Is there something in particular that would get you to actively use the new LessWrong? I would be interested in hearing a specific vision from some of you that makes you excited about using LessWrong.
And I don't want to only limit this to technical features. If there is some kind of state of the LessWrong community, or some kind of norm that if widely accepted would get you excited about LessWrong, then I would love to hear about that.
Examples could be:
"I would actively engage with LessWrong if I had the ability to automatically crosspost my content on LessWrong, mirror the LW comments on my own blog and have moderator right on my own posts"
"I would be excited about engaging with the community more if it would get better at giving feedback to new writers. I am currently trying to get better at writing, but the LessWrong comments haven't been historically very useful for me, and I have mostly felt discouraged after posting my writing on the page."
"I would be excited if there simply would be more high-quality content on LessWrong. If I imagine two to three people like Scott Alexander posting as frequently as he does, then I would definitely participate more."
Similar here. Two things that discourage me from posting on LW:
- knowing that if the debate gets interesting and will have even smallest political connotations, Eugine will likely harass the participants (well, before the downvotes were disabled, but disabling them brought new problems); furthermore, the potential participants are already aware of this, which makes them less likely to participate;
- there is a ton of stuff each week in Discussion, some of that low quality or just a link; regardless how much effort I put into my article, in two or three days it will be scrolled down into oblivion anyway; this was traditionally solved by Main vs Discussion, but the articles in Main paradoxically had less visibility, and the threshold for both of them was constantly lowering anyway, Main becoming the old Discussion, and Discussion becoming the old Open Thread comments.
So I'd like to see the discussion kept nice; and I'd like to see the good articles have a longer timespan.
(Not insisting on any specific technical solution, but for example the problem with "actually less visible Main" could be solved by simply posting links to 5 latest Main posts at the top of the Discussion page. There, everyone would see them, even if they only read Discussion.)
(Similarly, the "Discussion becoming new Open Thread" could be solved by having three levels, corresponding to previous Main, Discussion, Open Thread, but perhaps using different names, e.g. "Promoted", "Articles", "Forum". To avoid having to estimate the category of your own article, all new articles would go to "Forum", and then moderators would move them into higher levels using their own judgement, with karma as a guideline.)
So a few things I've been thinking about to solve these problems:
I hope we can deal with Eugene after we have a better Karma system and better moderation tools. Though we will see how hard this problem turns out to be. But my guess is that even if it turns out to be harder, it is a problem that can be solved with sufficient, but not prohibitive, engineering effort.
This current page already has a more aggressive scoring system that keeps highly upvoted posts at the top for longer, and which applies an exponential decay function over time, which results in you getting a mixture of recent posts and top posts as you scroll down the frontpage, instead of mostly a historical list of posts. I hope this increases visibility. I was also thinking of maybe adding a "promoted" section to the top of the posts list that always shows the top 5 promoted articles (by time-decayed score), so that you have something similar to main, without it being a whole click away.
I am currently hesitant to create more top-level distinctions like main/discussion/forum, both because I think it decentralizes discussion, adds mental overhead and encourages styles in different parts of the page, which makes it harder to promote the best content from anywhere on the page (i.e. if the forum is mostly written in a style appropriate to forum, then it's harder to promote that content to the frontpage with all the long-form content)