Personally, I liked LW for being an integrated place with all that : the Sequences, interesting posts and discussions between rationalists/transhumanists (be it original thoughts/viewpoints/analysis, news related to those topics, links to related fanfiction, book suggestion, ...), and the meetup organization (I went to several meetup in Paris).

If that were to be replaced by many different things (one for news, one or more for discussion, one for meetups, ...) I probably wouldn't bother.

Also, I'm not on Facebook and would not consider going there. I think replacing the open ecosystem of Internet by a proprietary platform is a very dangerous trend for future of innovation, and I oppose the global surveillance that Facebook is part of. I know we are entering politics which is considered "dirty" by many here, but politics is part of the Many Causes, and I don't think we should alienate people for political reasons. The current LW is politically neutral, and allows "socialists" to discuss without much friction with "libertarians", which is part of its merits, and we should keep that.

I had been a small-time LW regular for about 3 years and witnessed its decline until I stopped commenting a couple of months back. It was frustrating to see Eliezer, Yvain, Luke and others leave for other social media platforms, and even more to watch them fragment their writings further between personal blogs, FB, Reddit and tumblr. Not because it's a wrong thing to do, just because it's harder to follow and the commenting system is usually even worse than here. Well, except for Reddit. Without a strong leader charismatic emerging and willing to add quality content and drive the changes, I don't expect any site redesign to revive this rather zombified forum. Or maybe if the forum is redesigned one would emerge, who knows. Chicken and egg.

Or maybe it should be a rationality-related aggregator/hub, where all relevant links get posted and discussed. So that one could see at a glance that Scott A posted something on his blog, Eliezer on tumbler, Brienne on Facebook, gwern on his site and someone else on twitter or reddit. All on one page. There are various sites like that around. With the ability to comment locally, or go to the source and discuss it there. Maybe even add linkbacks to this site.

Just my 2c.

I have an old list of halfbaked post ideas. At some point I lost sight of what things were "rationality things" and what things were just "things, that I happened to want to talk about with rationalists, because those are the cool people"; and in the presence of this confusion I defaulted to categorizing everything as the latter - because it was easy; I live here now; I can go weeks without interacting with anybody who isn't at least sort of rationalist-adjacent. If I want to talk to rationalists about a thing I can just bring it up the next time I'm at a party, or when my roommates come downstairs; I don't have to write an essay and subject it to increasingly noisy judgment about whether it is in the correct section/website/universe.

I think "things that you happen to want to talk about with rationalists" is a legit category to want an outlet for and having an explicit place for that (which has virtues like "is not literally Tumblr") would be nice. Useful norms might include: one-paragraph OPs normalized, tongue-in-cheek "Rational [Household Object / Unrelated Hobby / Basic Life Skill]" titles allowed/encouraged, granting OP some veto power about what sorts of comments and commenters are allowed under their post, aggressively encouraged and standard-formatted tagging system.

One more use I have for LessWrong: learning about subjects from people whom I trust to be smart and rational. A while back I wanted to learn up on perceptual control theory, I found RichardKenneways' and Vaniver's posts a hundred times better than Wikipedia.

This is an invaluable resource for me that I would hate to lose. Even if the quality of new stuff being written on LW is declining, the quality of stuff that I'm reading on LW is still consistently excellent. I really hope we would find a way to keep this aspect going.

I need to think about this more, but my present impression is in favor of keeping LW and making it good. It seems to me that we gain quite a bit from having a Schelling place to post, such that evidence and arguments posted to that Schelling location become common knowledge.

I agree that LW has been doing fairly badly lately, but I am fairly seriously attempting to craft a post sequence designed to combat that; if not LW, I'd favor some other method that has a single secure Schelling spot.

My impression is that we know a fair bit of applied rationality that was not successfully conveyed by Eliezer's original Sequences (although a fair chunk of it seems to me to be implicit in those Sequences), and that we are now in a position to make a more serious attempt to convey in writing.

A tangential note on third-party technical contributions to LW (if that's a thing you care about): the uncertainty about whether changes will be accepted, uncertainty about and lack of visibility into how that decision is made or even who makes it, and lack of a known process for making pull requests or getting feedback on ideas are incredibly anti-motivating.

