I'd really like idea D. Open threads aren't terrific for developing ideas due to the navigation and visibility problems.

My friend kytael (not his real name, but his Less Wrong handle) has been on Less Wrong since 2010, has been a volunteer for the CFAR, and lived in the Bay Area for several months as part of the meatspace rationalist community there. For a couple of years, I was only a lurker on Less Wrong, and occasionally read some posts. I didn't bother to read the Sequences, but I already studied cognitive science, and I attended lots of meetups where the Sequences were discussed, so I understand much of the canon material of Less Wrong rationality, even if I wouldn't use the same words to describe the comments. It's only in the last year, and a bit, that I got more involved in my local meetup, which motivated me to get involved in the site. I find myself agreeing with lots of the older Sequence posts, and the highest quality posters (lukeprog, Yvain, gwern, etc.) from a few years ago, but I too am deeply concerned about the decline of vitality on Less Wrong, as I have only started to get excited about it's online aspects.

Anyway, when I too asked kytael:

What should the purpose of this site be? Is it supposed to be building a movement or filtering down the best knowledge?

(I asked him more, or less, the same question)

He replied: "I think the best way to view Less Wrong is as an archive."

Since he was tapped into the Bay Area rationalist community, but was a user of Less Wrong from outside of it as well, he was in an especially good position to provide better hypotheses as to why use on this website has declined, due to his observation.

First of all, the most prominent figures of Less Wrong have spread their discussions across more websites than this one, where much discussion from those popular users who used to spend more time on Less Wrong now discuss things. Scott's/Yvain's Slate Star Codex is probably the best example of this, another being the Rationalist Masterlist. Following a plethora of blogs is much more difficult than just going through this one site, so for newer users to Less Wrong, or those of us who haven't had the opportunity to know users of this site more personally, following all this discussion is difficult.

Second of all, the most popular, and common, users of Less Wrong have integrated publicly more, and now use social media. Ever since the inception of the CFAR workshops, users of Less Wrong have flocked to the Bay Area in throngs. They all became fast friends, because the atmosphere of CFAR workshops tends to do that (re: anecdata from my attendance there, and that of my friends). So, everyone connects via the private CFAR mailing lists, or Facebook, or Twitter, or they start businesses together, or form group homes in the Bay Area. Suddenly, once these people can integrate their favorite online community, and subculture, with the rest of their personal lives, there isn't a need to only communicate with others via the lesswrong.com, the awkward blog/forum-site.

Finally, since the inception of Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and others, started Less Wrong having already reached the conclusion that the best, 'most rational' thing for them to do was to reduce existential risk. Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote the Sequences as an exercise for himself to re-invent clear thinking to the point where he would be strong enough to start tackling the issue of existential risk reduction, because he wasn't yet prepared for it in 2009. Secondarily, he hoped the Sequences would serve as a way for others to catch up his speed, and approach his level of epistemology, or whatever. The instrumental goal of this intent was obviously to get more people to become awesome enough to tackle existential risk alongside him. That was five years ago. As a community goal, Less Wrong was founded as dedicated to 'refining the art [and (cognitive) science of human rationality'. However, the personal goal for its founders from what was the SIAI, and is now the MIRI, is provide a platform, a springboard, for getting people to care about existential risk reduction. Now, as MIRI enters its phase of greatest growth, the vision of a practical 'rationality dojo' finally exists in the CFAR, and with increased mutual collaboration with the Future of Humanity Institute, the effective altruism community, and global catastrophic risk think tanks, those who were the heroes of Less Wrong use the website less as they've gotten busier, and their priorities have shifted.

They wanted to start a community around rationality, to improve their own lives, and those of others. Now they have it. So, those of us remaining can join these other communities, or try something new. The tools for those who want this website to flourish again remain here in the old posts: Eliezer, Luke, and Scott, among others, laid the groundwork for us to level up as they have. So, aside from everything else, a second generation, a revival of Less Wrong, where new topics that aren't mind-killing, either, can be explored. If those caring among us do the hard work to become the new paragon users of Less Wrong, we can reverse its Eternal September.

