vanTumblr — highpriestessofelua: Apparently some people are...

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
highpriestessofelua-deactivated
highpriestessofelua

Apparently some people are trying to revive LessWrong.com, and have a beta version of “LessWrong 2.0″ running here. I think that the effort is laudable but also maybe going in the wrong direction?

De facto, the largest rationalist diaspora Internet community is here on tumblr (I think). The thing that we actually need and want is not another “group blog.” What we need is a social network. We want the high quality “effort posts” on serious topics, but we also want the silly personal content (known colloquially as “shitposting”). Anything else will at best be a dry low-traffic forum like effective-altruism.com. Nothing wrong with effective-altruism.com, but it’s not a community hub. We want a place to have intellectual discussions, but also to make friends.

Why not create a social network for rationalists, which (like tumblr) doubles as a blogging platform, but which (unlike tumblr) doesn’t suck? I propose the following features:

  • Each user has a personal blog.
  • You can follow other people’s blogs.
  • You can browse the entire network, sorting/filtering by recentness, upvotes and tags.
  • You can upvote posts (but not downvote!)
  • You can flag posts for moderator attention.
    • Moderators can delete things, but rarely (spam, illegal things and extremely offensive stuff).
  • Each post has a discussion section in the form of a tree, like in reddit and old LessWrong.com.
    • The owner of the blog can disable comments for a post.
    • The owner of the blog can moderate eir own comment section, including deleting comments and blocking other users.
    • The owner of the blog can decide whether comments receive (i) no votes (ii) only upvotes or (iii) both upvotes and downvotes.
  • Intrasite hyperlinks have a special status and you can see the list of all posts linking a given post.
vaniver

The new design incorporates many, but not all, of these features. Downvotes are enabled, I don’t think we’ve put in the ability to disable comments, moderating comments on your posts is reserved to users above a threshold as opposed to granted to everyone, and I don’t think we have callback links.

Some of those we might add–callback links are, I think, pretty easy to incorporate and helpful in figuring out citation trees / later progress / etc., but might also be a farce on explanation posts (”Ok, One and Two Place Words is linked by… eight hundred posts and comments?”)


While we have a lot of the things that you might want from a social network, I do think it be important that LessWrong is not just a social network. If that’s all we accomplish, I think we should shut the site down and have people do their social networking on tumblr and Facebook and the other places where people do that. As Oli puts it:

over the course of its history, it has been one of the few places in the world that I know off where a spark of real discussion has happened, and where some real intellectual progress on actually important problems was made. 

Intellectual progress happens in conversations between people–but we want the progress, not the conversations.

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