Upcoming LW Changes

Per some recent discussions with Elo and others, I'm working on a mockup of some new Home page designs. The current one has the following issues:

1. "About" is hard to find.
2. The question "Why should I care?" isn't answered until several links in.
3. There are potential good contributors who are probably being driven away from posting because the first link to the materials is a huge, intimidating list with idiosyncratic or academic titles.
4. Who's going to look at the "Sequences" if they don't know what the "Sequences" are, already?
5. There needs to be a "New User" section that is EASY to find from the landing page. Most of this content is already in the about page, so the about page also needs to be easy to find.
6. The rationalist blogroll needs to be easier to find, to loop in the diaspora'd community.

I had my spouse and some friends look at it, because they fulfill a few conditions: They have never seen the site before, and they are the type of person I'd like to encourage to contribute (smart, good writers, thoughtful). Their feedback was discouraging. They all indicated confusion or intimidation. Several rationalist-adjacent people on communities like Tumblr avoid the site because it's confusing, intimidating, or both. I don't mind filtering for thoughtful, nerdy people. Less Wrong will do that by default. I do mind filtering people away just because they have a bad case of impostor syndrome.

Anecdotal: I avoided posting for YEARS because of all the reasons listed above. There are whole online communities who were interested in learning more because of EY's writing (mainly HPMOR), but felt that there wasn't room for them here. I'm not particularly unusual, and I'm not a bad member to have in the community.

Overall, the home page is full of Trivial Inconveniences: http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/

In the "Less Wrong 2.0" post on Main, I saw a suggestion that LW might have just been a "booster rocket" designed to get people where they needed to go. And that's fine, but I think it's a mistake to think that's all that was needed. It may have been a booster, but it only grabbed the people who were active during a period of a few years. It would be a shame to lose good community members on the assumption that a period of ~six years was "enough."

A for effort, but please satisfy my curiousity: what ARE the actual changes planned?

Count me as equal parts hopeful and skeptical.

I think the best part of LW was the content—articles by EY and the dude who writes at SSC being on the top of that list. Oh, and Luke wrote some cool stuff, too. There have been others, but the main consistent top posters are out as far as I can tell. If you can find good content, you will win in this LW reboot mission, even if no other changes are made.

Otherwise, I think you'll need huge changes to Make LW Great Again™. It's basically a good rationality/math-y reddit sub with an AI and EA focus. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not terribly novel or special either.

The pure cynic in me says almost nothing has demonstrably changed in the 3+ years (maybe more?) I've been reading here (other than the decline in good content) and I've no reason to believe this effort will yield anything.

Anyway, sincere kudos to you for your efforts. I like LW and support common sense efforts to improve it.

Couple ideas off the top off my head:

• Come up with a 2.0 karma system. Reddit-style karma is cool and functional, but I bet the finest minds at LW could come up with something that fosters even more rational discussion. Maybe a drop-down box with a few broad categories for "Why did you vote this way?" on every upvote or downvote so the commentor receives better feedback? It seems to me the system, while it has its value, is still often times just "yay!" or "boo!" buttons. Maybe you could devise something better?

• How about an extensive blogroll system with some sort of interactive component ("vote" via radio button, or an upvote/downvote) to indicate which articles/blogs LWers found worth reading? LW could have some value as a meta-level "hub" site for the rationality blog universe.

• Get rid of the Main/Discussion dichotomy altogether. It's super broken. Or maybe just organically let posts that get north of X upvotes be marked with a "This is good stuff" status star and place them in a more prominent spot.

Good luck. I look forward to the coming changes!

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[UPVOTE] [downvote] -- [interesting] [funny] [well-researched] ...

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I'm very happy about the prospect of reviving LW and maybe having some of the diaspora return!

Is there anything I can do to help with this? I love engaging in the comments, and I would love to (be able to) write posts that people appreciate, but I can't really do either for hardcore technical discussions of e.g. decision theory. I would be happy to start posting "things I'd love to discuss with rationalists", if & when a new social/thematic focus is agreed on. Examples: theories of e.g. biology or history from popular books I read; programming & tech topics; many subjects that would be at home in SSC posts (except in lower quality, obviously).

I could submit patches, but in practice I don't have the time to do so. I would happily donate some hundreds of dollars (e.g. for someone else to develop those patches), to increase the chance of reviving LW or to speed it up. I'm guessing it wouldn't be very useful unless others donate too, and you'll probably tell me to donate to MIRI instead, but I'm throwing it out there. What else can I do?

Nice to see someone taking the lead! I've been looking for something to work on, and I'd be proud to help rebuild LW. I'll send you a message.

Please stop me if I'm getting spammy (This will be my last non-reply comment on this post) but I just found this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/929/less_wrong_mentoring_network/

while I was looking through the FAQ for things to incorporate on the home page. I think this is still a great idea. I actually have some experience with mentoring programs, and would be willing to assist with a more formal process.