After this primary exodus from Less Wrong, others occurred as well. I personally know one user who had some of the most upvoted, and some featured, posts on Less Wrong until he stopped using this website, and deleted his account. Now, he interacts with other rationalists via Twitter, and is more involved with the online Neoreaction community. It seems like a lot of Less Wrong users have joined that community. My friend mentioned that he's read the Sequences, and feels like what he is thinking about is beyond the level of thinking occurring on Less Wrong, so he no longer found the site useful. Another example of a different community is MetaMed: Michael Vassar is probably quite busy with that, and brought a lot of users of Less Wrong with him in that business. They probably prioritize their long hours there, and their personal lives, over taking time to write blog posts here.

Personally, my friends from the local Less Wrong meetup, and I, are starting our own outside projects, which also involve students from the local university, and the local transhumanist, and skeptic, communities as well. Send me a private message if you're interested in what's up with us.

The problem is that LW is not getting many impressive posts from either talented outsiders or regular commenters who managed to graduate into quality article writers.

I suspect EY making Roko flame out in 2010 set up a dynamic where fluff posts and snarky comments are fine, but being an outsider who can write quality posts about something actually interesting is not, since that sets you up for a similar loss of face. People who could write the sort of content LW was supposed to be getting can do so just as well at their own blog which isn't subject to random bursts of MIRI autocracy, and most seem to do that.

Also, LW doesn't really have an incentive structure to go above and beyond writing stuff that the average reader will upvote after a quick read. There isn't a ladder for local posters who are hooked to the local feedback systems to go up into producing increasingly impressive content from the status of "frequent commenter who receives mostly upvotes".

I'm not really a very old user, maybe three years (and after becoming more active in real-life meetups I switched to an alt that used my real name, so I'm not as inactive as I look, though still pretty inactive these days). But I have to say, it subjectively feels like the quality of everything on lesswrong is lower than it was when I joined.

And I'll tell you what I perceive the difference to be:

1) All my favorite writers stopped writing here. I have to go elsewhere to find their content. Previously, I felt that most of the stuff I read here was at a level above me in terms of insightfulness and level of philosophical rigor... and now, with a few exceptions, I don't.

2) The user-base shifted such that it was no longer a homogeneous entity which I labeled as an in-group. People here don't just automatically share my outlook on morality, epistemology, "free will", consciousness, and even politics anymore. Previously, the core sequences were pretty in-line with what I initially believed, and the entire userbase shared those views. That's not to say I don't value diversity of opinion, but there is something special about a group that agrees with you on every core issue. The inferential distance just keeps growing wider and wider.

3) I can't quite put my finger on it, but somehow commenting here gradually began to feel more like I was arguing a viewpoint, rather than cooperative mutual discovery, If I want to argue with people who are wrong on the internet,(heh, username) I can go do that anywhere.

Of course, this doesn't mean LW is objectively worse. I was fairly impressed when i first started reading, so this might simply be regression to the mean (as in, maybe LW was always a random walk and I first joined because it hit the right buttons for me at some point in that walk, and now it's moving away from that point.) Or it might just be rosy retrospection.

I've kind of accepted A...lesswrong kind of began "dying" for me a year ago. But I don't recommended it as an action...it's an unfortunate thing to happen.

I like option B the best. A lot of the good stuff I find here these days tends to be links to other things. C and D will probably increase the numbers we're measuring, but won't actually raise the content quality. With respect to C, Political discussion is wonderful on its own but has the side effect of causing the types of people who are primarily interested in talking about politics (as opposed to science or philosophy) to speak up more often, which drives down quality. With respect to D, that's not changing anything other than the location of the activity. Who cares if it's all in one thread or not? I think I disagree about it being harder to navigate.

Maybe upvotes on Discussion-level posts should get more karma than a comment. Perhaps something like 3-5 karma per upvote.

It is always frustrating to see a good comment on your Discussion level post receive more karma than your post itself. A decent Discussion-level post is at least an hour's worth of work; a good comment is more like 10 mins. The person who steps up and sets the stage should be rewarded.

I haven't posted here for that long but I think that a more co-operative and cheerful style of discussion would strengthen the community, encourage people to post more, and ultimately strengthen the rationalist cause. In short, it would seem that adopting such more benevolent norms would be the rational thing to do...

