I've previously talked about how I think Less Wrong's culture seems to be on a gradual trajectory towards posting less stuff and posting it in less visible places. For example, six years ago a post like this qualified as a featured post in Main. Nowadays it's the sort of thing that would go in an Open Thread. Vaniver's recent discussion post is the kind of thing that would have been a featured Main post in 2010.

Less Wrong is one of the few forums on the internet that actually discourages posting content. This is a feature of the culture that manifests in several ways:

• One of the first posts on the site explained why it's important to downvote people. The post repeatedly references experiences with Usenet to provide support for this. But I think the internet has evolved a lot since Usenet. Subtle site mechanics have the potential to affect the culture of your community a lot. (I don't think it's a coincidence that Tumblr and 4chan have significantly different site mechanics and also significantly different cultures and even significantly different politics. Tumblr's "replies go to the writer's followers" mechanic leads to a concern with social desirability that 4chan's anonymity totally lacks.)

• On reddit, if your submission is downvoted, it's downvoted in to obscurity. On Less Wrong, downvoted posts remain on the Discussion page, creating a sort of public humiliation for people who are downvoted.

• The Main/Discussion/Open Thread distinction invites snippy comments about whether your thing would have been more appropriate for some other tier. On most social sites, readers decide how much visibility a post should get (by upvoting, sharing, etc.) Less Wrong is one of the few that leaves it down to the writer. This has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is that important but boring scholarly work can get visibility more easily.

• Upvotes substitute for praise: instead of writing "great post" type comments, readers will upvote you, which is less of a motivator.

My experience of sitting down to write a Less Wrong post is as follows:

1. I have some interesting idea for a Less Wrong post. I sit down and excitedly start writing it out.

2. A few paragraphs in, I think of some criticism of my post that users are likely to make. I try to persevere for a while anyway.

3. Within an hour, I have thought of so many potential criticisms or reasons that my post might come across as lame that I am totally demoralized. I save my post as a draft, close the tab, and never return to it.

Contrast the LW model with the "conversational blogging" model where you sit down, scribble some thoughts out, hit post, and see what your readers think. Without worrying excessively about what readers think, you're free to write in open mode and have creative ideas you wouldn't have when you're feeling self-critical.

Anyway, now that I've described the problem, here are some offbeat solution ideas:

• LW users move away from posting on LW and post on Medium.com instead. There aren't upvotes or downvotes, so there's little fear of being judged. Bad posts are "punished" by being ignored, not downvoted. And Medium.com gives you a built-in audience so you don't need to build up a following the way you would with an independent blog. (I haven't actually used Medium.com that much; maybe it has problems.)

• The EA community pays broke postdocs to create peer-reviewed, easily understandable blog posts on topics of interest to the EA community at large (e.g. an overview of the literature on how to improve the quality of group discussions, motivation hacking, rationality stuff, whatever). This goes on its own site. After establishing a trusted brand, we could branch out in to critiquing science journalism in order to raise the sanity waterline or other cool stuff like that.

• Someone makes it their business to read everything gets written on every blog in the EA-sphere and create a "Journal of Effective Altruism" that's a continually updated list of links to the very best writing in the EA-sphere. This gives boring scholarly stuff a chance to get high visibility. This "Editor-in-Chief" figure could also provide commentary, link to related posts that they remember, etc. I'll bet it wouldn't be more than a part-time job. Ideally it would be a high status, widely trusted person in the EA community who has a good memory for related ideas.

Some of these are solutions that make more sense if the EA movement grows significantly beyond its current scope, but it can't hurt to start kicking them around.

The top tier quality for actually read posting is dominated by one individual (a great one, but still)

Are we talking about LW proper here? Arguably this has been true over a good chunk of the site's history: at one time it was Eliezer, then Yvain, then Lukeprog, etc.

I think this post misses a lot of the scope and timing of the Less Wrong diaspora. A lot of us are on Tumblr now; I've made a few blog posts at the much more open group blog Carcinisation, there's a presence on Twitter, and a lot of us just have made social friendships with enough other rationalists that the urge to post for strangers has a pressure release valve in the form of discussing whatever ideas with the contents of one's living room or one's Facebook friends.

