LessWrong 2.0

Personally, I liked LW for being an integrated place with all that : the Sequences, interesting posts and discussions between rationalists/transhumanists (be it original thoughts/viewpoints/analysis, news related to those topics, links to related fanfiction, book suggestion, ...), and the meetup organization (I went to several meetup in Paris).

If that were to be replaced by many different things (one for news, one or more for discussion, one for meetups, ...) I probably wouldn't bother.

Also, I'm not on Facebook and would not consider going there. I think replacing the open ecosystem of Internet by a proprietary platform is a very dangerous trend for future of innovation, and I oppose the global surveillance that Facebook is part of. I know we are entering politics which is considered "dirty" by many here, but politics is part of the Many Causes, and I don't think we should alienate people for political reasons. The current LW is politically neutral, and allows "socialists" to discuss without much friction with "libertarians", which is part of its merits, and we should keep that.

I have an old list of halfbaked post ideas. At some point I lost sight of what things were "rationality things" and what things were just "things, that I happened to want to talk about with rationalists, because those are the cool people"; and in the presence of this confusion I defaulted to categorizing everything as the latter - because it was easy; I live here now; I can go weeks without interacting with anybody who isn't at least sort of rationalist-adjacent. If I want to talk to rationalists about a thing I can just bring it up the next time I'm at a party, or when my roommates come downstairs; I don't have to write an essay and subject it to increasingly noisy judgment about whether it is in the correct section/website/universe.

I think "things that you happen to want to talk about with rationalists" is a legit category to want an outlet for and having an explicit place for that (which has virtues like "is not literally Tumblr") would be nice. Useful norms might include: one-paragraph OPs normalized, tongue-in-cheek "Rational [Household Object / Unrelated Hobby / Basic Life Skill]" titles allowed/encouraged, granting OP some veto power about what sorts of comments and commenters are allowed under their post, aggressively encouraged and standard-formatted tagging system.

I had been a small-time LW regular for about 3 years and witnessed its decline until I stopped commenting a couple of months back. It was frustrating to see Eliezer, Yvain, Luke and others leave for other social media platforms, and even more to watch them fragment their writings further between personal blogs, FB, Reddit and tumblr. Not because it's a wrong thing to do, just because it's harder to follow and the commenting system is usually even worse than here. Well, except for Reddit. Without a strong leader charismatic emerging and willing to add quality content and drive the changes, I don't expect any site redesign to revive this rather zombified forum. Or maybe if the forum is redesigned one would emerge, who knows. Chicken and egg.

Or maybe it should be a rationality-related aggregator/hub, where all relevant links get posted and discussed. So that one could see at a glance that Scott A posted something on his blog, Eliezer on tumbler, Brienne on Facebook, gwern on his site and someone else on twitter or reddit. All on one page. There are various sites like that around. With the ability to comment locally, or go to the source and discuss it there. Maybe even add linkbacks to this site.

Just my 2c.

I need to think about this more, but my present impression is in favor of keeping LW and making it good. It seems to me that we gain quite a bit from having a Schelling place to post, such that evidence and arguments posted to that Schelling location become common knowledge.

I agree that LW has been doing fairly badly lately, but I am fairly seriously attempting to craft a post sequence designed to combat that; if not LW, I'd favor some other method that has a single secure Schelling spot.

My impression is that we know a fair bit of applied rationality that was not successfully conveyed by Eliezer's original Sequences (although a fair chunk of it seems to me to be implicit in those Sequences), and that we are now in a position to make a more serious attempt to convey in writing.

One more use I have for LessWrong: learning about subjects from people whom I trust to be smart and rational. A while back I wanted to learn up on perceptual control theory, I found RichardKenneways' and Vaniver's posts a hundred times better than Wikipedia.

This is an invaluable resource for me that I would hate to lose. Even if the quality of new stuff being written on LW is declining, the quality of stuff that I'm reading on LW is still consistently excellent. I really hope we would find a way to keep this aspect going.

A tangential note on third-party technical contributions to LW (if that's a thing you care about): the uncertainty about whether changes will be accepted, uncertainty about and lack of visibility into how that decision is made or even who makes it, and lack of a known process for making pull requests or getting feedback on ideas are incredibly anti-motivating.

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

• Online community design is an important subfield of group rationality, which is arguably more important than individual rationality. It's hard to deny that many of the biggest group rationality failures are happening online nowadays.

• A great thing about online communities is they let you aggregate the work of a variety of sporadic contributors. People have heard of Yvain because he writes good stuff on a consistent schedule. Imagine alternate universe Yvain whose blog has two posts, spaced 6 months apart: Meditations on Moloch and The Control Group Is Out Of Control. Since alternate universe Yvain does not write on a consistent schedule, few people have heard of his blog and his insights aren't read by many people.

I think the "Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction" post is wrong, which is unfortunate because I suspect it played a big role in killing LW.

Let's rewind to the dawn of the internet era. We're having coffee with Tim Berners-Lee and talking about his new invention, the World Wide Web. Speculatively we can see the Web disrupting many industries, but predicting that the Web will disrupt academia seems downright unimaginative. Heck, Tim is using the Web to share physics research already. After all, the Web means

• An end to credentialism. Now any amateur physicist can contribute in their spare time.

• Smoother, better peer review processes.

• Cheap, universal distribution.

Academia could use a shakeup anyway: much academic writing stinks, and philosophy in particular has gone astray.

Now fast forward to the present. The academic utopia we envisioned has happened to some degree--see Wikipedia and the AskHistorians subreddit, for instance. But it hasn't happened to the degree we hoped. Why not? I can think of a few reasons:

• Financial incentives and prestige inertia that benefit established systems. See e.g. Bryan Caplan on this.

• Lack of a profit motive. The Web revolutionized areas it was possible to get rich revolutionizing. Revolutionizing academia has much less profit potential. (Revolutionizing credentialing might make someone rich, but academia serves valuable roles for society that aren't credentialing and are hard to make money from. For example, it certifies smart people as high status topic experts. If you've attended high school you know that smart people are not high status by default. We're lucky to live in a world where journalists are more likely to interview college professors for trend pieces than celebrities. If colleges went away and cons + Mensa became the primary places smart people gathered, that might change.)

• The acceleration of addictiveness. The Web is selecting for addictive stimuli. Blogs are a more addictive version of personal websites. Twitter and Facebook are more addictive versions of blogs. If the web-based version of academia is optimizing for something other than addictiveness, it's likely to get crowded out. (I suspect this is playing a role in Wikipedia's decline.)

