Thanks for articulating why Facebook is a safer and more pleasant place to comment than LW. I tried to post pretty much this on a previous thread but wasn’t able to actually articulate the phenomenon so didn’t say anything.
That being said, I still feel like I’d rather just post on Facebook.
There are two specific problems with Facebook as a community forum that I’m aware of. The first is that the built-in archiving and discovery tools are abysmal, because that’s not the primary use case for the platform. Fortunately, we know there’s a technical solution to this, because Jeff Kaufman implemented it on his blog.
The second problem is that a number of prominent people in the community are ideologically anti-Facebook and we don’t want to exclude them. There’s a partial technical solution for this; a site that mirrored Facebook comments could also let users comment directly and interleave those comments with the Facebook ones. But I don’t think those comments could be made to show up on Facebook, so the conversation would still be fractured. I admit I would probably care more about this if not for my disagreement with the central claim that Facebook is uniquely evil.
Other than that, Facebook seems to have the whole “archipelago” thing pretty much solved.
Meanwhile, if I post on LessWrong I still expect to be heavily nitpicked, because I expect the subset of the community that’s active on this site to be disproportionately prone to nitpicking. Similarly, certain worldviews and approaches to problem-solving are overrepresented here relative to the broader community, and these aren’t necessarily the ones I most want to hear from.
Maybe this just boils down to the problem of my friends not being on here and it’s not worth your time to try to solve. But it still feels like a problem.
Thanks for the informative writeup.
I already said all of this on Facebook, but just to reiterate:
I believed from the first announcement, and continue to believe, that much of the value of Arbital as it exists is in the software itself. (By comparison, if Wikipedia stopped existing, MediaWiki would still be important and valuable.)
I, personally, want my own Arbital instance that I can use to write about EA donation opportunities. (I think Malcolm Ocean has said he wants one too.)
If and when it gets open sourced under any of the usual open source licenses, I will contribute documentation, automation scripts, and/or settings cleanup as needed to make it self-hostable.