The suggestions you list amount to "ask Scott to give up his private resource for a public good, even though if what he wanted to do was post on a group blog he still has a LW handle", "somehow by magic increase readership of the EA forum", and "restructure LW to entice the old guard back, even though past attempts have disintegrated into bikeshedding and a low level of technical assistance from the people behind the website's actual specs". These aren't really "solutions".

I think LessWrong has a lot of annoying cultural problems and weird fixations, but despite those problems I think there really is something to be gained from having a central place for discussion.

The current "shadow of LessWrong + SSC comments + personal blogs + EA forum + Facebook + IRC (+ Tumblr?)" equilibrium seems to have in practice led to much less mutual knowledge of cool articles/content being written, and perhaps to less cool articles/content as well.

I'd really like to see a revitalization of LessWrong (ideally with a less nitpicky culture and a lack of weird fixations) or the establishment of another central hub site, but even failing that I think people going back to LW would probably be good on net.

Note how all the exodus is to places where people own their particular space and have substantial control over what's happening there. Personal blogs, tumblrs, etc. Not, say, subreddits or a new shinier group blog.

Posting on LW involves a sink-or-swim feeling: will it be liked/disliked? upvoted/downvoted? many comments/tepid comments/no comments? In addition, you feel that your post stakes a claim on everybody's attention, so you inevitably imagine it'll be compared to other people's posts. After all, when you read the Discussion page, you frequently go "meh, could've done without that one", so you imagine other people thinking the same about your post, and that pre-discourages you. In addition, a few years' worth of status games and signalling in the comments have bred to some degree a culture of ruthlessness and sea-lawyering.

So, these three: fretting about reactions; fretting about being compared with other posts; fretting about mean or exhausting comments. One way to deal with it is to move to an ostensibly less demanding environment. So you post to Discussion, but then everyone starts doing that, Main languishes and the problem reoccurs on Discussion. So you post to open threads, but then Discussion languishes, open threads balloon and become unpleasant to scan, and the problem reoccurs, to a lesser degree, on them too. But if you go off to a tumblr or a personal blog or your Facebook: 2nd problem disappears; 3rd problem manageable through blocking or social pressure from owner (you); 1st problem remains but is much less acute because no downvotes.

It's useless to say "just don't fret, post on LW anyway". The useful questions are "why didn't this happen in the first 4-5 years of the site?" and "assuming we want this reverted, how?" For the first question, because as the site was growing, the enthusiasm for this exciting community and the desire to count your voice among its voices overrode those feelings of discomfort. But after a few years things changed. Many regulars established lateral links. The site feels settled in, with an established pecking order of sorts (like the top karma lists; these were always a bad idea, but they just didn't matter much at first). There's no longer a feeling of "what I'll post will help make LW into what it'll be". And there's a huge established backlog that feels formidable to build on, especially since nobody's read it all. So the motivation lessened while the dis-motivation stayed as it was.

How to fix this? I think platformizing LW might work well. Everybody prefers their own space, so give everybody their own space on the common platform. Every user gets a personal blog (e.g. vaniver.lesswrong.com) on the same platform (reddit code under the hood). The global list of users is the same. Everybody gets to pick their reading list (tumblr-style) and have their custom view of new posts. There's also RSS for reading from outside of course. Blog owners are able to ban users from their particular blog, or disallow downvotes.

Then bring back Main as a special blog to which anyone can nominate a post from a personal blog, and up/downvotes determine pecking order, with temporal damping (HN style). Would also be cool to have a Links view to which everyone can nominate links from other rationality blogs and LWers can discuss.

(I realize that this would require nontrivial programming work, and have a good understanding of how much of it would be required. That isn't an insurmountable challenge).

Hey all,

As the admin of the effective altruism forum, it seems potentially useful to chip in here, or at least to let everyone know that I'm aware of and interested in this kind of conversation, since it seems like mostly everything that needs to has already been said.

The statement of the problem - online rationalist discourse is more fractured than is optimal - seems plausible to me.

I think that SSC and Scott's blogging persona is becoming quite a bit bigger than LessWrong curently is - it's got to the stage where he's writing articles that are getting thousands of shares, republished in the New Statesman, etc. I think SSC's solo blogging is striking a winning formula and shouldn't be changed.

