Matthew Mandel

What are the most underrated internet communities today?

The rationalists and effective altruists were underrated in the 2000s and 2010s. I stumbled on lesswrong in high school (through reddit) and got a kick out of the quirky perspective over there. It felt interestingly orthogonal to debates I was exposed to in class and to the ideas I discussed with friends. Though I had philosophical objections to effective altruism, I was pleasantly surprised to find a community that took philosophy so seriously as a practical discipline. Whether or not one thought these groups were right about their various claims, they proved to be worth paying attention to given how novel their perspective was and how influential they turned out to be.

Since SBF and the rapid developments in AI, the rationalists and effective altruists have garnered a lot more attention and spilled over into more mainstream discourse. But for a while, their ideas just lived on internet islands like lesswrong, Slate Star Codex, and the Effective Altruism forum. This physical isolation probably helped them cultivate their distinctiveness. We locked a bunch of philosophers, quants, and non-profit workers in a forum together and came back a decade later to the AI-risk canon and the shrimp welfare project.

Are there weird niches like that on the internet today? The answer has to be “yes”, but the internet feels much more centralized than it used to be. There are discord and telegram groups, but those are better for importing communities than for forming new ones. There are weird subcultures on twitter, but I don’t think they’re ever sufficiently separated to fully speciate from each other.

I found out about the rationalists (and bitcoin, another vital new internet culture in the 2010s) from reddit. The subreddit architecture seems like the best shot for preserving islands of weirdness in a more centralized internet. Where are the subs with people living 10 years in the future and synthesizing different fields in crazy new ways?

Have we ironically moved into a period of ideological stagnation just as we burst into this moment of technical dynamism? Or is that not ironic at all? Are there, to paraphrase Kohelet, times for blogging and times for building?