All of these factors seem surmountable, and indeed LW made decent progress despite them. They haven't been surmounted due to a combination of apathy and this problem not being on peoples' radar.

That's the research side of academia. Now let's look at the teaching side.

Imagine you're a professor teaching a critical thinking class. Out of all the classes in the general education curriculum, the case for your class actually helping the lives of your students is among the strongest. You're a really good teacher, and your students are so engaged with your assigned readings that they are putting off homework for other classes to do them. Sounds great right?

That's basically the problem Patri's post complained about. It's a "first world" problem by professorial standards. If your students are really having issues with their other classes because they are so excited about the readings for your class, maybe do the readings during class so they aren't a distraction while doing other homework, prevent students from reading ahead, or something like that.

The higher education bubble is likely going to "pop" eventually. (Maybe when employers realize that taking Coursera classes is a positive signal of conscientiousness, curiosity, and having the wisdom to avoid debt... Google's HR guy is already on record saying people who make their way without college are "exceptional human beings".) The market will provide a new solution for credentialing because there's money in that. There's less money in the other stuff academia does, and it'd be great if we could start laying the foundation for that now. Stretch goal: bake EA principles in from the start.

For me the annoying thing about LW is that it takes extremely long, usually forever, to change anything. You have a new idea? (Such as replacing "Main" and "Discussion" with something else.) You post it in Open Thread, and people agree? You post an article with a more detailed explanation, and many people upvote it? Guess what -- most likely still not going to happen. :(

It's not that we didn't have good ideas in the past. We had many, most of them we never implemented. Maybe some of them would have improved things. We'll never know. Why? Among other reasons, because Reddit codebase is a piece of crap. It would be probably better in long term to rewrite everything from scratch.

At this moment one idea resonates with me: "do one thing and do it well". Identify the purposes that you want to be served. For each of them, build a separate, optimal solution. Link aggregator. Discussion forum. Community blog. Meetup organizer. Rationalist welcome page. Rationalist wiki. Give them all the same header, so people can easily link from here to there, and maybe even a single sign-on system.

For example, an optimal link aggregator would support tags, and filtering by tags; the main page would contain X recent entries with more than Y upvotes; the "show more" link would show all recent entries. An optimal discussion forum would support creating new topics, which is not the same as articles (each linked article could automatically spawn its own minidiscussion, but there should be some more general topics); I am not sure about details. Community blog would allow people to post articles (which would be automatically linked by the link aggregator) if a community of moderators agrees the articles are good enough (if they are not, no one else will know about them, so there is no public shame); maybe each article could have an optional "public draft" phase where people can suggest improvements. Etc.

You bring up a number of important points. Perhaps I missed this when reading, but one role LessWrong plays and continues to play is a good source of discussion. Often I'll find the discussion to be more interesting than a particular article. It's not uncommon for me to be linked to a particular comment divorced from its larger context and not be interested in the larger context. I don't know how common this behavior is, but this is not uncommon for me, and I don't think replacing the rationalist materials with a wiki or Q&A site would suit this well at all. This is one reason to favor something like Reddit.

I'm also generally not a fan of shutting down even semi-active forums. In one online community I've participated in, there were several major forum closures, and each time there was a period of confusion about what to do if you're interested in discussion, along with basically sectarian posturing to get active posters. The sectarian stuff caused major problems down the line, and the current discussion forum for this community more or less voluntarily avoids those conflicts now. There also are a number of roles LessWrong plays that I'm not sure would survive a transition to the diaspora, like the page about sharing academic papers. I also often enjoy reading the open threads. Perhaps transitioning LessWrong more towards discussion would be a good middle ground.

Edit: On a related note, I find following discussions on Tumblr to be a huge pain, and hope either this improves in the future or that more discussions happen elsewhere.

It would motivate me to write more for LW if I could see how many views each of my articles/comments received.

I would caution away from a bias towards "the current situation seems vaguely bad, therefore Something Must Be Done." There are lots of people still getting use out of LessWrong. I think it would be unfortunate that a bias towards Doing Something over Leaving It Be might cause a valuable resource to be ended without good cause. If the site can be reinvented, great, but if it can't -- don't hit the Big Red Button without honestly weighing the significant costs to the people who are still actively using the site.

(I briefly searched, to see if there's an article on LW about the idea of a bias towards Doing Something. It would of course be essentially the opposite of status quo bias; and yet I think it's a real phenomenon. I certainly feel like I observe it happening in discussions like this. Perhaps the real issue is in the resolution of conflicts between a small minority who are outspoken about Doing Something, and a large silent majority who don't express strong feelings because they're fine with the status quo. This is an attempt to express a thought that I've had percolating, not a criticism of this post.)

I approach Less Wrong et al mostly from the Grey Tribe Social Club and community clearinghouse perspective. In that sense, I see four things we get from Less Wrong that we do not get from the disapora:

1. A central social arena for what SSC refers to as the Grey Tribe. Nerds, aspiring rationalists, political cynics, probably some other things I haven't thought of, unified mostly by dispassionate discussion and valuing truth for its own sake. The disapora fails at this because the communities on individual blogs are only thinly connected by the occasional inter-blog link. There is much more There there, than is apparent to someone who discovers the community through a single blog.
2. Shared infrastructure that lowers trivial inconveniences to entry. Someone who wants to make a long point can do it here without needing to run their own blog.
3. Shared audience. This is more important than I think it's given credit for. You can start a new blog, but unless you plan on also going out of your way to market it then your chances of starting a discussion boil down to "hope it catches the attention of Yvain or someone else similarly prominent in the community." Here, you can write something on topics of mutual interest and have a reasonable shot at getting it read, without having to first establish yourself individually. Note that as I understand it (someone correct me if I'm wrong) most of the diaspora personages we're actually aware of got their audience here first.
4. Community safety net. If Yvain gets hit by a car tomorrow, the SSC community disintegrates shortly thereafter as commenters move to their next-most-favored authors, which won't necessarily match.

I'm from an IT background, so I will also discuss technology. There's two technical problems you mention. The first is aggregation of the work of diaspora authors; right now, all we have is links on the sidebar and author links to each other. This actually seems like the simplest problem to solve. I'm pretty sure everybody's blog software provides an RSS feed. Just configure them to provide full text, and display that on Less Wrong as a feed alongside Main and Discussion. Call it Diaspora or something. This does, admittedly, require cooperation from the owners; my intuition is that it would be easier to get in this community than most others.