For the EA Forum, the risk has always been that it would merely fracture existing discussion rather than generating anew any of its own. People usually think enough about how their project could become a new competing standard because they have a big glorious vision of how it would be. The people who are enthusiastic enough to start a project tend to be way out on the bell curve in terms of estimating how successful it is likely to be, so it can be unthinkable that it would end up as 'just another project' like the others (e.g. Standards: https://xkcd.com/927/). I thought about this a lot when starting the forum, and despite the fact that significant effort has been put into promoting it to a clear existing target community, this is still a plausible objection to the forum.

That's why I'm sceptical of the idea of creating new centres of gravity on subreddits. If the EA Forum is only uniting somewhat more than it's fracturing, then it's unlikely that a subreddit would do so. Why would a subreddit fare so much better at centralising discussion than LessWrong, the userbase that it's directly trying to cannibalise, and which has been a supremely popular blog over multiple years? It's so unlikely that it's simply not going to happen.

As for the forum, it's been growing slowly yet persistently, the output of content is going well, and the discourse is more constructive and action-oriented than one might have hoped for. Overall, I think it's having a centralising effect on EA discussion moreso than a fracturing one, and a constructive effect on EA activity moreso than just addicting people to nonproductive discussion. Since the growth is good so far, the hope is that as it continues, it will attract more members from outside of existing communities. If the growth trajectory starts to reverse itself, then we'd have to revisit some of these questions, but essentially, so far, so good. Incremental updates are to be made, but not any complete overhaul.

LessWrong also has significant value as it is.

So what does that leave? My initial thoughts would be:

• A handful of LessWrongers read the EA Forum and vice versa, but most don't, and most are interested in, and not actively repulsed by the other group's writing, to the extent that they make an effort to relate to it. So maybe we should feel less inhibited about posting articles from either source to the other, e.g. in comments where relevant, so that people can feel happy that they're seeing more of the whole picture.
• Maybe we should make a smart automatic feed for rationality and EA stuff, using this algorithm but training it on the LW diaspora. This algorithm looks very effective, and wouldn't create new problems by decentralising comments.
• An embarassing number of people run personal blogs to some extent because of vanity, when the value of doing so (number of people who engage with them, community-building effect) is less. As discussed, it's kind-of like a prisoners dilemma, for which the default solution should be to try to establish a social norm to ensure cooperation. Some articles could be written in this vein and promoted to encourage centralisation of discussion.

The overall mass of people thinking about Rationality, x-risk and effective altruism seems to be growing, though, which is good news, so this kind of discussion is not a crisis talk. Still, it does seem like an important discussion to have. Happy as always for comments and criticism.

So, I have lots of thoughts and feelings about this topic. But I should note that I am someone who has stayed on LessWrong, and who reads a sizable portion of everything that's posted here, and thus there's some difference between me and people who left.

In order to just get this comment out there, I'm going to intermingle observations with prescriptions, and not try to arrange this comment intelligently.

Individual branding. There are lots of benefits to having your own site. Yvain can write about whatever topics he wants without any concern about whether or not other people will think the subject matter is appropriate--it's his site, and so it's what he's interested in. As well, people will remember that they saw it on SSC, rather than on LW, and so they'll be much more likely to remember it as a post of his.

This could be recreated on LW either by giving post authors more control over the page appearance for things they post (a different page header?), having author / commenter images, or by shifting the "recent on rationality blogs" from a sidebar to a section of similar standing to Main and Discussion. I must admit I haven't used reddit much, but I'm of the impression that the standard use case is a link to content elsewhere, which can be up/downvoted, and comments on the Reddit link. I doubt it'd be very difficult to tie blogs and LW accounts, so that whenever Nate posts to Minding our way, the so8res LW account posts a link to it in the Rationality Links section, and then any upvotes on the link would translate to karma for the so8res LW account.

Gresham's Law. It applies to social groups as easily as money. Jerks make a conversation less fun for people who are not jerks, so they participate less, so the conversation is even more dominated by jerks, and so on. (Compare to counterfeit money making all money less trusted and valuable, so known good money is hoarded, so the average value of traded money is assumed to be even lower.) There needs to be some counter-force that encourages pleasant interactions and discourages unpleasant interactions, or it seems like this will happen anywhere.