Some miscellaneous thoughts:

• Online community design is an important subfield of group rationality, which is arguably more important than individual rationality. It's hard to deny that many of the biggest group rationality failures are happening online nowadays.

• A great thing about online communities is they let you aggregate the work of a variety of sporadic contributors. People have heard of Yvain because he writes good stuff on a consistent schedule. Imagine alternate universe Yvain whose blog has two posts, spaced 6 months apart: Meditations on Moloch and The Control Group Is Out Of Control. Since alternate universe Yvain does not write on a consistent schedule, few people have heard of his blog and his insights aren't read by many people.

I think the "Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction" post is wrong, which is unfortunate because I suspect it played a big role in killing LW.

Let's rewind to the dawn of the internet era. We're having coffee with Tim Berners-Lee and talking about his new invention, the World Wide Web. Speculatively we can see the Web disrupting many industries, but predicting that the Web will disrupt academia seems downright unimaginative. Heck, Tim is using the Web to share physics research already. After all, the Web means

• An end to credentialism. Now any amateur physicist can contribute in their spare time.

• Smoother, better peer review processes.

• Cheap, universal distribution.

Academia could use a shakeup anyway: much academic writing stinks, and philosophy in particular has gone astray.

Now fast forward to the present. The academic utopia we envisioned has happened to some degree--see Wikipedia and the AskHistorians subreddit, for instance. But it hasn't happened to the degree we hoped. Why not? I can think of a few reasons:

• Financial incentives and prestige inertia that benefit established systems. See e.g. Bryan Caplan on this.

• Lack of a profit motive. The Web revolutionized areas it was possible to get rich revolutionizing. Revolutionizing academia has much less profit potential. (Revolutionizing credentialing might make someone rich, but academia serves valuable roles for society that aren't credentialing and are hard to make money from. For example, it certifies smart people as high status topic experts. If you've attended high school you know that smart people are not high status by default. We're lucky to live in a world where journalists are more likely to interview college professors for trend pieces than celebrities. If colleges went away and cons + Mensa became the primary places smart people gathered, that might change.)

• The acceleration of addictiveness. The Web is selecting for addictive stimuli. Blogs are a more addictive version of personal websites. Twitter and Facebook are more addictive versions of blogs. If the web-based version of academia is optimizing for something other than addictiveness, it's likely to get crowded out. (I suspect this is playing a role in Wikipedia's decline.)

All of these factors seem surmountable, and indeed LW made decent progress despite them. They haven't been surmounted due to a combination of apathy and this problem not being on peoples' radar.

That's the research side of academia. Now let's look at the teaching side.

Imagine you're a professor teaching a critical thinking class. Out of all the classes in the general education curriculum, the case for your class actually helping the lives of your students is among the strongest. You're a really good teacher, and your students are so engaged with your assigned readings that they are putting off homework for other classes to do them. Sounds great right?

That's basically the problem Patri's post complained about. It's a "first world" problem by professorial standards. If your students are really having issues with their other classes because they are so excited about the readings for your class, maybe do the readings during class so they aren't a distraction while doing other homework, prevent students from reading ahead, or something like that.

The higher education bubble is likely going to "pop" eventually. (Maybe when employers realize that taking Coursera classes is a positive signal of conscientiousness, curiosity, and having the wisdom to avoid debt... Google's HR guy is already on record saying people who make their way without college are "exceptional human beings".) The market will provide a new solution for credentialing because there's money in that. There's less money in the other stuff academia does, and it'd be great if we could start laying the foundation for that now. Stretch goal: bake EA principles in from the start.

For me the annoying thing about LW is that it takes extremely long, usually forever, to change anything. You have a new idea? (Such as replacing "Main" and "Discussion" with something else.) You post it in Open Thread, and people agree? You post an article with a more detailed explanation, and many people upvote it? Guess what -- most likely still not going to happen. :(

It's not that we didn't have good ideas in the past. We had many, most of them we never implemented. Maybe some of them would have improved things. We'll never know. Why? Among other reasons, because Reddit codebase is a piece of crap. It would be probably better in long term to rewrite everything from scratch.