But that doesn't solve the greater difficulty, aggregation of comments. Even if we publish an aggregated feed of all known LW authors, and also allow posts on LW itself for people who don't have their own blog, we still end up with N+1 disconnected communities.

Normally I'd say "everybody come back to LW and post here", but 1. that's not going to happen; people like owning their own gardens; and 2. you rightly point out that it benefits authors to have fuller control over their publishing environment. So there's a divide here between what's useful to authors and useful to the community.

The problem we're actually trying to solve is community aggregation. We want individual homes for authors, but we also want a town square for residents and visiting speakers.

So I'm going to step to the side and bring something out here...

/Error exits stage right, returns pushing small wooden horse labeled "hobby"/

Anyone who follows SSC comment subthreads complaining about crappy commenting features will know what I'm going to say next.

Distributed discussion is a solved problem, and the solution is not Disqus or anything like it. The solution is called NNTP, and it has been around since approximately forever. It is currently mostly unused because no one has written (or, perhaps, popularized) a good web frontend for it; and today, the web is the Internet in most users' eyes. It does not have all possible good features (in particular, it does not have a voting system, although it could probably be kludged in), but given the number of times I've answered feature complaints with some variant of "you know, somebody implemented something that does that 20 years ago, but no one uses it", I am guessing it has enough.

So my personal solution is: Start a rationalist Usenet, with NNTP providing the backend and blogging software acting as a client. Each diaspora author gets a top-level group tree, within which groups are moderated by them. "blogs" are effectively frontends to the tree, presenting the local author's work as top-level posts and comments as replies. Less wrong collects posts from friendly authors using NNTP's existing mechanisms for distributing posts, but is only responsible for moderating within its own top-level tree, provided for general discussion and non-blog-owners (and as a sort of meta-moderator). Effectively, NNTP is now the database the site reads from. Only you don't necessarily need the site to read it; power users who want better efficiency can use all the power of existing nntp clients.

This solution does require blog authors to use blogging software that accepts NNTP as a post/comment backend. However, I think it is an easier problem to convince a few dozen authors to do this (and to write such a frontend if necessary) than a few thousand readers to switch to non-web clients for anything. A web interface is necessary for any such plan anyway; in today's world, if Google doesn't index it, it doesn't exist.

We're a heavily tech-slanted community. There ought to be enough technical expertise here to pull such a thing off.

And while I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony.

(Now that I've reached the bottom of my comment, I'm thinking of writing this up in further detail, as a full post, to describe exactly how such a plan could be implemented and solve technical and coordination problems -- note that my proposition above could be adopted incrementally, which is important to the latter issue. I've never presented a full argument to a non-old-timer audience and I don't know how convincing it would be. I'd rather get a sense of initial reactions first, though, and I've already spent more time on this post than my employer would probably approve of.)

I am not sure what is the point of shutting LW down -- I don't see the upside. Even if you accept that it's nothing but a ghost town with a large library, haunted by spirits, after exorcising them you're left with nothing. The spirits disperse to all corners of the 'net, the library grows silent and really dead... that doesn't look like a good outcome.

Things evolve and change. This is both good and inevitable. LW cannot exist frozen in time and we want to move into the future, not attempt to return to the past. LW will never be what it used to be and that's fine.

One obstacle not discussed is the 'tone' or 'pleasantness' of posting to LW. Since this is a huge reason why people left, that may seem like an oversight, but I think the fix is fairly routine and so not worth much space in the post.

Right now, the Diaspora solves this by only bringing things people actively seek out to their attention. If you're going to Scott's blog, you'll know that you'll see the occasional post about Tom Swifties, and it's his blog, so who are you to complain about it?

It seems like subreddits partially solve that problem ("What is this cryonics doing in my rationality?" becomes "Well, what'd you expect from the medical futurology subreddit?"), and tags do an even better job (tagging something "rigorous" will attract attention you want, and not tagging it that will hopefully dissuade attention you don't want).

Add in some active moderation and better voting / tagging powers for respected users, and you're mostly done.

Something seems wrong to me about the "Welcoming Committee / Rationality Materials" section in the OP. I mean, if we imagine someone arriving in Rationalistan as a result of a link in the HPMOR author's notes or something of the kind and getting intimidated by how much stuff there is and/or how little they feel they know ... whyever would what they then need look like Wikipedia? Wikipedia is terrific and I am a huge fan, but it's not great at providing "social reinforcement" and "other people to ask questions of".

Vaniver's other suggestion for something that would serve this need better than a Redditalike is Stack Overflow. That's a better fit, but the SO model works best where what people need is answers to specific questions that have clear-cut answers. Surely that's not the situation of someone newly arriving in Rationalistan. Their questions are going to be more like "WTF is all this?" or "I think I need to reevaluate how I think about lots of important questions but I barely know where to start; what shall I do?". Stack Overflow itself (and I think most of its offshoots) strongly discourages that sort of open-ended question on the grounds that that's not what SO is good at.

The biggest weakness of Less Wrong as a welcoming committee isn't that it's a forum rather than an encyclopaedia or a Q&A site; I think a forum is the Right Thing for that purpose. The biggest weakness is the whole "ghost town of unquiet spirits" thing -- which I think is an unkind exaggeration but it's hard to deny has some truth to it. LW would make a better welcoming committee if it were livelier and more impressive, and it won't gain those attributes as a welcoming committee.

Having said that, I agree that there's a place for something Wikipedia-like. The LW wiki was meant to be that, but it's never had a great deal of participation. I have no idea what could be done to change that. People contribute to things to benefit others, or to benefit themselves. Editing a wiki is never going to bring much personal gain, and when all the material that would go into the wiki is already out there in other forms (e.g., the Sequences) it's hard to see that the benefit is going to be big enough to excite people doing it altruistically.