There are a couple of ways to make LW warmer and fuzzier. I don't know how well I expect that to work, and I think that's hard to square with a "truth uber alles" approach.

One is to have active moderators paying attention to people who seem like jerks, hopefully starting with modeling good approaches / pointing to NVC principles / discussing, and then moving to red text and karma penalties and banhammers. I think we can get some novel, interesting work out of this suggestion if it's heavy on the "we want to teach NVC to troublesome posters" and light on the "let's just ban the trolls and the problem is solved," but I'm not currently opposed to banning people who aren't "trolls" but are just aggressively unfun for others.

Another approach is to move from a "main" and "discussion" split, where the difference is "seriousness," to something like a "sensitivity" and "specificity" split, where the former is for speculative / broad / hastily stated ideas and run under "yes, and" norms, where the likelihood is high that something is there, and the latter is for fully baked / precise ideas and run under "no, but" norms. When there's something you want to hold up to high scrutiny, you put it in "specificity," and things upvoted to the top in that feed will be high quality; when there's something that you want to suggest but don't necessarily want to defend, you put it in "sensitivity."

Coordination problems. Part of the problem with a gradual, systematic shift is that no individual can stop it. If there are, say, eight high-profile interesting posters who gradually posted and checked LW less and less in a mutually reinforcing fashion, then just one of them coming back won't do much. They'll see that the other seven are still missing, and more importantly, the other seven won't notice they're back, because they don't check LW much! But this is a coordination problem, and coordination problems can be solved. If those eight got together and decided "yes, we will recolonize LW," then the activation barrier could be crossed and LW could flip from the low-energy local minimum to the high-energy local minimum. But in order for this to make sense, it needs to be a good idea to recolonize LW!

Other things. The rationalist community may be at a point where a community blog is not where the community really resides, or where it should reside. LW originally existed to create a connected community of people able to think clearly about the future, in order to provide sufficient attention and funding to MIRI and other institutions (both for-profit and non-profit) that do work in offices. And now MIRI has the attention and funding it needs, and there is a community of people able to think clearly about the future. One possibility is to just discard LW, as a booster rocket that served its purpose, and another possibility is to try to recreate it to better serve a interstitial, communal role.

But moving from "the place where any idea will be considered for epistemic rationality reasons" to "the common ground of many causes that benefit from clear thinking" seems even worse for "truth uber alles" than trying to be warm and fuzzy, because you need the weird stuff to be enough out of the way and minimized that people think it's PR-positive to advertise there, rather than a liability.

People seem to be complaining about community fracturing, and good writers going off onto their own blogs. Why not just accept that and encourage people to post links to the good content from these places?

Hacker News is successful mainly because they encourage people to post their own blog posts there, to get a wider audience and discussion. As opposed to reddit where self promotion is heavily discouraged.

Lesswrong is based on reddit's code. You could add a lesswrong.com/r/links, and just tell people it's ok to publish links to whatever they want there. This could be quite successful, given lesswrong already has a decent community to seed it with. As opposed to going off and starting another subreddit, where it's very hard to attract an initial user base (and you run into the self promotion problem I mentioned.)

mm.., I think and agregator from less wrong, SSC , EA forum and OB posts, would be great,only if all of the formers have an easy (visible) link to it. It could allow more traffic to flow between those gravity centers. it may be better than crossposting.

A possible dark explanation:

-The main reason people cared about lesswrong was that Scott and Elizier posted on lesswrong. Neither posts on lesswrong anymore. Unless some equally impressive thinkers can be recruited to post on LW the site will not recover.

FYI: I've just made this: www.reddit.com/r/RationalistDiaspora.

See: discussion in this thread.

I think "LW type" rationalists should learn to be colleagues rather than friends. In other words, I think the win condition is if you agree on the ideals, but possibly bicker on a personal level (successful academic communities are often like this).