At this moment one idea resonates with me: "do one thing and do it well". Identify the purposes that you want to be served. For each of them, build a separate, optimal solution. Link aggregator. Discussion forum. Community blog. Meetup organizer. Rationalist welcome page. Rationalist wiki. Give them all the same header, so people can easily link from here to there, and maybe even a single sign-on system.

For example, an optimal link aggregator would support tags, and filtering by tags; the main page would contain X recent entries with more than Y upvotes; the "show more" link would show all recent entries. An optimal discussion forum would support creating new topics, which is not the same as articles (each linked article could automatically spawn its own minidiscussion, but there should be some more general topics); I am not sure about details. Community blog would allow people to post articles (which would be automatically linked by the link aggregator) if a community of moderators agrees the articles are good enough (if they are not, no one else will know about them, so there is no public shame); maybe each article could have an optional "public draft" phase where people can suggest improvements. Etc.

I would caution away from a bias towards "the current situation seems vaguely bad, therefore Something Must Be Done." There are lots of people still getting use out of LessWrong. I think it would be unfortunate that a bias towards Doing Something over Leaving It Be might cause a valuable resource to be ended without good cause. If the site can be reinvented, great, but if it can't -- don't hit the Big Red Button without honestly weighing the significant costs to the people who are still actively using the site.

(I briefly searched, to see if there's an article on LW about the idea of a bias towards Doing Something. It would of course be essentially the opposite of status quo bias; and yet I think it's a real phenomenon. I certainly feel like I observe it happening in discussions like this. Perhaps the real issue is in the resolution of conflicts between a small minority who are outspoken about Doing Something, and a large silent majority who don't express strong feelings because they're fine with the status quo. This is an attempt to express a thought that I've had percolating, not a criticism of this post.)

It would motivate me to write more for LW if I could see how many views each of my articles/comments received.

I approach Less Wrong et al mostly from the Grey Tribe Social Club and community clearinghouse perspective. In that sense, I see four things we get from Less Wrong that we do not get from the disapora:

1. A central social arena for what SSC refers to as the Grey Tribe. Nerds, aspiring rationalists, political cynics, probably some other things I haven't thought of, unified mostly by dispassionate discussion and valuing truth for its own sake. The disapora fails at this because the communities on individual blogs are only thinly connected by the occasional inter-blog link. There is much more There there, than is apparent to someone who discovers the community through a single blog.
2. Shared infrastructure that lowers trivial inconveniences to entry. Someone who wants to make a long point can do it here without needing to run their own blog.
3. Shared audience. This is more important than I think it's given credit for. You can start a new blog, but unless you plan on also going out of your way to market it then your chances of starting a discussion boil down to "hope it catches the attention of Yvain or someone else similarly prominent in the community." Here, you can write something on topics of mutual interest and have a reasonable shot at getting it read, without having to first establish yourself individually. Note that as I understand it (someone correct me if I'm wrong) most of the diaspora personages we're actually aware of got their audience here first.
4. Community safety net. If Yvain gets hit by a car tomorrow, the SSC community disintegrates shortly thereafter as commenters move to their next-most-favored authors, which won't necessarily match.

I'm from an IT background, so I will also discuss technology. There's two technical problems you mention. The first is aggregation of the work of diaspora authors; right now, all we have is links on the sidebar and author links to each other. This actually seems like the simplest problem to solve. I'm pretty sure everybody's blog software provides an RSS feed. Just configure them to provide full text, and display that on Less Wrong as a feed alongside Main and Discussion. Call it Diaspora or something. This does, admittedly, require cooperation from the owners; my intuition is that it would be easier to get in this community than most others.

But that doesn't solve the greater difficulty, aggregation of comments. Even if we publish an aggregated feed of all known LW authors, and also allow posts on LW itself for people who don't have their own blog, we still end up with N+1 disconnected communities.

Normally I'd say "everybody come back to LW and post here", but 1. that's not going to happen; people like owning their own gardens; and 2. you rightly point out that it benefits authors to have fuller control over their publishing environment. So there's a divide here between what's useful to authors and useful to the community.

