvoted for saying things that make sense, because new users don’t get it, and the old users can’t compensate for that with upvotes because there aren’t enough of them.
THAT is the type of scenario the question is asking about.
I worded it as “too many new users for acculturation capacity” because I don’t think new users are a bad thing. What I think is bad is when there are an overwhelming number of them such that the old users become alienated or find it impossible to have normal discussions on the forum.
Please do not confuse “too many new users for acculturation capacity” with “new users are a bad thing”.
Also, why is there no option for “new users are a good thing?”
Maybe a diversity of viewpoints might be a good thing? How can you raise the sanity waterline by only talking to yourself?
The question is asking you:
“Assuming user is of right type/attitude, too many users for acculturation capacity.”
Imagine this: There are currently 13,000 LessWrong users (well more since that figure was for a few months ago and there’s been a Summit since then) and about 1,000 are active. Imagine LesWrong gets Slashdotted—some big publication does an article on us, and instead of portraying LessWrong as “Cold and Calculating” or something similar to Wired’s wording describing the futurology Reddit where SingInst had posted about AI “A sub-reddit dedicated to preventing Skynet” they actually say something good like “LessWrong solves X Problem”. Not infeasible since some of us do a lot of research and test our ideas.
Say so many new users join in the space of a month and there are now twice as many new active users as older active users.
This means 2⁄3 of LessWrong is clueless, posting annoying threads, and acting like newbies. Suddenly, it’s not possible to have intelligent conversation about the topics you enjoy on LessWrong anymore without two people throwing strawman arguments at you and a third saying things that show obvious ignorance of the subject. You’re getting downvoted for saying things that make sense, because new users don’t get it, and the old users can’t compensate for that with upvotes because there aren’t enough of them.
THAT is the type of scenario the question is asking about.
I worded it as “too many new users for acculturation capacity” because I don’t think new users are a bad thing. What I think is bad is when there are an overwhelming number of them such that the old users become alienated or find it impossible to have normal discussions on the forum.
Please do not confuse “too many new users for acculturation capacity” with “new users are a bad thing”.