Many of the most-influential, highly-respected people in SIAI/MIRI circles don't read LessWrong much, or post but don't make comments. I'm thinking of Eliezer, Michael Vassar, Carl Schulman, and Peter deBlanc, but if you look at the MIRI team, you'll see mostly names I don't recognize from LW. lukeprog does, now, and that's great, but I suspect that within the MIRI org chart, spending time here costs a bit of status. It signals that you're one of the followers rather than a leader. Replying to comments may also cost status if you perceive your status as higher than the person you're responding to.

I also think earlier LW had more discussion about futurism, transhumanism, and artificial intelligence, and those things brought people in. More importantly, people engaged with those topics had specific questions that had answers.

The voting system favors posts that don't have anything offensive or that you can disagree with over posts that are interesting and hence controversial.

I once posted to Main (http://lesswrong.com/lw/6uw/how_to_enjoy_being_wrong/).

Afterwards, I felt bad about it somehow - like I had done something wrong or unappreciated -- despite having a substantially positive karma balance on that post. I think the reason was that almost all the top-level comments were neutral or negative and there was not much encouraging discussion, and I think the post might have been moved to Discussion - it was certainly not promoted.

It's actually interesting to go back and look at that because I now realize that that was a reasonably successful post and probably should have encouraged me further. Instead it did not. I wonder if something similar has happened to others.

See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/04/open-thread/#comment-95554

B-- posting links to articles-- is already possible. It's fallen out of fashion, I'm not sure why. So far as I remember, link posts in Discussion went over well enough so long as there was a substantial excerpt or a summary rather than just the link.

Similarly to what some others have written, my attitude toward LessWrong is that it would best thrive with this model:

1. Embrace the Eternal September.

If LessWrong is successful at encouraging epistemic and especially instrumental rationality, people who have benefited from the material here will find less value in staying and greater opportunities elsewhere. LessWrong doesn't need to be a place to stay any more than does a schoolhouse. Its purpose could be to teach Internet users rationality skills they don't learn in ordinary life or public school, and to help them transition into whatever comes next after they have done so.

Since culture is always changing, to best aid new waves of people, the Sequences will need to be scrapped and crafted anew on occasion.

2. Aim lower.

Eliezer had motives in writing the Sequences in the way he did, and he also had a very narrow background. It has often been noticed that the demographics here are absurdly skewed toward high IQ people. My presumption is that our demographics is a consequence of how things like the Sequences are written. For example, Eliezer's supposedly "excruciatingly gentle" introduction to Bayesianism is in fact inaccessible for most people; at least it was difficult for me as a high-but-not-very-high IQ person with (not-recent) years of statistics training, and I pointed friends toward it who simply gave up, unable to make progress with it. A new Sequences could do well to have multiple entry points for people of different backgrounds (i.e. abandon the programmer jargon) and ordinary IQs.

3. Extend higher.

If we want to keep longtime participants from moving on, then we have to give them additional value here. I can't give advice here; I feel I've already learned more theoretical rationality here than I can effectively ingrain into habit.

I think a big issue is that any of the big contributors of the past, lukeprog, EY, Yvain, gwern, Kaj_Sotala etc. aren't writing articles here anymore and there is no other similarly good and popular writer that would do the same today. There is no purpose coming here, except for the Open Threads. Posting and making comments itself is not very fun because you always have to watch out what you say.

Anything that requires many people to change their habits probably won't going to happen. Changing norms is difficult for the same reason, so idea D is possible, but a bit hard.

I think a combination of

a more co-operative and cheerful style of discussion

and

allowing and encouraging submissions of rationalism, artificial intelligence, transhumanism etc related articles from elsewhere, possibly as a separate category.

and generally allowing a more free discussion about related "fun" issues

could work, but I don't know how would you go about implementing the first one. Like I said, changing norms and habits is a bit difficult and making announcement to the effect of "Be more co-operative and cheerful" is probably going to work as well as announcing "Be nice and don't bully!" in schools. Just relaxing moderation wouldn't be enough. Because honestly, I haven't even noticed any moderation here, there's just the feeling of it.