The problem we're actually trying to solve is community aggregation. We want individual homes for authors, but we also want a town square for residents and visiting speakers.

So I'm going to step to the side and bring something out here...

/Error exits stage right, returns pushing small wooden horse labeled "hobby"/

Anyone who follows SSC comment subthreads complaining about crappy commenting features will know what I'm going to say next.

Distributed discussion is a solved problem, and the solution is not Disqus or anything like it. The solution is called NNTP, and it has been around since approximately forever. It is currently mostly unused because no one has written (or, perhaps, popularized) a good web frontend for it; and today, the web is the Internet in most users' eyes. It does not have all possible good features (in particular, it does not have a voting system, although it could probably be kludged in), but given the number of times I've answered feature complaints with some variant of "you know, somebody implemented something that does that 20 years ago, but no one uses it", I am guessing it has enough.

So my personal solution is: Start a rationalist Usenet, with NNTP providing the backend and blogging software acting as a client. Each diaspora author gets a top-level group tree, within which groups are moderated by them. "blogs" are effectively frontends to the tree, presenting the local author's work as top-level posts and comments as replies. Less wrong collects posts from friendly authors using NNTP's existing mechanisms for distributing posts, but is only responsible for moderating within its own top-level tree, provided for general discussion and non-blog-owners (and as a sort of meta-moderator). Effectively, NNTP is now the database the site reads from. Only you don't necessarily need the site to read it; power users who want better efficiency can use all the power of existing nntp clients.

This solution does require blog authors to use blogging software that accepts NNTP as a post/comment backend. However, I think it is an easier problem to convince a few dozen authors to do this (and to write such a frontend if necessary) than a few thousand readers to switch to non-web clients for anything. A web interface is necessary for any such plan anyway; in today's world, if Google doesn't index it, it doesn't exist.

We're a heavily tech-slanted community. There ought to be enough technical expertise here to pull such a thing off.

And while I'm dreaming, I'd like a pony.

(Now that I've reached the bottom of my comment, I'm thinking of writing this up in further detail, as a full post, to describe exactly how such a plan could be implemented and solve technical and coordination problems -- note that my proposition above could be adopted incrementally, which is important to the latter issue. I've never presented a full argument to a non-old-timer audience and I don't know how convincing it would be. I'd rather get a sense of initial reactions first, though, and I've already spent more time on this post than my employer would probably approve of.)

You bring up a number of important points. Perhaps I missed this when reading, but one role LessWrong plays and continues to play is a good source of discussion. Often I'll find the discussion to be more interesting than a particular article. It's not uncommon for me to be linked to a particular comment divorced from its larger context and not be interested in the larger context. I don't know how common this behavior is, but this is not uncommon for me, and I don't think replacing the rationalist materials with a wiki or Q&A site would suit this well at all. This is one reason to favor something like Reddit.

I'm also generally not a fan of shutting down even semi-active forums. In one online community I've participated in, there were several major forum closures, and each time there was a period of confusion about what to do if you're interested in discussion, along with basically sectarian posturing to get active posters. The sectarian stuff caused major problems down the line, and the current discussion forum for this community more or less voluntarily avoids those conflicts now. There also are a number of roles LessWrong plays that I'm not sure would survive a transition to the diaspora, like the page about sharing academic papers. I also often enjoy reading the open threads. Perhaps transitioning LessWrong more towards discussion would be a good middle ground.

Edit: On a related note, I find following discussions on Tumblr to be a huge pain, and hope either this improves in the future or that more discussions happen elsewhere.

I am not sure what is the point of shutting LW down -- I don't see the upside. Even if you accept that it's nothing but a ghost town with a large library, haunted by spirits, after exorcising them you're left with nothing. The spirits disperse to all corners of the 'net, the library grows silent and really dead... that doesn't look like a good outcome.

Things evolve and change. This is both good and inevitable. LW cannot exist frozen in time and we want to move into the future, not attempt to return to the past. LW will never be what it used to be and that's fine.

One obstacle not discussed is the 'tone' or 'pleasantness' of posting to LW. Since this is a huge reason why people left, that may seem like an oversight, but I think the fix is fairly routine and so not worth much space in the post.