Here you can find a mind map aggregating the opinions of every commenter up until the time of this comment.
I will further edit it as comments are added. If you want to make it editable from the community let me know (and suggest a service that does so!). If you think I have misrepresented your opinions let me know and I'll fix it.
My analysis:

• LW is perceived badly for two reasons: low quality and obscurity to newcomers;
• LW is perceived as a good thing on at least on three axis: as an archive for the Sequence and the Wiki; as a community aggregators for different movements / sources (EA, HPMOR, sporadic contributors, etc.); for its live services (sharing academic articles, chat, stupid questions thread, etc.);
• the vast majority of people are in favor of keeping it open;
• the highest value LW offers is as an aggregator of the Diasporists, and the main problem is the sharing of comments;
• the most frequently proposed solutions include RSS feeds, subreddits and removing the distinction between Main and Discussion.

I like those suggestions too, I'm in favor of keeping it open.

I'm tempted to go through Eliezer's Facebook page and start copy/pasting interesting things to LessWrong Discussion...

I vote for both plans at once!

1) Make the current LW read-only. All content is still accessible, but commenting and voting is disabled. The discussion section is closed as well. Let things rest for a month or so.

2) Announce that during the next year, LW will have one post per week, at a specified time. There will be an email address where anyone can send their submissions, whereupon a horribly secretive and biased group of editors will select the best one each week, aiming for Eliezer quality or higher. The prominent posters you've contacted should create enough good content for the first couple months. Voting will be disabled for posts, and enabled only for comments. There will also be one monthly open thread for unstructured discussion.

I don't think anything short of that would work. LW's problem is the decline in quality, so the fix should be quality-oriented, not quantity-oriented.

Hi. As a longtime lurker (my first introduction to the site may have been as early as twelve years old) I'm very glad to see this conversation finally come to a head. I'm of the opinion that the current site needs to either reinvent itself or shut down. I think that the biggest negative of the rationalist diaspora has in fact been keeping track of who has flown to what corner of the earth, further Eliezer Yudowsky and others posting on Facebook is annoying to me, because I do not use Facebook and find it to be an actual pain at times to get access to their posts. Having a less proprietary mirror would make me much more likely to read their writings. At the same time, given the implied privacy of Facebook I have to wonder if the point of posting there is so that things will not be read outside of the small audience EY now caters to.

Reinventing LessWrong as an archival site for the sequences and a hub for coordinating the diaspora would be a prudent use of its Schelling-Point real estate.

I largely agree with your analysis, though I do have some ideas on what an online community that does not waste peoples time and gets them to do interesting things would look like. If somebody would be interested in discussing this with me they may email me at:

wqcbfgntr@yvahkznvy.bet (Rot13'd to prevent email spam.)

(or here, but I'm kind of public discussion shy).

I like online social interaction. I used to get this on LessWrong; for me, it was a fun Internet forum to hang out on. With the lack of new major content, though, I've been finding less to talk about. Perhaps we need to design LW 2.0 as a platform that supports "random nerdy fun social times", general life advice ("I'm having a problem, help me Internet Hive Mind!) and other things that aren't directly related to How To Think Better.

The people still posting to LW seem to be getting use out of it; going archive-only doesn't seem great to me.

The two technical changes I think would most help with continued use of the site:

• remove the main vs discussion distinction, and remove promotion.

• make it more usable on phones

If LW was archived without a proper replacement, I'd either move my posts to a website like FiMFiction (which wouldn't be a very good alternative), or, more likely, stop posting and commenting on rationality-related stuff entirely.

My two cents:

• Merge Main and Discussion

• Make new content more visible. Right now the landing page, and in particular the first screen, mostly consists of boilerplate. You have to scroll or click in order to view if new content has been posted. In the current attention scarce era of Facebook and Twitter streams, this is not ideal.

• Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.

A few points:

1. I would hate to see LW close and I don't think that would be a helpful step in getting people exposed to rationality unless a new central hub rose to take its place. I found LW through HPMOR just this year and have very little idea of what LW looked in it's supposed glory days. Things aren't great now, but if LW had been completely dead I likely wouldn't have moved from wanting to be rational to reading 600+ pages of Rationality:From AI to Zombies, making tons of connections and rationalist friends, attending CFAR, starting a LW meetup in my area, and more. A completely dead website would have given the impression of a dead philosophy that was abandoned by the people who followed it because it wasn't actually that useful after all.

2. Decreases to the level of polish, rigor, and rationality knowledge publicly deemed necessary before posting in the various areas could be helpful (in current LW or a LW 2.0). I mainly post in Open and Stupid Question threads because of this.

3. People here can be pretty cold and harsh in their replies. I've also heard of issues regarding downvote brigades or mass downvoting of people's posts due to personal disagreements. If this place really is full of "unquiet spirits" then a method of removing them, discouraging that kind of conduct, or changing them into kind benevolent spirits should be included in the works.

Looking at the discussion, my impression has been that there are at least two things that'd be valuable:

• Merge Main and Discussion. There doesn't really seem to be any good reason to maintain this distinction: Main only gets one third of the posts that Discussion gets, and that's combining the views of All + Promoted posts: the page with non-promoted Main posts only gets about one fifteenth of the posts that Discussion does. If you post something in Main and it doesn't get promoted, basically nobody sees it. (Necessary caveat: RSS subscriptions and the like aren't included in these figures.) That doesn't make sense for the section of the site that's supposed to be for the higher-quality posts, so it seems safe to say that the intent of the Main/Discussion distinction isn't really working and is only needless complexity.
• Do add a new subforum for submitting pure links, Reddit-style. Useful for collecting everything interesting from the LW Diaspora in one place.

Personally I'd also suggest:

• Change the default sorting of topics in a subreddit from "New" to something like Reddit's "Hot", which sorts topics based on a combination of how many upvotes they have and how recent they are. This would help highlight quality topics better and keep them more visible. As an added bonus, I think somebody mentioned that it's intimidating to post topics because if your topic gets downvoted it will hang around as a mark of shame for a very long time; this would help ease that problem, with downvoted topics dropping out of sight faster.

One thing LessWrong should have been, and never was, is a place to expand on and critique the ideas behind Friendly AI and Coherent Extrapolated Volition. It's nearly 2016, and AFAIK we still have no more details on what CEV is or how it might work than when the site was created. I find it strange to talk about shutting the site down when it's never gotten around to what should have been its primary purpose.

It wasn't such a place partly because Eliezer discouraged attempts to fill in the gaps, figure out what he meant, or critique the assumptions of his program. LessWrong was a fundraiser for a cause that it wanted not to discuss.

The main thing holding me back from posting on Less Wrong, and I really doubt that I'm alone in this, is that it feels sort of mutually exclusive with posting on my own blog. That blog has to exist for the things I want to post that would be too far offtopic for LW, but then if I want it to not be dead, that consumes my entire posting volume.

