madeofmeat
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User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
4hr ago
You were talking about a LessWrong purge, but I can't find these people's LW accounts that have gone quiet. David Friedman has an active one that advertises meetups and doesn't seem to have ever participated in comments. He's been a regular commenter over at slatestarcodex and seems to always have been received well there. I don't know who Baaj, Barnaby or Paniookah are and google didn't find any comments by these names in LessWrong or SSC. I'm not aware of QNTM ever interacting much directly with the LessWrong sphere.
madeofmeat
1d ago
That said, in 2014 - 2015 LessWrong saw a purge of long time commentors and contributors for their refusal to get on board with Wild Animal suffering or all the trans/poly stuff. If you were to ask me, I would tell you that this purge was a significant contributing factor to the decline of LessWrong 1.0 and the subsequent relaunch of LW 2.0 as a more explicitly MIRI-oriented activist space.
I don't remember anything like this. If they were long time commentors, you can surely name some of them.
madeofmeat
21d ago
The Reddit I'm thinking of with multiple Lisp programming posts on the front page is older than the /r/jailbait Reddit. It's the Reddit that didn't have subreddits yet. I think I first became aware of it when Paul Graham gushed about it in 2005. Like, "the front page of the internet" has been something between a joke and an empty slogan for very long now, but in 2005 that actually made sense, and Reddit did get established as the main option for an open, vote-based non-topic-restricted link aggregator like that very early. Digg.com was an earlier incumbent, but then there was the 2007 shakeup where Digg censored frontpage posts about people discovering how to crack BluRay encryption and Reddit didn't, and Reddit got established as the cool site and Digg started spiraling into obscurity.
I'm less clear on what the early history of porn on Reddit was. Subreddit creation opened up in 2008 and the jailbait controversy started up in 2011, so it went pretty fast once you could have porn subreddits. But how porny was the pre-subreddit era?
If this happened, it wasn't at LessWrong. EY got frustrated with LWs moderation capabilities and culture in the early 2010s, decamped to Facebook and Twitter where he could freely block anyone who annoyed him and never really returned to LessWrong for anything other than occasional drive-by comments. Meanwhile LessWrong generally doesn't delete the publicly visible user accounts when someone is banned, and there's no user account page for qntm.
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