[META] Open threads (and repository threads) are underutilized.

Is there a way to sticky the current open thread to the top of discussion? (and if not, would it be difficult to implement?)

That would be an ideal solution for a person with similar LW browsing habits to me.

First choice: sticky thread. (May require coding.)
Second choice: weekly rather than twice a month. (Does not require coding.)

I'm for either Tim's suggestion, or for increasing the frequency of the open threads to once a week.

I think the solution that forums adopted is a good one - giving at least some weight to activity in a topic in the default ordering of discussion posts. This would solve the open thread problem probably.

Collection threads definitely seem like a wiki-integration problem.

Why not just have a "light"(lite?) subreddit, and put anything that would be a top-level open thread post in there? If we are going to make a new subreddit just for that, wouldn't it make sense to start titling them by topic rather than by date range? (Perhaps a links topic would still be useful.)

If we don't go that route, I think stickying is lightweight and would be effective.

Weekly open threads require no work from the site admins and may get us a long way to where we need to be. Let's try that before we propose anything more complicated.

I might organize a wiki page for some of the repositories myself if people think this is a good idea but no one else feels like doing it

This wiki page seems relevant, but it's currently more for pointing the current place to put things than a repository of everything that's ever been put there.

I think sticky threads or automatically recurring threads are good implementations.

I understand coding resources are limited, but I might as well mention that my dream implementation of this would be rather different from the normal LW implementation of posts. For example, intro posts are awesome to have- but it's not obvious to me that it's good to have them clustered in a normal post. There's a limit to the number of comments that can be displayed at once, which has a few odd effects (in particular, it might be wise to discourage discussion on introductory threads). Similarly, the LW user display threads are currently not set up well to show comments oldest-first, which is where many introductory comments will be. (Suppose someone feels strongly about being referred to with particular pronouns, and mentions that in their introductory comment. Most people won't see it that way; that's something they would probably be better off advertising on their user page, but it's not obvious to them that's possible.)

But we have the code support already for user pages from the wiki. If you have a wiki account but nothing on your user page yet, it's ugly and blank (like mine is right now). It might be worthwhile to push people from writing introductory posts to writing their user pages. (One downside of this approach is that it's not currently possible to upvote users or their profiles, whereas many newcomers now get a positive karma score just for saying hi.)

With rationality quotes, it seems like it would work better as a tagged database than as collections of monthly comments. Again, karma support seems like a must-have, as it makes it easier to sort comments by quality, as well as rewarding finding good comments. But it seems like instead of monthly threads stretching back to 2009 (and a handful from earlier), it would be neat to have them all in one place (like the ongoing collections of Best of Rationality Quotes), and more than that, to be able to look at them by focus rather than just by karma score.

I've posted the new open thread marked as being for one week. Let's see what happens.

I'd like to have a listing of open thread sub-threads which have the highest total karma, or possibly highest average karma per comment. I realize this would take coding, so it's more of a wish list item.

More frequent open threads and quotes threads would be handy.

I agree that there's a problem.

If we did open threads more often (once a week, say), I think it would fix the issue. Looking at the current page 1 of the Discussion section, posts from July 4 are still visible.

I agree that the Reddit format would probably work, but it seems inefficient to use another site to be able to operate this one.

Why can't we implement subreddits here? Seems like it would be super useful, for this and for other problems like the fact that philosophy, AGI, life extension/transhumanism and rationality all get mixed into the same discussions section.

In general, I think there's too high of a bar for what's considered worth posting. The vibe of LW discussion is something like "post something you've written or a link to an article and we will discuss/appraise it", but I think it might be nicer and foster a more active community to have more of a "chatting" sort of vibe, where people can freely bring up minor questions, topics only tangentially related to rationality, etc.

I think this would be best done by introducing a third "subreddit" with a low importance threshold for posting that serves the same function the open threads currently do. So essentially, there would be three subreddits: a high threshold one (Main), medium threshold one (Discussion), and a low threshold one (this new subreddit). I'm not sure if that was what you meant by introducing a new subreddit, or if you meant introducing a new subreddit merely to hold a bunch of individual Open Threads. The former seems like a more natural solution to me.

Anyway, poll:

[pollid:536]

Make a new subreddit for open threads.

How much resources would it take to make this new subreddit and move the latest Open Thread there (or create the next Open Thread there)? In worst case, how much resources would it take to return to the original state?

Seems to me this has the best "cost : possible benefit" ratio.