Well I totally missed the diaspora. I read star slate codex (but not the comments) and had no idea people are posting things in other places. It surprises me that it even has a name "rationalist diaspora." It seemed to me that people ran out of things to say or the booster rocket thing had played itself out. This is probably because I don't read Discussion, only Main and as Main received fewer posts I stopped coming to Less Wrong. As "meet up in area X" took over the stream of content I unsubscribed from my CSS reader. Over the past few years the feeling of a community completely evaporated for me. Good to hear that there is something going on somewhere, but it still isn't clear where that is. So archiving LW and embracing the diaspora to me means so long and thanks for all the fish.

I think it would be good to merge PredictionBook with LW. Both are run by Trick Apps. Having them together would help LW to make us of more prediction making.

Predictions would be a new tab besides Main and Discussion. The Wiki might also worth having it's own tab.

Just as we have at the moment a [poll] tag we could have a prediction tag to be used inside LW discussions.

The biggest thing I feel the lack of right now is a place for semitechnical discussion with people who are roughly on the same page. Suppose I wanted to discuss some thoughts on trying to go beyond the Hibbard 2012 model in terms of applying machine learning to FAI - there's just not a good place that I know of. When agentfoundations was founded I was hoping it would be that place, but that's not really how it panned out.

Yesteray I posted the draft for a new article on the LW slack. I circulating drafts of articles before publishing them on LW proper might be in general a good way to improve the quality.

There are an awful lot of ideas in this comment thread but many ideas have been proposed in the past. Without leadership, nothing's going to happen, and as I understand it the leaders of lw have left. Nate's been contacted? Ok, does he have decision making power? Is he an appropriate leader to have it? Will he use it? Well, I hope so, but the first step is a deliberate move to take ownership and end the headlessness

I've been spending quite a bit of time on Less Wrong chat. I think that LW chat has demonstrated that when there are different channels, it really opens up the conversational space. One thing that I've found to be very surprising is that: a) Less Wrong chat has surprisingly little discussion of politics b) Less Wrong chat has lots of discussion about parenting.

My favoured system would be for Less Wrong to gain different subs, with the ability to follow or unfollow them and have content appear on a mainscreen that summarises the subs that you choose to follow.

Thanks for laying all this out so clearly, you have put a lot of thought and effort into this!

Want to highlight that many potential effective altruists find out about EA from active engagement with Less Wrong. As a strong EA, for me that counts as a significant piece of evidence for keeping Less Wrong going, in a reinvented form.

I also gain a lot from discussion and feedback here. I think Reddit or another venue would not do as good a job at it. This is another reason I'd prefer to have a reinvented site.

Book reviews seem to be usually welcome on LW, and there are threads about learning from books; but AFAIK there is no object-level intro into how to cultivate a habit of asking yourself but what does it actually mean? when you read.

For example, when I recently opened a high-school botany textbook and tried to read it as someone who wants to get a technical understanding of botany from it, the first chapter had me stumped. Okay, so there are different branches of botany, all those special sciences about algae and lichens and mosses - but what does it mean? What questions do they deal with? How small or large are they in scope? How do algae people speak with moss people or - God forbid - ecology people? (Actually, they often don't.) If 'science begins when you begin working with numbers', then when do botanists begin working with numbers? (Okay, cladistics or phytocoenology are rather hard to explain at the start, but there have to be simple examples.) From the very start the textbook teaches you to memorize words but not to look too closely at the things built from them.

I think such micro-reviews - of a chapter, of half a chapter - with informed commentary would be nice to have.

We know there has been evaporation happening. So the question is... who left, and who stayed?

Well... Less Wrong is, well, boring. Nothing interesting is happening here.

Without interesting things happening, people won't come see what's going on. Without people coming to see what's going on, nobody will want to write things for Less Wrong, because almost nobody will be around to read them. Without people writing things - well, nothing interesting is going to happen, because new things are a kind of interesting, and perhaps the only kind Less Wrong really allows.

There's a bootstrapping problem. Eliezer bootstrapped Less Wrong the first time around, and the more prominent people from that era developed followings and reputations here, then, well, left, because they had more control elsewhere. Nobody stepped in to replace them; new interesting people, by and large, reach SSC (and its brethren blogs) and stop there.

But... SSC gets its biggest influxes in traffic when Scott Alexander talks about exactly those sorts of things we explicitly forbid talking about here - identity, politics, etc.

There's a balancing act between talking about things people feel really strongly about - the things they're mindkilled about - and never talking about anything interesting at all. The biggest drama I haven't personally introduced is whether or not some guy who did something bad several years ago might still be hanging around under a new username.

So... who left, and who stayed?

What's wrong with the unquiet spirits? I don't think that that is a good reason to shut the site down.

Organizations typically go through changes when the founders move on. That's not unusual. That's expected.

I value the ability to have discussions with people on this site, and oppose the idea that the site should be archived and shut down.

For about a bit more than a year I have been wanting a forum very similar to this one. In the process of gradually unsubscribing from the defaults on Reddit I found that even many of the Truesubreddits were not satisfying any longer and not knowing of the existence of LessWrong I put a moderate amount of effort in fruitlessly trying improving those subs. It took joining the Effective Altruïsm to stumble on this site, the point being that there likely is a considerable pool of potential users for this site who I suspect don't know that this site exists either. I urge anyone active in places like truesubreddits to be more vocal about the existence of this site.

This aspect of accessibility touches on the flipside that Facebook would be too accessible to the wrong kind of potential users, with in addition the format itself possibly leading to a decline in quality. Consider for example that moving LW to Facebook would mean friends of members in the group, despite not being suitable for the page at all, would see they are member and might join to see what it is all about. I once joined a couple groups on philosophy and psychology on Facebook and was very much displeased with the quality of the posts.

I do agree with the idea of expanding the subject matter of this site. Even though I felt a great sense of relief and homeliness when I finally discovered this site this poses a partly unnecessary barrier to becoming active. The lack of breadth in issues being discussed not only means that I currently have to do some homework and have been lurking for weeks prior to contributing anything, but also that those active on the site only can only still the hunger of few of their likely many interests. I wonder if a poll has ever been conducted as to what potential subforums or features users would like to see added/ changed? You have written this post addressing multiple problems and suggestions, but it would have been better if a survey were included in this or a subsequent post to see where precisely the problems lie and to what extent the solutions for them bear support.

