#1

Hi all, new here. I recently decided to give Rapamycin a try, after being cautiously skeptical for some time, watching from the sidelines. I used to be a MD and am now (recently) a software engineer. Currently somewhat bored at my job, so I’m looking to learn and maybe do some side projects to keep myself busy and keep developing my skills.

I love the wealth and breadth of collaborative info on this site. Actually somewhat overwhelming. I was trying to think of ideas for a side project and am curious to crowdsource some ideas/opinions if there is anything interesting or useful the community would like to see. I thought the idea of having some open-source dashboard or real-time data on Rapamycin users would be cool, to keep track of the growing interest in this field.

I already see some polls/surveys that are aggregating self-reported data such as dosage, frequency, etc. In fact, this site already covers essentially everything. So now I’m just curious if there’s anything people think would be cool to see that’s not available in this current format.

Cheers

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#2

Attn: @RapAdmin
This site hasn’t recently exploded in the number of new users and in the number of new posts. It’s almost impossible now to keep up with everything. Also there is more and more redundancy and repetition of the same info with the flood of new users starting new threads without searching first.
I would love someone to do the condensed bible of Rapamycin News Info that filters out all the repetition, using AI or maybe something like the “Summarize This Topic” that appears after the first post of long threads. Another idea might be to somehow divide the forum with a new user section that gives them time to explore the site a little more before asking things that the experienced users have to keep explaining over and over again. When the site was smaller, this was more manageable. I expect @RapAdmin is also reaching the limit of what he can do with his available time. There are maybe millions (?) of pages of Info here, it often seems like it. Any statistics @RapAdmin ? New users? New posts? New threads?

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#3

Yea great observations, even though I’m pretty new I can picture a lot of what you’re saying about more and more redundancy. While you mentioned condensed bible I was also thinking along similar lines, something like an open-source guide that others can contribute through Github, which would serve the distilled ‘consensus’ or most voted on pieces of information.

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#4

This is a normal concern and it is fine for people to repeat the same things over and over. If someone doesn’t want to do that, then no one will reply it’s as simple as that. Many people have already read a bunch of stuff but want personalized information pertaining to their situation.

Aggregating everything in one thread or section or so is not a good idea as no one will read it or not ask questions. It’s fine as it is now IMO.

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#5

There are 6 categories but in truth almost everything gets posted in “General”. There are benefits to that and discussions can certainly be wide-ranging and often that can be great. But with the increase in volume, you can only wonder about what you may be missing out on. Sometimes, when I’m on longer, I discover things that make me say - How could I have missed that for so long? And I spend many hours every day here.

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#6

I understand that, and I’m certainly not trying to discourage new users. I, no doubt, did the same thing when I was new. @AnUser you’re here more than me…do you think you’ve read all the posts here? Or what percentage, would you guess?

I use the search much more now…but sometimes it’s lacking. I do spend part of everyday going back to read old posts, but it seems like I’ve only scratched the surface.

Think of poor @RapAdmin, back bent over, carrying us thru the mud…and everyday hearing the same thing…“Got room for one more?”

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#7

@helenas,

For some time I’ve thought this site would benefit from a companion StackExchange site.

Long used by programmers and now extending across 170 very different subject sites, the original developers of StackExchange conceived of an extraordinarily simple way of recognizing and thereby organizing information.

  • A user posts a question.
  • Members of the site supply answers to the question.
  • Members rank the perceived value of the question by “up” voting it.
  • Members rank the perceived value of answers to the question, again by “up” voting.
  • After participants have supplied answers the original poster can “accept” the best answer or clarify the question to get better answers.

The process becomes interactive with community members engaged in developing and providing good answers.

The questioners and answerers receive reputation points whenever someone upvotes a question or answer. Rarer, questions or answers get down voted.

Over time expertise gets recognized by the community.

Questioners can attach relevant “tags” which one can readily use to search for relevant answers.

The StackExchange paradigm provides an effective and focused way of asking well formed questions and identifying well formed answers (answers not opinions).

The StackExchange paradigm does not provide a discussion space, it wouldn’t need to the Rapamycin News Forum works perfectly for that.

One can provide concise comments to questions and answers.

As @helenas observes, a significant amount of this forum - as currently used - has lots of redundancy that can make it unwieldy, when one wants an answer to a question.

StackExchange doesn’t charge anything to use or set up a site.

Setting up a site doesn’t take much. New sites start in Area 51, with a proposal. Once enough people join the site it moves to full operational status.

Happy to help if anyone wants to pursue this.

@RapAdmin - this might simplify your work load :wink:

4 Likes
#8

I’ll check it out, heard of StackExchange but never used it. This is a common enough situation that I’m sure there are different approaches to improving it. And as you pointed out the RapaNews Forum serves different purposes, only one is pure information (hopefully scientific). But also as a social community that builds some relationships.

