Closed Beta Users: What would make you interested in using LessWrong 2.0?

There seem to be two related problems here: content discovery for old posts without a specific topic; and finding posts on specific topics.

For the former, Less Wrong currently has two mechanisms: the Sequences wiki articles, and http://lesswrong.com/top/ . Neither of these is entirely adequate. The Sequences wiki articles fail to mention some of the best content. /top/ is close, but it's a feature that you can only use once; if you go back a second time, it works badly because you have to click Next a bunch of times before you get to something you haven't already read. This seems fixable! It might be good if LW tracked which articles you've read, in a way that's more reliable/persistent than browser history, and provided a feed of unread posts with a mix of new posts and highly-upvoted old posts.

I don't think that using up prominent real estate on core sequences is a good idea. I think that /top/ on lesswrong is a better idea, and agree with jim that mixing in top/unread with recent stuff would be pretty reasonable (e.g. if 1/3 of stuff I saw was just the highest rated article I hadn't read or skipped too many times).

Putting everything into a giant book is not a reasonable form of organizing institutional knowledge. (At least not beyond a certain point.)

In general, I feel like the sequences approach strangled the intellectual growth of LW 1.0 by sending people the message that unless their content is in the top 0.1% of content they should just go home. So that's what people did.

If you want a thriving discussion you're going to need to have a space for discussing things with reasonable but not incredible quality standards. You do not want to give users the message that for their discussion to be worthwhile it must ultimately be worthy of inclusion into a canon. Trying to build a canon too early just strangles everything. You're overemphasizing it because it's what EY did when you really should if anything underemphasize it.

p.s. Overemphasizing the construction of a canon also has negative PR effects, because it gives the impression of a fanatic group.

People browsing my blog seems much more likely than people browsing my user page. More generally, stuff I post on my blog seems to reflect on me in a way that stuff I post on LessWrong does not (instead reflecting on LessWrong).

So a few things I've been thinking about to solve these problems:

• I hope we can deal with Eugene after we have a better Karma system and better moderation tools. Though we will see how hard this problem turns out to be. But my guess is that even if it turns out to be harder, it is a problem that can be solved with sufficient, but not prohibitive, engineering effort.

• This current page already has a more aggressive scoring system that keeps highly upvoted posts at the top for longer, and which applies an exponential decay function over time, which results in you getting a mixture of recent posts and top posts as you scroll down the frontpage, instead of mostly a historical list of posts. I hope this increases visibility. I was also thinking of maybe adding a "promoted" section to the top of the posts list that always shows the top 5 promoted articles (by time-decayed score), so that you have something similar to main, without it being a whole click away.

• I am currently hesitant to create more top-level distinctions like main/discussion/forum, both because I think it decentralizes discussion, adds mental overhead and encourages styles in different parts of the page, which makes it harder to promote the best content from anywhere on the page (i.e. if the forum is mostly written in a style appropriate to forum, then it's harder to promote that content to the frontpage with all the long-form content)