So compared to when most things were either posted or crossposted to LW, it seems like we currently spend too little attention on aggregating and unifying content spread across many different places. If most of the action is happening offsite, and all that needs to be done is link to it, Reddit seems like the clear low-cost winner. Or perhaps it makes sense to try to do something like an online magazine, with an actual editor. (See Viliam's discussion of the censor role in an online community.) I note that FLI is hiring a news website editor (but they're likely more x-risk focused than I'm imagining).

It should be not extrodinarily hard to re-enable the ability to submit links which this sites software came with (aka make https://www.reddit.com/submit?selftext=false and https://www.reddit.com/submit?selftext=true both work), and run a bot which scrapes from a list of blogs/tumblers/etc to auto-submits those links (could make the list drawn from the XML export of a wiki page, protected so only wiki admins can edit, with a request thread requiring x current recognized people to vouch for you before you're added, or having someone/a small team designated to handle those requests).

Then put top rated posts on the front page with reasonable turnover/ability to see past ones and LW becomes again the best place to rapidly check for new content across the wider rationality community.

There's a reason why CFAR has workshops instead of writing articles and books.

Is there? Given that this community seems to be quite skeptical about the value of e.g. university over self-teaching from textbooks, what's the rationale for that format?

New venues in rationality discussions seem to be the LW Slack, R/SlateStarCodex, the facebook group, the nonopen CFAR mainling list, Omnilibrium, the EA forum and the Intelligent Agent Foundations Forum.

I don't think that proliferation of different venues is bad.

I am somewhat new to LW, so I only know the "eternal september" period.

Even tough the contributions and the comments do not have the same quality as the old content, there are still (in my opinion) some interesting posts and discussions, so I'd prefer not archive LW.

The use of LW as focal point would really interest me since I am a bit lost in the diaspora, the other two points are also good and deserve to be implemented.

I think a knowledge aggregator fills a different purpose from a link aggregator. When someone has an idea they want to explore, they write something about it, and that can be put in a link aggregator. By default it's not yet ready for a knowledge aggregator. But it's more likely to become ready if people see it and discuss it.

I think transience is okay for a link aggregator.

Links can't be grouped, categorized.

Link flair isn't perfect, but it allows this.

I like rationality quotes, so whatever happens I hope that stays alive in some form. Maybe it could move to /r/slatestarcodex.

I'm almost exclusively a lurker. I don't visit meetups and don't read the Rationality Quotes threads. What I largely use lesswrong for now is the aggregation feature of the "RECENT ON RATIONALITY BLOGS" tab. I suspect I could duplicate this functionality with some combination of RSS Feed/blog subscription feature, but I'm unmotivated to do so and have convinced myself that the blogroll list curated by LessWrong is valuable. Hopefully my experience is demographically representative enough of a larger pool of lurkers as to be valuable.

For what it's worth, I got relatively little[1] out of reading the Sequences solo, in any form (and RAZ is worse than LW in this regard, because the comments were worth something even on really old and inactive threads, and surprisingly many threads were still active when I first joined the site in 2014).

What really did the job for me was the reading group started by another then-Seattleite[2]. We started as a small group (I forget how many people the first meetings had, but it was a while before we broke 10 and longer before we did it regularly) that simply worked through the core sequences - Map & Territory, then How to Actually Change Your Mind - in order (as determined by posts on the sequences themselves at first, and later by the order of Rationality: AI to Zombies chapters). Each week, we'd read the next 4-6 posts (generally adjusted for length) and then meet for roughly 90 minutes to talk about them in groups of 4-8 (as more people started coming, we began splitting up for the discussions). Then we'd (mostly) all go to dinner together, at which we'd talk about anything - the reading topics, other Rationality-esque things, or anything else a group of smart mostly-20-somethings might chat about - and next week we'd do it again.

If there's such a group near you, go to it! If not, try to get it started. Starting one of these groups is non-trivial. I was already considering the idea before I met the person who actually made it happen (and I met her through OKCupid, not LessWrong or the local rationality/EA community), but I wouldn't have done it anywhere near as well as she did. On the other hand, maybe you have the skills and connections (she did) and just need the encouragement. Or maybe you know somebody else who has what it takes, and need to go encourage them.

[1] Reading the Sequences by myself, the concepts were very "slippery"; I might have technically remembered them, but I didn't internalize them. If there was anything I disagreed with or that seemed unrealistic - and this wasn't so very uncommon - it made me discount the whole post to effectively nothing. Even when something seemed totally, brilliantly true, it also felt untested to me, because I hadn't talked about it with anybody. Going to the group fixed all of that. While it's not really what you're asking for, you may find it does the trick.

[2] She has since moved to (of course) the Bay Area. Nonetheless, the group continues (and is roughly now two years running, hitting nearly every Monday evening). We regularly break 20 attendees now, occasionally break 30, and the "get dinner together" follow-up has grown into a regularly-scheduled weekly event in its own right at one of the local rationalist houses.

I'd like to see a section listing current projects among the community.

I've picked up a vague sense of the growth out of LW (a few blogs, CFAR, Beeminder, Mealsquares, etc.), but a list of current work would be an impressive testimony of the effects of rationality.

But the point is for each listed project to give people direction as to what they can do with their new found rationality. It could list tasks to be done, how to prepare to do them, project needs. Let people know either what they can do, or what they can study to become able to do. Help them prepare by getting them involved and giving them feedback.

For example, on the projects page:

Packaging rationality for mass reception

Project name: Intentional Insights

Leader:

Tasks

1. Suggest a principle from the sequences which would be good to write up for mass consumption. Explain your choice

2. Outline an article based on a principle (see list of suggestions here)

3. Write up part of an article for review (the intro, an anecdote, the closing, data, an explanation of the data, a visual)

4. Review people's writings here (suggest alternate wordings or approaches)

To get up to speed:

1. Read our thoughts on what kinds of principles are important for people to understand. Comment on what kind you think are important.

2. Read about how to outline articles for mass consumption

3. Read here about how to write certain parts of an article

4. These books are useful (list books)

Needs:

1. Someone to help us improve our understanding and application of marketing. How can we improve our impact with each article? See current suggestions.