I'm interested in setting up the dev environment. But I'm running into technical issues setting up the VM etc. I expect more such questions will come up. What is the right place to discuss these? Perhaps a channel on the slack? Or do we want something more permanent to help new contributors?

Would you mind putting links to the issue tracker items as you update this post, and editing/updating the post to keep track of which issues have open/no assignment?

Added some details about technical changes, but not at the detail where someone could start producing code (for anything besides linkposts). My hope is to put more atomic things as issues; if there are, say, three changes to make to the tagging system, my current thought is that each of those deserves an issue (unless they depend on each other in a deep way).

The overarching theme with tags is this: we don't want to silo content for people, because that's a recipe for people missing out on content ("Wait, there's a main section?"). But we also want to make it very easy to filter on what you want to see and don't want to see, ideally building the equivalent of a personalized rationalist RSS. (Remember how you could read a bunch of blogs and then also comment on them in Google Reader?)

The main argument against tags and for subreddits is that different people will want different rules (what topics are appropriate, how people should talk to each other, etc.) and subreddits are a good way to make and enforce that distinction. If, say, the community neatly divided into "warm rationalists" and "cold rationalists" then we could have a warm subreddit and a cold subreddit which have parallel discussions on any shared topic. But there aren't similar clean distinctions between topics; we don't want, say, a SSC subreddit and a medicine subreddit because a post could easily fall in both categories.

I think that tags can solve the topic/norms problem too, but only if they're clearly visible. (If the boxes are a different color, or have a conspicuous border, or so on, then it'll be about as useful as having a different subdomain on the site.) But what exactly that'll look like requires a bit more discussion and familiarity with the codebase (to see what parts are easy and hard to accomplish at various levels).

I'm really excited about these changes but I do tend to lean toward optimism bias, so take it with a grain of salt.

My primary interest for the changes would be to make LW more accessible and welcoming to newbies, so lots of the changes proposed here are good. I'd especially welcome a prominent section for new people engaging with LW to guide them through the process well. Perhaps a specific project could be guiding newbies into engaging with LW well by tracking points where they might fall off?

It looks like new accounts are set up with a comment and post threshold of around -3 so that heavily downvoted posts are not displayed in the Discussion thread list and comments in threads are minimized unless you choose to expand them. However, it doesn't look like the default view when looking at the website without an account does the same. If we want to minimize exposure of heavily downvoted threads, it could be good to set up the website so that it doesn't display them on the Discussion thread list for a non-user.

At some point, when there is a clear vision of what is going to be built I'd suggest a crowd funding campaign in order to raise funds for development.

It looks like the development VM is up and running, thanks to changes just merged into the main repo. Thanks brendanlong and wezm!

To celebrate, I opened four new issues. Each is a fairly small feature that will help in some fashion:

• Allowing linkposts seems like an easy way to "bring the diaspora back" to LW while still allowing everyone to maintain their own branding and control (and, if they insist on it, distance). It might also be easy!

• Shutting down new posts to Main is a precursor to new content organization (which may be subreddits separated by norms, or may be tags, or so on).

• Shutting down voting by virgin comments is the first and simplest step in the war against sockpuppets.

• Allowing admins to view votes on comments (only when admin is on) will dramatically simplify the resolution process for retributive downvoting and sockpuppet claims.

I think it would be good to have a limit of posts/per/day for people with karma 10 votes cast on their posts.

I'd like notifications of big changes in karma on particular comments

What's the current state of play on this? Is anything still moving?

Looks interesting. I may try writing an article or two to help the environment along.

Personally I'm of the ilk that the wrong change is better than no changes at all, because at least things are moving again. Excited to see what happens!

On a tangential note: it would be cute for LW to acquire a collection of resident chat bots, preferably ones which could be dissected and rewired by all and sundry. Erecting defences against chat bots run amok would also be enlightening :-)

I'm disappointed that the details listed about social changes are so vague.

I would love to see some kind of Less Wrong council that meets regularly and discusses future directions. One problem at the moment is the lack of transparency about decisions - we generally don't know if an idea has even been considered or why they have been rejected.

LessWrong doesn't have any noteworthy technical problems, save for the much-clamoured need for a thematic breakup into subreddits. You're likely to waste more effort in that direction than you'll get benefit out of it.

It's the people, stupid. It has always been the people.

Simply put, the current crop of users makes for stale, insubstantial discussions and a bad social atmosphere. Everybody who didn't suck went off and moved to the Bay Area and entered a poly relationship with several other rationalists and they're all now frolicking around in meatspace and on Facebook. Nearly every active user that's still around gets on my nerves, personally. As for those who have found out about LW and haven't joined up already, it hasn't been the insufficiently well-organized homepage that pushed them away; more likely, they didn't want to be within ten miles of singularitarians. MIRI has milked this place for all it was worth. It's done. Let it die and hope something better rises up from its ashes.