Ideas to Improve LessWrong

One problem with a lot of these META: discussions is that people tend to come up with suggestions for things other people ought to do to make LW better.

A way to discuss ideas for the site, vote on them, and incentivize the generation of good ideas. I sense that having this would be huge. a) I sense that there are a lot of good ideas out there in people's heads but that they haven't shared. b) I sense that by discussing things, there could be a lot of refinement of current ideas, and a lot of generation of new ideas.

By ideas for the site, do you mean changes for the site code? And if you mean changes to the code, do you mean the change ideas, or the change implementations?

The backend is open source, and posts were made in 2011 and 2012 on how to make modifications to the code so that users could submit improvements. I don't pay close attention, but my impression is that very few, if any, improvements have been submitted by users.

Issues can be reported (i.e. requests made) at the Google Code page. But resources to implement those changes are minimal, as I understand it.

It seems to me that the primary piece missing is the effort. Either volunteers need to familiarize themselves with the codebase and then make changes, or volunteers need to put up enough cash to hire devs to make changes. (Presumably the folks at Trike Apps, who would need to approve those changes anyway.)

A way for people to assign monetary value to requests ("I would pay $20 for five separate subreddits") and aggregate those pledges into prizes would perhaps be interesting and solve some of the core problems (while causing other, hopefully more minor, problems). Either it's clear that something is worth doing, it gets done, and the doer is rewarded, or it's clear that something is not worth doing, and it remains deliberately undone.

I think having more "subreddits" would be worthwhile - many times I've had something I'd like to discuss with LWers but not posted it because it was too off-topic. However, as others have pointed out, this has been suggested many times but not done.

Perhaps if we can find out how much money it would take for Trike Apps to be willing to make this (or any other popular) change, and it was a reasonable amount, we could arrange a Kickstarter or similar to see if we could get enough funds.

The volume of quality content getting posted to LW is not as high as it could be. So one idea is code modifications that nudge users to publish more high-quality content.

When you write:

This article is something that has been in my head for a while. I hadn't planned on doing a write-up so soon. I wanted to take the time to a) refine my ideas and b) figure out how to express them clearly before posting. But the recent post Less Wrong lacks direction made me change my mind. My thinking now is that I overestimated the downside (wasting peoples time with a less than fully thought out post) and that there's enough value to justify posting a rough draft now.

I have a feeling that there are many articles like this that people have half-baked that they haven't gotten around to refining. I have lots of half-baked articles, for example. In my case, I endorse not working on those articles because I feel like I've got higher-priority stuff to do. Commenting on your article is more relaxing and something I can do in my spare time. But maybe that's the problem. Maybe the problem is that because posting to LW is framed as "work" for almost everyone, we get very few posts. (How many successful online forums do you think make posting feel like work? E.g. think of the GameFAQs forum, the XKCD forum, etc. Maybe the reason Q&A sites like Quora do so well is that writing a high quality response to a question doesn't feel like work. So, more LW Q&A threads?)

Or maybe it's fine that people see writing quality LW posts as work. Maybe the real issue is that they don't think it's valuable work. They notice that most comments even on highly-upvoted LW posts are critical, and subconsciously infer (with their primate brains) that making posts is not a socially sanctioned activity. Maybe what we need is a "blogging carnival" (like the EA community was doing for a while) where someone chooses a prompt at the beginning of the month and challenges people to write a post on that topic before the month is over.

Project ideas. There are a lot of smart, skilled and ambitious people here who want to do good things. If LW made it easier to coordinate and work with people, I could see it having a huge impact.

I see no obstacle to open up threads in discussion for any project. There's also https://www.facebook.com/groups/dotimpact/

Online chat. Like Facebook. I think it'd be a) cool and b) sometimes useful.

We have a facebook group and there's an IRC channel.

Also we have written conversation here and a chat doesn't provide in person communication.

Social coordination:

Happens via Meetups. http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Less_Wrong_meetup_groups

I think that the home page could use a redesign: right now, most of the the area on the first screen is occupied by static text. I have to scroll down or click to see new posts in Main (which is not very much active) and I have to click to see new posts in Discussion (where most of the activity occurs).

New posts should be immediately visible on the first screen of the home page. Also, there is probably no reason to keep Main and Discussion separated at the moment. They should be merged.

What are you trying to improve on LW, and why? What is the purpose of improvements? What do you want LW to be like after you'll apply them?

Personally, I'd want LW to be an effective tool in learning how to apply rationality, discussing rationality and rationality-related topics, and developing new rationality techniques. Every instrument has its purpose; if you want to study, say, math, isn't it more effective to go to some math communities and seek help and assistance there? If you want to chat like in Facebook, why not go to Facebook? If you have a brilliant startup idea, why not go to the (potentially much broader) community of people interested in such kind of ideas? And so on.

The obvious, and very important, improvement is writing more high-quality posts on rationality-related topics, like the sequences.

The harder subsection mostly consists of technical improvements. Is it an actual bottleneck of LW, or our needs are mostly satisfied with nested comments?

[pollid:986]

Thanks for posting this thread. It's good to see a bunch of ideas floating around.

I would imagine that multiple discussion areas should be easy given that this code is based off Reddit. This has been discussed before, but no action has been taken on this.

Social co-ordination is handled to a degree by local Less Wrong Groups.

Re: debate tools. Some tools already exist. Have you looked into these?

Re: highlighting and taking notes across the Internet. Apparently the replacement for Internet Explorer will do something like this.

Having a system for enabling pairing up for learning also sound like a good idea.

I have more to say on these ideas. I'll message you later when I'm not overloaded with work.

I am new here - and so do not have enough experience to make a judgement call, but I do have a question:

Why do you want to "improve" it? What are the aspects of it's current operation that you think are sub-optimal, and why?

I see a lot of interesting suggestions for changes, and a wishlist for features - but I have no inkling if they might "improve" anything at all. I tend to be of the "simpler is better" school, and from the sound of things, it seems things are already pretty good, or at least pretty non-bad?

STORYTIME!

I used to play a lot of World of Warcraft. I mean - a lot. I had always been a big fan of Blizzard, and when WoW came out, I participated eagerly in the beta, and played it heavily for many years. I eventually left, for a number of reasons - but the relevant one, here, is that Blizzard had been steadily "improving" WoW to the point where it was not what I wanted. In the early days, a lot of WoW was hard, and thus rewarding. You had giant questlines, 40 man raids, and it would take months, maybe a year, to complete goals. Doing so was rewarding, as it was challenging to the intellect, and demonstrated mastery to my peer group - It's fun to brag and show off, even in a video game. But - my goals were not Blizzards, and they steadily "improved" things by making it simpler - rather than a 40 man raid where everyone must be in top form, you could do 25 man, 10 man, 5 man "raids", and you could earn some things by virtue of just grinding (quantity) rather than excellence (quality). Eventually, they started simply selling the types of things that I had spent a great deal of time earning, further invalidating it in my eyes. They improved themselves out of a paying customer, and while they maybe picked up 5 in my place - for me, at least, it ruined the game.

The moral is - beware of "improving" things so much that you alter them fundamentally. I'll be blunt - very little of what you propose above can't be done in discussion threads, and the world has enough social networks. Part of the reason I joined here is the fact that I cannot ask or discuss these things on twitter or shudder facebook - well, I can, but I would get very little but the blank stares of bumpkins. I love humanity, but on a whole we are a bunch of bumpkins, sorry to say.

One simple UI improvement for the site: add a link from comments in inbox to that comment in the context of its post; now I have to click twice to get to the post and then scroll down to the comment.