2. Someone to work out how to make effective videos out of our articles. Someone with a good style to feature in the videos. Show us how you would do it, if you're interested

One way of dividing up the options is: fix the current platform, or find new platform(s). The natural decay process seems to be tilting towards the latter, but there are downsides: the diaspora loses cohesion, and while the new platforms obviously offer some things the current one doesn't, they are worse than the current one in various ways (it's really hard to be an occasional lurker on FB or tumblr, especially if you are more interested in the discussion than the "OP").

If the consensus is to fix the current platform, I suggest trying the simple fixes first. As far as I can tell, that means, break the discussion/main dichotomy, and do something about "deletionist" downvoting. Also, making it clearer how to contribute to the codebase, with a clearer owner. I think that these things should be tried and given a chance to work before more radical stuff is attempted.

If the consensus is to find something new, I suggest that it should be something which has a corporation behind it. Something smallish but on the up-and-up, and willing to give enough "tagging" capability for the community to curate itself and maintain itself reasonably separate from the main body of users of the site. It should be something smaller than FB but something willing to take the requests of the community seriously. Reddit, Quora, StackExchange, Medium... this kind of thing, though I can see problems with each of those specific suggestions.

I think the problem with Main is the exclusion criteria is too strong for the current state of the site. If Main featured an average of one post a day or every other day, with the best post from that period, then that would keep it useful. One post every 15 days simply isn't enough content to garner viewership. Discussion has enough content, but it isn't very well curated. I think the karma system has largely failed other than to prevent trolling. I can think of multiple examples where a correct answer to a factual topic discussion got buried in the comments, and a clearly wrong answer got upvoted above it.

So what's needed is more content, and better curation of that content.

One possibility is to use moderators to choose which discussion posts get elevated to Main, and have a clear goal to maintain a constant stream of content, and to simply choose the best post that appears during the pre-agreed selection period. A constant stream of content will lower quality in the short term, but increase viewership, which will improve quality in the long-term by giving the moderators more options of what to elevate to main. There will be slim pickings at times, but if you don't post content this will lower the long-run quality of the site. There should be a clear standard of how many moderators are around, and a clear standard for when a moderator is replaced.

Other possibilities such as a wiki or an open-sourcing community are far removed from the site's current purpose, and thus are more likely to fail. I'm not sure why the purpose of being a news organization for rationality content as a concept is bad, or why Vaniver believes such a purpose is unworkable when it seems to have worked pretty well for several years even if the current iteration isn't working. Remember Occam's Razor.

Edit - I should add that I don't consider Meetups and Community News to really be content. It's only relevant to a subset of LessWrong users. I think including those in Main actually detracts from the intention of Main, but that when you remove them there's not much content there fulfilling the purpose of Main. Community News and major discussion posts are two very different topics, and shouldn't be included in the same category, which is a sorting issue. Major discussion posts are what I consider to be the main content, and those should be curated, and maintained at a constant level.

Does LW have Google analytics data? If so, I think it would be good if people in this debate could look at it. Maybe share the link in slack instead of here publically.

Getting direct work done. Open-sourcing things is powerful, but it remains true that money is the unit of caring. When people really want something done, they have an institution with an office and employees that get the thing done.

What?

The Linux kernel is a prime example, along with plenty of other, impressive FOSS programs can't be summed up by "powerful". The general consensus with programmers was that "office and employyes" is less than adequate and often insult-worthy.

I don't come here much because there is not too much content. I'd come here more often if there was links to content that is nice. Even if it is just a sidebar with links to off-site posts. I mean, there is the blogs people who used to post here now post at, there's other rationality blogs, there's the occasional reddit thread of interest.

I have no problem with the 'ghosts haunting the dead site' staying around.

I think the first step is for whoever controls LW, which I suppose is Eliezer, to hand over control to someone who's active on the site. This is important because promoting posts is important to get a high viewcount. I don't get the impression anybody reads all the new posts to Main and promotes the ones they think are good.

More transparency about who's in charge and how they operate LW would be good during and after this process.

Eliezer's policy was explicitly, "Although you now create the content for LessWrong, that gives you no right to have any say in how it's run." I think that's part of why people left, and ought to change going forward.

I think we should either develop a plan that makes LW fully functional at the three roles mentioned above (and any others that are raised), or we should close down posting and commenting on LW (while maintaining it as an archive).

First, I wonder who this "we" is. Does the "we" discussing this include any people with the power to do any of it?

I don't agree with shutting it down. Post warning message banners if you like, but I believe in the free market. I'm not talking about money or the invisible hand; I'm talking about the idea that you shouldn't try to decide what's good for other people. If people want to keep using LW, their use of it is their vote that it's useful. If people stop believing it's useful, they'll stop using it. If they still believe it's useful to them, who are you to overrule them?

I thought an idea of a greeting party and a closer-tied community sounds good. Maybe something like a number of small teams, so that any newcomer would be taken into one and shown the most valuable stuff, with bonus ability to cooperate on articles or code projects, or research, or wherever the team advantage is. Together with some in-group chat where people may get to know each other better. And, of course, the big free-for-all discussions and articles should stay, so the community would not be divided too much. There should also be less nitpicks at the main articles comments if the articles were already discussed and edited by the group.

I've also talked to many of the prominent posters who've left about the decline of LW, and pointed out that the coordination problem could be deliberately solved if everyone decided to come back at once. Everyone that responded expressed displeasure that LW had faded and interest in a coordinated return, and often had some material that they thought they could prepare and have ready.

High value is assigned to many original top posters. This leads me to three questions:

1. What demand will LW 2.0 satisfy that will keep these prominent original posters returning to LW regularly in the future over the course of 2+ years?

2. Do you think the reasons that led them to leave the first time can be prevented this time and will not be soon reiterated?

3. How can new top posters as good or better than the old ones be found/recruited/marketed to?

Getting people to go ahead and eat the cost of cross posting with the explicit knowledge that the community appreciates this seems like it would help.

...but if I went completely, crazily, unbelievably optimistic, I'd add: let there be a regime of viewing the site (or however it's called) without karma and user names, but in such a way that if one wants to PM some commenter, there'd be a 'PM' box right next to the comment.

(Upvoted, thanks.)

I think I disagree with the statement that "Getting direct work done." isn't a purpose LW can or should serve. The direct work would be "rationality research"---figuring out general effectiveness strategies. The sequences are the prime example in the realm of epistemic effectiveness, but there's lots of open questions in productivity, epistemology, motivation, etc.