There's the possibility of starting from scratch and making the subreddit /r/lesswrong more active. Then changing habits and community norms wouldn't be such a big problem. LW related subreddits like /r/rational and /r/HPMOR are already pretty active so expanding this "LW cluster" on reddit would only be natural progression. But I feel like even if that happened, it wouldn't be a satisfying solution for many.

I gave my own reasons for mostly abandoning this site in a post.

There were additional specific factors, some involving Eliezer's high-handed interventions to remove or downgrade things I'd posted without, I think, considering them carefully. A big one was when gwern responded to a post of mine with a vicious attack, not on my post, but on me as a person. I replied with something to the effect of, "As a rationalist, you should recognize that attacking someone has a cost, so what exactly is the benefit to you here?" He responded by saying that he just felt like it.

That wasn't what bothered me. What bothered me was that his comment was cruel and senseless, exactly the opposite of what this website is supposed to encourage--yet this denunciation of rationality in his personal behavior had more upvotes than downvotes. That showed me that this website isn't really about rationality, at least not to most of those who read and vote.

I feel a little bad about admitting that his personal attack succeeded in his goal of reducing my presence here. But it wouldn't have, if the LW community hadn't assisted.

The open threads are popular and valuable. Please don't destroy the good part of this site in your efforts to fix the bad.

Which of the proposed solutions do you prefer?

[pollid:701]

My prior here is that we're just seeing less visitors overall

Trike should be able to check this. My guess is that the site has a lot higher view rate than 2-3 years ago, from both casual and registered users, but maybe they do not vote as often as before (or are more negative than before?), keeping the average karma/post steady.

Also, does the median karma per post match the mean, or is the latter skewed by high-karma outliers?

Did anything specific happen (or stop happening) in the fall of 2011?

I also notice that the "featured articles" are for the most part re-postings of old articles. When did this start?

Problem 1: The subject area is defined too narrowly. Instead of limiting ourselves to "refining the art of human rationality", I would like the forum to allow any content which is interesting to an audience of atheist humanists who favor solving problems through a rational / analytic approach and who cherish a rationalist style of discourse. This also applies to how the forum markets itself outside.

Problem 2: Much of the time, the forum feels too much like a battle arena and too little like a community. In particular, I felt great disillusionment with LessWrong after my proposal to restrict downvotes to traditional use-cases of moderation received vehement opposition. Possible improvements:

• Add a lot of community features to the site. For example, integrate the google groups for LW business networking and LW parenting into the site (there is currently no way for newcomers to find them). Create a platform for LW couch surfing. LW crowdfunding. Subforums for people seeking advice anonymously. Et cetera.

• Revamp the Karma system. For example, go for something more like StackExchange (e.g. you can't downvote a comment, you can only "flag as inappropriate").

• Publish much more of the stuff going on in meetups to the site. For example, videos. Maybe we also can allow people to participate in meetups remotely through e.g. Google hangout.

even though many of the discussions are endless loops of the same discussion. It can be annoying for the old-timers, but new generations may need to discover things for themselves.

This would be a good thing to encourage - though I'm not sure that allowing submissions from elsewhere is the best way to achieve it. I assume that the "Rerunning the Sequences" thing that was going on a bit back was an attempt at this - but the reposts didn't seem to get much attention or discussion. For various reasons, people are less receptive to content that is old - heuristics imply that it will be less salient on average, the author is less available for feedback/interaction, the timing for absorbing new information takes more discipline, there is less discussion, etc... It would be better to have posts which rehashed the main ideas in the sequences, which would solve this problem. Additionally, it would add new perspectives, insights and refinements - it wouldn't be completely redundant.

Another issue that LW has is being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. This is really off-putting to me, and most likely to other users as well. Encouraging redundancy would alleviate this problem since people would be able to gain status/distinguish themselves more easily without being contrarian.

Idea C: Allow and encourage posts on "political" topics in Discussion (but probably NOT Main).

I really dislike this idea. It takes effort to read political stuff properly, and also drives away new-comers. There is more than enough discussion on politics in the blogs surrounding LW, if that is something you want to discuss.