You can now submit links to LW! As the rationality community has grown up, more and more content has moved off LW to other places, and so rather than trying to generate more content here we'll instead try to collect more content here. My hope is that Less Wrong becomes something like "the Rationalist RSS," where people can discover what's new and interesting without necessarily being plugged in to the various diaspora communities.
Some general norms, subject to change:
- It's okay to link someone else's work, unless they specifically ask you not to. It's also okay to link your own work; if you want to get LW karma for things you make off-site, drop a link here as soon as you publish it.
- It's okay to link old stuff, but let's try to keep it to less than 5 old posts a day. The first link that I made is to Yudkowsky's Guide to Writing Intelligent Characters.
- It's okay to link to something that you think rationalists will be interested in, even if it's not directly related to rationality. If it's political, think long and hard before deciding to submit that link.
- It's not okay to post duplicates.
As before, everything will go into discussion. Tag your links, please. As we see what sort of things people are linking, we'll figure out how we need to divide things up, be it separate subreddits or using tags to promote or demote the attention level of links and posts.
(Thanks to James Lamine for doing the coding, and to Trike (and myself) for supporting the work.)
Awesome! This strikes me as a very good thing, especially with your suggested social norms. I have 3 additional suggestions, though:
Add a social norm where commenters make short summaries, or quote a couple sentences of new info, without the fluff. The title of the link serves much the same purpose, and gives readers enough info to decide whether or not to click through. This is standard practice on the more intellectual subreddit, since they already have the background context and knowledge that 90% of the article is spent explaining.
Add a social norm where the best comments get linked to. I enjoy Yvain's SSC posts, and the comments section often contains some gems, but digging through all of them to find the gems is tedious. I intend to quote or rephrase gems when I find them, and link to them in comments here.
Maybe we should have subreddits on LW. I'm not sure about this one. Tags serve some of the same purposes, so perhaps what would be ideal would be to subscribe and unsubscribe from tags you're interested in. However, just copying the Reddit code for subreddits would be simpler. It would divide up the community though, so probably not desirable while we're still small.
The biggest problem with SSC is there is no voting. Lesswrong allows the best comments to rise to the top, in principle at least. Still I think it's a good idea, interesting discussion can be buried in nested comments, or be better than the main post.
I really don't like this idea. I think the best model for lesswrong is something like Hacker News. Hacker news has no sections for different topics and it's just vague "things of interest to hackers" which includes almost everything. I'd like to see lesswrong become "things of interest to rationalists", which could be everything from SSC posts to genetics research to AI research. I think it would work out well.
Whereas reddit excludes a lot of things that don't neatly fit into the limited topic of any specific large subreddit, and most people don't' subscribe to non default subreddits even if some of the content there might interest them.