LessWrong Is Not about Forum Software, LessWrong Is about Posts (Or: How to Immanentize the LW 2.0 Eschaton in 2.5 Easy Steps!)

The importance of Eliezer and Yvain has not escaped us. My suspicion is that in fact one of the important differences between LW and Facebook is forum software; one of the reasons why Eliezer prefers Facebook is because he can moderate more easily with less pushback.

After this is done, everyone else should wander back in, more or less.

This seems unclear to me. A major factor in drawing people here before was new Eliezer content; even if Eliezer posts here instead of to Facebook, most new Eliezer content is not at the same level of general interest as R:AZ or HPMOR, and the frequency of general interest content is lower. The community is actually doing different work these days than it was five years ago.

Internet communities have lifecycles; you need fresh new blood to replace old blood for lots of reasons. (One of the things that's interesting about LW's history is that many of the people who were promising new blood got hired to do work which, presumably, cut into their posting; overall this seems good because the community has real-world goals, but is also the sort of thing that didn't get worked around in time.)

I agree with you that it makes sense to shift focus, and that there are steps we can take to moderate more effectively (many of which route through forum software!). I also agree that it's better to lock LW down than have it continue in a bad state, but think we should give revitalization a serious try first.

It's not clear why Yudkowsky or Scott would want to come back and post here, I guess. The current incentives don't really encourage them to post. LW has a decreasing readership, and engagement on their own platforms (FB and SSC) is likely higher.

Also, I think there's additional baggage associated with the LW name, and this is likely a turnoff for, say, some of Scott's readers.

Plus, I don't Yudkowsky / Scott coming back is exactly the goal at this point. I think tristanm said it well when he pointed out that:

“[Also,] it seems that they very best content creators spend some time writing and making information freely available, detailing their goals and so on, and then eventually go off to pursue those goals more concretely, and the content creation on the site goes down.”

At this point, I think that there's additional real-work that's important outside of just writing new articles. While it's certainly often instrumental to work on things like communication and staying publicly transparent, I think that merely asking them to come back is pushing on the wrong side of the causal chain. It feels a little like cargo culting, I think.

Your advice is essentially "call back the old celebrities".

A big problem of LW 1.0, before the downvotes were banned, was the infamous sockpuppet master using his fake accounts to downvote whoever he didn't like. I suspect he drove off a few potential "new celebrities". Either by downvoting them directly; or because they realize they don't really want to publish on a website where one idiot can single-handedly censor their content.

I am not saying that those people were on the level of Eliezer, Yvain, or Gwern, just that, given chance, perhaps a small fraction of them could enter the pantheon.

If LW 2.0 will be able to prevent similar personal vendettas, and if there will be a way to make higher-quality content available for a longer time (as opposed to now having all Discussion content scrolling off the first page at the same speed), I hope we will gradually get some high-quality content back.

Maybe LW could evolve into something new and awesome with better (forum) software?