How do newcomers delve deeper into the community?

post by Lord Dreadwar · 2022-11-12T19:00:29.018Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

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I have some experience managing large online communities of various sorts, and it struck me that some of the most difficult but necessary work across all of them was in spending hours brainstorming, with our leadership teams, how we might pull the 80% (or 50%, or 99%) of our membership, blissfully ignorant of the true depths of the community, into the heart of the network, where all the fun and the socialising and the opportunities were—the community within the community. (Incidentally, the harsh lessons of trial-and-error and a little bit of internal meritocratic competition ended up invariably outputting a solution of pouncing on new contributing members and pulling them into the hidden depths of community involvement via an apprenticeship/adoption/message-buddy system.)

I ask this for the benefit of new members who might be drawn to us in light of recent publicity: what are the hidden depths to LessWrong? How does one become more involved in this space, and adjacent spaces?

I noticed a similar question in the community resources, and links to Discord servers, and so forth. I joined the community in 2010, primarily engaging with overlapping counterpart groups on Facebook, subreddits, CFAR events, HPMOR meetups, local LessWrong meetups, and the like. But now that the community has grown in membership and resources, how do we address questions like becoming more involved in-person in the Bay Area community, or working in EA? Are there any layers to the LessWrong onion that longtime and more involved members might take for granted, but are quite invisible to newcomers, long-time lurkers, and less involved members?

Quite simply, how does one become as involved in the rationalist community as possible? It would be a good idea to develop an FAQ around this; I have the suspicion many will be seeking networking opportunities through LessWrong in the future.

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