You make a pretty good case for better platforms for accomplishing individual parts of what LW can do but I think LW should be the central place that takes a solid stab at doing all of them because once you send someone to another site, they're less likely to be willing to spend the (now-consumed) time/energy on a 2nd or 3rd site for the other things you mention in the article.

I have always viewed this site as the central meeting point or repository for all things related to rationality and find that the infrastructure is already very promising with a combination of a Reddit-based discussion area and wiki. However, the wiki seems to get 0 attention from the discussion area and the only visible part is the discussion area unless you click on the 3rd item in the bulleted list on the home page or the grayed out wiki link in the corner if you have the discussion page bookmarked.

With the departure of many of the big names to other platforms, I find that I lose track of what they're writing because I don't have the time or energy to go around rounding all of the various sites up. At most, I might remember to visit Overcoming Bias once in a while. I certainly don't have EY's Facebook URL memorized.

The problem with filter bubbles is more about disagreement getting filtered out, not topics being filtered out. We're forced to filter very aggressively for topics anyway, just because there are too many topics and if we didn't filter close to 100% of the uninteresting topics we'd never have time for the interesting ones.

In other words, "X is potentially valuable and important" can be applied to EA, but it can also be applied to a random guy blogging about how much it sucks that his garage band broke up, as well as a near-infinite amount of other topics.

This is a proposal to replace (or supplement) the tagging system with a classification system for content that would be based on three elements: subject, type, and organization.

For me, one of the problems with current LessWrong is that it has too many interesting distractions in it. Ideally, I would want to follow just a few things, with highly groomed content. For example, I'd like to see a section devoted to summaries of recent behavioral psychology articles by someone who understands them better than I do. I suspect that other people would like to see other things that I'd prefer to filter out. Examples: artificial intelligence research, effective altruism, personal productivity. I'm not knocking these subjects; but when I allocate time, I'd like to be able to allocate 100% to what I want to see and 0% to what I don't.

That suggests that one area where Less Wrong could be improved is at the top level of organization. I'd suggest that content be organized in subjects, like Behavioral Psychology, Effective Altruism, Personal Productivity, and Artificial Intelligence. Now you might say that the tagging system does this. It kind of does, but it is insufficiently prescriptive. An article on effective altruism could have no tags, or many, or not the ones I think of.

Currently, the content is also classified by type, in Main and Discussion. Frankly, the difference between the two makes little sense to me. But I think there is another classification that would be helpful when combined with prescriptive subjects. I'd classify content type more like this:

• Research, used for summarizing a publication elsewhere, with the summary provided by someone who know something about it
• Link, used for identifying some information that might be of use to the community
• Commentary, used for the normal kind of stuff that shows up in discussion
• Sequence, assigned by moderators to the original stuff that made this site what it is, or at least was
• Reading, used for reading groups for specific books
• Meetups, used only to announce Meetups
• Organization, used to announce and promote organized action

Then a third classification of content is by organization. The community needs to remain connected to the organizations it spawned. So the third content classification would be by organization, which could be empty. Possible initial values would be MIRI, CFAR, FLI, etc. I'd hope that those organizations would ensure that at least their own research got into the relevant subject under a Research classification, and that their own blog posts got thrown over into the relevant subject under a Link classification.

This would make it easier for me to justify coming back to read Less Wrong daily, because I wouldn't expose my self to wonderful distrations in order to find the things I'd like to keep up on.

Near as I can tell LW 'faded' because it was initially created to sneak obsession with a particular flavor of AI apocalypse into the minds of as wide an audience as possible under the guise of a rationality movement so as to make money for the singularity institute, and now there are actual institutions which are more lucrative potential funding sources. That, and the ai safety subtext that underlaid everything has gone nowhere at the institute itself to all outward appearances.

Interesting place to talk about interesting things with interesting people though! Keep that around for sure!

I think /r/SlateStarCodex fulfills some of these. As a Focal Point/News Organisation, we see that it is evolving to a general rationlist-ish subreddit with about 9/25 articles on the front page not being written by Scott. In terms of the Stack Overflow-like function, with about 4/25 front page posts being questions related to various SSC/rationalist things.

I think moving some of the information from the about page to the main page would be a good idea. I suspect that new people coming here will want to read the "famous" posts first. Recommending Eliezer's book would also be a good idea.

LW is a convenient way to follow a lot of people, since you only need to go to one site, or follow one RSS feed. Since those people don't post here directly anymore, is it possible to make LW automatically cross-post? This is common in the open source world with the "planets", like Planet GNOME. I assume we'd want a way to still directly post to LW, and probably a way to filter by tag (for example, only posts tagged "lesswrong" go to LW).

That is true with an assumption. The assumption is that I will regularly return to LessWrong and read EA articles if I see them. My own assessment of myself is that I won't, so the assumption would be false. (I could be wrong.) I generally avoid EA articles because I'm not all that interested in them. No knock on the field, it's just not why I'm here. But the fact that I have to wade through articles on EA and all the other topics I don't care about deters me from returning to LessWrong, which I do less frequently than I wish I would, because I miss the optimal time to comment on articles.

.

There are a few thoughts here. I mostly came here to read and educate myself on the rationality movement and this sort of thing. I think that LW is a tremendous resource of information and that that information should be collected as a resource and transported to a place like Medium where it can be read and experienced. I think it is very intimidating and I think everything can be organized into three broad categories: Philosophy, Technical, Theoretical

In short, it's time for some media organization and distribution in such a way that people can experience it in a holistic way.

I think it's also time to do some marketing and reach out. What is our message? How can we articulate that message? How can we organize around CFAR and MIRI to do that? It's not just AI but rationality in general. Groups are helpful but there is plenty of online resources to allow people to interact in their own way and make small contributions through conversation. It's not just improving this platform but making the amazing work that is happening here accessible as best we can. When someone writes something technical an effort can and should be made to create that as something much more for people to take in and incorporation. The Sequences are intimidating, how can we break that down into something digestible?

As for community, groups are a good idea to foster and support but creating online accountability groups and such can also be helpful. A social network aspect of this may be helpful as well. How can we provide support for a rationality community? How can we foster greater contributions?

As for helping people I think it's digestible articles, video, and blog posts that have to be created in order to make it really accessible in a fun and exciting way that people can actually use. Could we create some teams for this?

Just putting out ideas here. I think there can be life in LW if we create something new and novel.

I know I quit commenting because there just wasn't much going on.

Maybe rss feeds?