Open thread, January 29 - ∞

I was very fond of this site. There were excellent essays, and the discussion structure suited me very well. I'm more of a short form writer. Also, the way it was easy to find old material and conveniently add to old threads is a feature that ssc doesn't have.

The big block of unchanging recommendations at the top of LW2 gets on my nerves.

This being said, the resident troll squeezed a lot of the fun out of LW1, and getting to be moderator-- and then discovering I didn't have adequate moderation tools-- gave me something of an ugh field about the place. And now it's over. It was good when it was good.

There is an alternative interface to the new site at Greater Wrong. It has a few problems (namely, it's hard to access archived content; all you get is a day to day listing of posts) but compared to Lesser Wrong it's at least usable. LW2 should support it officially in addition to the Lesser Wrong website, and perhaps even add features like logging in and posting content through it.

I have become very used to the interface here and the various ways it can be manipulated, so I prefer it greatly even if this is just due to inertia. Glad to see more than 6 names on the Last 30 Days list. But it's clear that this is a dead zone and I've become resigned to the idea that this will soon be gone.

I do enjoy what's going on at LW2 even though it's still open beta, a bit broken in a few areas and cluttered by too many specific requests and follow-up about personal preferences for site look and feel. And moderator chat that really feels like it can be kept behind closed doors -- I hope this is just a feature of beta that will be ironed out. And I fully applaud the approach to trolls (so far anyway).

Overall it's fun to see people jockeying for the position of Next Great Poster Who Will Lead Us From Darkness, especially those who aren't trying to copy Previous Heroes. Some falling terribly short but it's interesting to see the variety of voices. It does not seem to be heading to an obvious local minimum, something I worried about in the early days of LW2.0. Maybe a few local minima but that's fine with me.

It seems like a personal message sent to me on the new website got lost.

At the beginning, the speed was too low but now it's a lot better.

Getting notifcation to replies to your post doesn't yet work and I think that's the last thing that has to be done to make the new website a clear improvement above the existing version.

I tend to agree. I don't know is it just a habit or something else, like a conservative profile of myself and many others, but that doesn't really matter.

The new site isn't that much better. Should be substantially better than this one for a smooth transition.

When exactly did that happen? I haven't been here when the site was "highly active" (which I assume when EY was making the sequences posts) but do we have any statistics about it? I could build a small scraper and make a graph for dates and stuff, but somebody with access to the database could do it much better.

I don't remember ever seeing statistics on that.

FWIW lesswrong has rarely felt like a comfortable place for me. Not sure why. Maybe I missed the fandom stage.

I did have a laugh now and again back in the day. Even then I think I came here for the "taking ideas seriously" thing that rationalists can do, than for the community.