I agree with the comments (like John Maxwell's) that suggest that Less Wrong effectively discourages comments and posts. My karma score for the past 30 days is currently +29, 100% positive. This isn't because I don't have anything controversial to say. It is because I mostly stopped posting the controversial things here. I am much more likely to post them on Scott's blog instead, since there is no voting on that blog. I think this is also the reason for the massive numbers of comments on Scott's posts -- there is no negative incentive to prevent that there.

I'm not sure of the best way to fix this. Getting rid of karma or only allowing upvotes is probably a bad idea. But I think the community needs to fix its norms relating to downvoting in some way. For example, officially downvoting purely for disagreement has been discouraged, but in practice I see a very large amount of such downvoting. Comments referring to religion in particular are often downvoted simply for mentioning the topic without saying something negative, even if nothing positive is said about it.

I also agree with those who have said that the division between Main and Discussion is not working. I would personally prefer simply to remove that distinction, even if nothing else is put in to replace it.

If you have drafts you think are not good enough for LW, then polish them, include the criticisms of which you can think, make a falsifiable prediction and GO POST THEM ON YOUR OWN BLOG. Link to LW articles on specific biases that could have guided your thoughts if you can identify them. You do not owe anyone anything, and if you write well enough, you will have readers. Make your own rules, change them when you need to, hell, STOP BLOGGING if you don't feel the need.

It does not mean that you have to leave LW. Comment, post, IGNORE KARMA HITS, comment on YOUR OWN BLOG about what you think was badly discussed here, just - just go ahead already.

It's annoying to read articles about possible solutions that don't get implemented instead of, well, content.

Honestly, my maginal returns of spending time on LW dropped drastically since I finished reading the sequences. Attending local meetups was kinda fun to meet some like-minded people, but they inevitably were far behind in the sequences and for the most part always struck me as trying to identify as a rationalist rather than trying to become more rationalist. This strikes me as the crux of the issue: LW has become (slash might have always been) an attractor of nerd social status, which is fine if that's its stated goal, though this doesn't seem to be the issue.

Additionally, in the 5 years I've been attending meetups (at least six different ones in three different countries), I've noticed a drastic increase in the levels of weirdness happening, to the extent that I find myself discouraged from attending and having to deal with these people. This is the point I think Witness was trying to express below, perhaps not in so many words, but I find myself explicitly not liking a lot of the people/memes now associated with LW. This is not good.

I do, however, think a place for cultivating rationality is important to have, and to that end I would suggest using Github as the platform. Having some sort of rationality repository (preferably without the LW label), where people can open pull requests for things they're thinking about/working on solving. As an added bonus, you get the ability to track how ideas change over time, can easily fork differing opinions, and get all of the cool things a commit history would do for you. I think having some sort of rationality platform is important, but personally I would do away with the LW culture, keep our identities small, and individually go on our way.

LessWrong has had its time and its place, but its lingering death is probably something we should pay a lot of attention to. As a community experiment, I think the results speak for themselves.

My $0.02.

I'm surprised by this idea of treating SSC as a rationalist hub. I love Scott, Scott's blog, and Scott's writing. Still, it doesn't seem like it is a "rationality blog" to me. Not directly at least. Scott is applying a good deal of epistemic rationality to his topics of interest, but the blog isn't about epistemic rationality, and even less so about practical rationality. (I would say that Brienne's and Nate's 'self-help' posts are much closer to that.) By paying attention, one might extract the rationality principles Scott is using, but they're not outlined.

There's a separate claim that while Scott's blog isn't about rationality in the same was LW is, it has attracted the same audience, and therefore can be a rationality attractor/hub. This has some legitimacy, but I still don't like it. LW has attracted a lot of people who like to debate interesting topics and ideas on the internet, with a small fraction who are interested in going out and doing things (or just staying in, but actually changing themselves). Scott's blog, being about ideas, seems that it also attract lots of people who simply like mental stimulation, but without a filter for those most interested in doing. I'd really like our rationality community hubs to select for those who want take rationality seriously and implement it in their minds and actions.

On this selecting for -or at least being about- the EA Forum is actually quite good.

Lastly, maybe I feel strong resistence to trying to open Scott's blog up because it seems like it really is his personal blog about things he wants to write about - and just because he's really successful and part of the community doesn't mean we get tell him now 'open it up'/'give it over'/co-opt it for the rest of the community.