One of the core things that I was always thinking about with LessWrong, and that was my kind of primary analysis of what went wrong with previous LessWrong revivals, was [kind of] an iterated, [the term] “prisoner’s dilemma” is overused, but a bit of an iterated prisoner’s dilemma or something where, like, people needed to have the trust on an ongoing basis that the maintainers and the people who run it will actually stick with it. And there’s a large amount of trust that the people need to have that, if they invest in a site and start writing content on it, that the maintainers and the people who run it actually will put the effort into making that content be shepherded well. And the people who want to shepherd it only want to do that if the maintainers actually...
And so, one of the key things that I was thinking about, was trying to figure out how to guarantee reliability. This meant, to a lot of the core contributors of the site, I made a promise when I started it, that was basically, I’m going to be making sure that LessWrong is healthy and keeps running for five years from the time I started. Which was a huge commitment—five years is a hugely long time. But my sense at the time was that type of commitment is exactly the most important thing. Because the most usual thing that I get when I talk [in] user interviews to authors and commenters is that they don’t want to contribute because they expect the thing to decline in the future. So reliability was a huge part of that.
And then I also think, signaling that there was real investment here was definitely a good chunk of it. I think UI is important, and readability of the site is important. And I think I made a lot of improvements there to decide that I’m quite happy with. But I think a lot of it was also just a costly signal that somebody cares.
I don’t know how I feel about that in retrospect. But I think that was a huge effect, where I think people looked on the site, and when [they] looked at LessWrong 2.0, there was just a very concrete sense that I could see in user interviews that they were like, “Oh, this is a site that is being taken care of. This is a thing that people are paying attention to and that is being kept up well.” In a similar [sense] to how, I don’t know, a clean house has the same symbol. I don’t really know. I think a lot of it was, they were like, wow, a lot of stuff is changing. And the fact that a lot of work is being put into this, the work itself is doing a lot of valuable signaling.
Yeah I definitely have this in my head when thinking about how to run the EA Forum. But I haven’t made a commitment to personally run the site for five years (I’m not a commitment sort of person in general). Maybe that means I’m not a good fit for this role?
I also hear conflicting views on whether it’s good or bad to “signal that there is real investment”. I think I intuitively agree with Habryka here, but then others tell me that it can look bad for us to talk about doing work that doesn’t tie directly to impact — like maybe if we talk about improving the UX of the site, people will think that we are wasting charitable money, and that will decrease some people’s trust in our team. So for some people, I think they would trust us more if we were doing less work on the site?
Yeah I definitely have this in my head when thinking about how to run the EA Forum. But I haven’t made a commitment to personally run the site for five years (I’m not a commitment sort of person in general). Maybe that means I’m not a good fit for this role?
I want to quickly flag that this sounds very wrong to me. In Oliver’s case, he was the CEO of that org, and if he left then, I think it’s very likely the organization would have died.
In comparison, I think CEA is in a much more robust place. There’s a different CEO, and it’s an important enough organization that I’d expect that if the CEO left, there would be sufficient motivation to replace that person with someone at least decent.
I think that it would be nice for CEA to make some commitments here. At very least, if it were the case that the forum was in great risk of closing in a few years, I assume many people here would want to know (and start migrating to other solutions). But I think CEA can make the commitments without you having to be personally committed.
Yeah actually I think @Habryka [Deactivated] discusses these kinds of dynamics here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4NFDwQRhHBB2Ad4ZY/the-filan-cabinet-podcast-with-oliver-habryka-transcript
Excerpt (bold mine, Habryka speaking):
Yeah I definitely have this in my head when thinking about how to run the EA Forum. But I haven’t made a commitment to personally run the site for five years (I’m not a commitment sort of person in general). Maybe that means I’m not a good fit for this role?
I also hear conflicting views on whether it’s good or bad to “signal that there is real investment”. I think I intuitively agree with Habryka here, but then others tell me that it can look bad for us to talk about doing work that doesn’t tie directly to impact — like maybe if we talk about improving the UX of the site, people will think that we are wasting charitable money, and that will decrease some people’s trust in our team. So for some people, I think they would trust us more if we were doing less work on the site?
I want to quickly flag that this sounds very wrong to me. In Oliver’s case, he was the CEO of that org, and if he left then, I think it’s very likely the organization would have died.
In comparison, I think CEA is in a much more robust place. There’s a different CEO, and it’s an important enough organization that I’d expect that if the CEO left, there would be sufficient motivation to replace that person with someone at least decent.
I think that it would be nice for CEA to make some commitments here. At very least, if it were the case that the forum was in great risk of closing in a few years, I assume many people here would want to know (and start migrating to other solutions). But I think CEA can make the commitments without you having to be personally committed.