Announcing the DWATV Discord
I have decided this blog should at least experiment with having a discord server, so I made one. I kept it simple. There’s a few channels for the things the blog tends to be interested in - games, rationality, Covid - along with places to ask about suggesting future post topics, hiring me to do consulting, share links I might want to include in future posts or suggesting we meet up for lunch if you’re going to be in Manhattan.
There’s also a room called Zvi-asks-questions, where people who want to be helpful can help find answers to stuff, either for the blog or otherwise. As I move into new areas, especially to the extent I start looking at politics and policy, that’s going to become more valuable. Plan is I’ll experiment with questions both personal and blog related and see what happens, everyone’s always free to ignore.
That’s the core philosophy here, try stuff and see what happens. I figure the worst realistic case is it turns out all this is a bad idea, wastes a bit of time and turns into a ghost town, in which case not much is lost, or it could turn out really well. Worth a shot.
The roles are friend for people I know, subscriber for subscribers to Substack (Patreon at $10/month or more also counts), and collaborator for those I am working with. There’s general channels for them but mostly I figure people should get to use cool colors cause why not. If you want a role, you can message me to request it, including ID/email as appropriate so I know who you are.
I'd advise against having a bunch of $TOPIC discussion channels, at least to start with. Keeping everything in General leads to more cross-pollination and less siloing of the userbase. A couple of different conversations can happen in a channel at once before it becomes hard to follow.
If conversation about some topic is repeatedly swamping other things then break it out into its own channel.
Zvi-asks-questions makes sense as its own channel to make life easier for you as does anything more limited in scope e.g. topic suggestions, hiring you or posting predictions.
Do people just hangout in Discord servers all day? They all just seem to _mostly_ require a TON of time investment and (of course) I've never been able to figure out how to setup 'notifications' beyond the obviously-a-bad-idea 'send me ALL of the notifications to my desktop' option.
I'm probably weird, but I like having a smaller number of messages (I think) I want, and a queue for reading/marking-un-read individual messages, or some kind of 'message digest' option, for async communications methods.
Once something like a Discord channel becomes big/frequented enough that there 3+ conversation threads interleaved, it just seems too overwhelming to do more than occasionally 'dip my toes into the stream' for a few minutes if I'm really bored. Maybe you'll start linking to stuff in the Discord and that can serve as my regular reminder to go look at it for a bit?
(I accepted your invite anyways!)