Right now, the Diaspora solves this by only bringing things people actively seek out to their attention. If you're going to Scott's blog, you'll know that you'll see the occasional post about Tom Swifties, and it's his blog, so who are you to complain about it?

It seems like subreddits partially solve that problem ("What is this cryonics doing in my rationality?" becomes "Well, what'd you expect from the medical futurology subreddit?"), and tags do an even better job (tagging something "rigorous" will attract attention you want, and not tagging it that will hopefully dissuade attention you don't want).

Add in some active moderation and better voting / tagging powers for respected users, and you're mostly done.

I'm tempted to go through Eliezer's Facebook page and start copy/pasting interesting things to LessWrong Discussion...

Something seems wrong to me about the "Welcoming Committee / Rationality Materials" section in the OP. I mean, if we imagine someone arriving in Rationalistan as a result of a link in the HPMOR author's notes or something of the kind and getting intimidated by how much stuff there is and/or how little they feel they know ... whyever would what they then need look like Wikipedia? Wikipedia is terrific and I am a huge fan, but it's not great at providing "social reinforcement" and "other people to ask questions of".

Vaniver's other suggestion for something that would serve this need better than a Redditalike is Stack Overflow. That's a better fit, but the SO model works best where what people need is answers to specific questions that have clear-cut answers. Surely that's not the situation of someone newly arriving in Rationalistan. Their questions are going to be more like "WTF is all this?" or "I think I need to reevaluate how I think about lots of important questions but I barely know where to start; what shall I do?". Stack Overflow itself (and I think most of its offshoots) strongly discourages that sort of open-ended question on the grounds that that's not what SO is good at.

The biggest weakness of Less Wrong as a welcoming committee isn't that it's a forum rather than an encyclopaedia or a Q&A site; I think a forum is the Right Thing for that purpose. The biggest weakness is the whole "ghost town of unquiet spirits" thing -- which I think is an unkind exaggeration but it's hard to deny has some truth to it. LW would make a better welcoming committee if it were livelier and more impressive, and it won't gain those attributes as a welcoming committee.

Having said that, I agree that there's a place for something Wikipedia-like. The LW wiki was meant to be that, but it's never had a great deal of participation. I have no idea what could be done to change that. People contribute to things to benefit others, or to benefit themselves. Editing a wiki is never going to bring much personal gain, and when all the material that would go into the wiki is already out there in other forms (e.g., the Sequences) it's hard to see that the benefit is going to be big enough to excite people doing it altruistically.

Here you can find a mind map aggregating the opinions of every commenter up until the time of this comment.
I will further edit it as comments are added. If you want to make it editable from the community let me know (and suggest a service that does so!). If you think I have misrepresented your opinions let me know and I'll fix it.
My analysis:

• LW is perceived badly for two reasons: low quality and obscurity to newcomers;
• LW is perceived as a good thing on at least on three axis: as an archive for the Sequence and the Wiki; as a community aggregators for different movements / sources (EA, HPMOR, sporadic contributors, etc.); for its live services (sharing academic articles, chat, stupid questions thread, etc.);
• the vast majority of people are in favor of keeping it open;
• the highest value LW offers is as an aggregator of the Diasporists, and the main problem is the sharing of comments;
• the most frequently proposed solutions include RSS feeds, subreddits and removing the distinction between Main and Discussion.

I like those suggestions too, I'm in favor of keeping it open.

I vote for both plans at once!

1) Make the current LW read-only. All content is still accessible, but commenting and voting is disabled. The discussion section is closed as well. Let things rest for a month or so.

2) Announce that during the next year, LW will have one post per week, at a specified time. There will be an email address where anyone can send their submissions, whereupon a horribly secretive and biased group of editors will select the best one each week, aiming for Eliezer quality or higher. The prominent posters you've contacted should create enough good content for the first couple months. Voting will be disabled for posts, and enabled only for comments. There will also be one monthly open thread for unstructured discussion.

I don't think anything short of that would work. LW's problem is the decline in quality, so the fix should be quality-oriented, not quantity-oriented.

I think it would be good to merge PredictionBook with LW. Both are run by Trick Apps. Having them together would help LW to make us of more prediction making.

Predictions would be a new tab besides Main and Discussion. The Wiki might also worth having it's own tab.

Just as we have at the moment a [poll] tag we could have a prediction tag to be used inside LW discussions.

My two cents:

• Merge Main and Discussion

• Make new content more visible. Right now the landing page, and in particular the first screen, mostly consists of boilerplate. You have to scroll or click in order to view if new content has been posted. In the current attention scarce era of Facebook and Twitter streams, this is not ideal.

• Discourage/ban Open threads. They are an unusual thing to have on a an open forum. They might have made sense when posting volume was higher, but right now they further obfuscate valuable content.

I like online social interaction. I used to get this on LessWrong; for me, it was a fun Internet forum to hang out on. With the lack of new major content, though, I've been finding less to talk about. Perhaps we need to design LW 2.0 as a platform that supports "random nerdy fun social times", general life advice ("I'm having a problem, help me Internet Hive Mind!) and other things that aren't directly related to How To Think Better.

The people still posting to LW seem to be getting use out of it; going archive-only doesn't seem great to me.

The two technical changes I think would most help with continued use of the site:

• remove the main vs discussion distinction, and remove promotion.

• make it more usable on phones

Hi. As a longtime lurker (my first introduction to the site may have been as early as twelve years old) I'm very glad to see this conversation finally come to a head. I'm of the opinion that the current site needs to either reinvent itself or shut down. I think that the biggest negative of the rationalist diaspora has in fact been keeping track of who has flown to what corner of the earth, further Eliezer Yudowsky and others posting on Facebook is annoying to me, because I do not use Facebook and find it to be an actual pain at times to get access to their posts. Having a less proprietary mirror would make me much more likely to read their writings. At the same time, given the implied privacy of Facebook I have to wonder if the point of posting there is so that things will not be read outside of the small audience EY now caters to.

Reinventing LessWrong as an archival site for the sequences and a hub for coordinating the diaspora would be a prudent use of its Schelling-Point real estate.

I largely agree with your analysis, though I do have some ideas on what an online community that does not waste peoples time and gets them to do interesting things would look like. If somebody would be interested in discussing this with me they may email me at:

[email protected] (Rot13'd to prevent email spam.)

(or here, but I'm kind of public discussion shy).

Looking at the discussion, my impression has been that there are at least two things that'd be valuable:

• Merge Main and Discussion. There doesn't really seem to be any good reason to maintain this distinction: Main only gets one third of the posts that Discussion gets, and that's combining the views of All + Promoted posts: the page with non-promoted Main posts only gets about one fifteenth of the posts that Discussion does. If you post something in Main and it doesn't get promoted, basically nobody sees it. (Necessary caveat: RSS subscriptions and the like aren't included in these figures.) That doesn't make sense for the section of the site that's supposed to be for the higher-quality posts, so it seems safe to say that the intent of the Main/Discussion distinction isn't really working and is only needless complexity.
• Do add a new subforum for submitting pure links, Reddit-style. Useful for collecting everything interesting from the LW Diaspora in one place.

Personally I'd also suggest:

• Change the default sorting of topics in a subreddit from "New" to something like Reddit's "Hot", which sorts topics based on a combination of how many upvotes they have and how recent they are. This would help highlight quality topics better and keep them more visible. As an added bonus, I think somebody mentioned that it's intimidating to post topics because if your topic gets downvoted it will hang around as a mark of shame for a very long time; this would help ease that problem, with downvoted topics dropping out of sight faster.

Well I totally missed the diaspora. I read star slate codex (but not the comments) and had no idea people are posting things in other places. It surprises me that it even has a name "rationalist diaspora." It seemed to me that people ran out of things to say or the booster rocket thing had played itself out. This is probably because I don't read Discussion, only Main and as Main received fewer posts I stopped coming to Less Wrong. As "meet up in area X" took over the stream of content I unsubscribed from my CSS reader. Over the past few years the feeling of a community completely evaporated for me. Good to hear that there is something going on somewhere, but it still isn't clear where that is. So archiving LW and embracing the diaspora to me means so long and thanks for all the fish.