One critical function the forum here serves for me is to help filter through all the scientific studies and research trials on the internet. So when I research a topic on, say, cell biology, I try to look at a bunch of different papers and pick 2 or 3 of the best ones to link to. Then I go through each paper and try to pick the most essential sections to quote in my post on RapaNews. There’s just too much info out there…anything that helps to filter it down is a tremendous help. Also in picking the most reliable and authoritative sources (not thesenior.com.au). Even with podcasts/youtube videos, it’s extremely helpful to highlight critical sections or quote the most important points in your post. There’s just not enough time to watch through fluff. Try to present usable information, be selective. That’s how we can help each other.

1 Like
#9

My opinion is we need more participants and more participation. Can we hear from the people who do not speak up much? Is the technology keeping people from speaking up or asking questions? Is the board intimidating (I felt that at first)? How can this be a “safer” place to learn?

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#10

25 years ago I used to run a tech forum with over 200k users. The only way to do that was to have clear, usable topic sections and help. One section at the top was FAQ’s. When you joined you had limited access for a week.

I had 13 moderators that helped me mange it. I picked them over the years as I watched how they interacted with the members. Were they even keeled? respectful? but firm? did they buy into the culture?

I find this forum software to be a bit archaic and as you noted above there are other categories besides General but are rarely used. That is due to the way this software works.

Had my own co-located servers and we had as many as 5,000 concurrent users on at a time. Not easy back in the day. I used SMF https://www.simplemachines.org/

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#11

There’s definitely always a case to have a forum where the discussion can be as wide as possible, imo. What @RapAdmin did with distilling some of the major topics into links is really helpful though, for example, in cases where a new user wants a bookmarked topic where it’s easy to immediately came to find the answer they/he/she were looking for. But I’m sure he can’t himself continue indefinitely to keep everything organized by himself the more complex this space grows.

E.g. a newcomer may just want to know: ok, I see a ton of people sharing experiences, can I just find what the most commonly used dosage is for most people? where should I start if I just want to find X?

I may need to spend more time on the forum myself to see if there are any chokepoints, or I’m just assuming it. But that’s why all your opinions will help :wink:

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#12

Yea the selectivity part is where I’m trying to brainstorm whether there is a next level of optimization that could take place. Back in my younger days doing more weightlifting/strict powerlifting regimens and whatnot, you could spend an indefinite time on a forum trying to see what other people are doing, but sometimes it was simpler to just find a book/guide where a lot of users had consensus on the best beginner approach to start powerlifting. Helped pave the way to get more into the fine details that would be appropriate for long-form discussion on a forum thread.

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#13

A huge advantage here, over a book, is with so many well-connected people, some directly involved in research or some of the new start-ups, scouring for information, you often get news hot off the presses or directly from the source.

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#14

I like this idea and think it could really help the community, lets flush out the idea more.

I’m less enthusiastic about a stack overflow approach because I see a lot of questions and discussions here evolve over time in a discussion and I think its really hard to break out single questions over to a stack-overflow site independent of here, it just gets too confusing and difficult.

I also suspect that ChatGPT and similar AI systems (that will be trained based on Rapamycin News data) may soon replace the stack-overflow type of sites, and I think it would be hard to get people involved in Q&A like we do here, on a rapamycin oriented Stack Overflow site where there isn’t as much conversation, and as much need for daily use of the stack overflow type of site for rapamycin (as there is for software engineering where its people’s daily job).

See:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/15ju114/chatgpt_is_putting_stack_overflow_out_of_business/

The consequences of generative AI for online knowledge communities

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-61221-0

Is Stack Overflow Obsolete? An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of ChatGPT Answers to Stack Overflow Questions

https://arxiv.org/html/2308.02312v4

5 Likes
#15

yea good points. not to digress too much, but awhile ago I was also thinking if I had the vision/ambition/discipline/skills, I would have wanted to make an open-source publication repository that is formatted uniquely in a way to invite crowdsourced peer-review feedback. The problem with journals and publications is that everything is gated, and even open-source pre-publication sites like Biorxiv don’t give an easy way for the public to engage in discourse on a paper. It’s so archaic that even today we don’t have a place where scientific publications can be held to scrutiny in a standardized way in the public in the same way that Twitter/X allows for every opinion to be scrutinized/discussed.

StackExchange is an interesting idea. I’ll have to ponder on that for a bit.

1 Like
#16

Yea I was thinking about something similar. I think there is decent enough overlap with this site already, where adding another companion site where a lot of similar questions/answers get posted may worsen the redundancy. It would be cool to see/have this forum remain as a single-source-of-truth in the sense that it’s the de facto ‘community’ for discussion.

The thing that strikes me at face-value with forums (or even StackX) is they are very non-linear. And that’s what they’re good for: digressions, tangents, some randomness in direction. And perhaps the companion to that would be something on the opposite end, something very linear or simple.

In my head, I was playing around with the idea of some dashboard that showed the rankings of the most common ‘regimens’, their ratings, and whatever other properties, where a viewer would instantly see what’s at the top of the community’s interest or focus. Similar to the survey polls you created. Those, imo, are a gem, since I find these summary statistics/metrics to serve that linear purpose (e.g. instead of reading hundreds of posts on people discussing what regimen they are on, I can just see the statistics and instantly decide for myself if I so choose to follow the most voted on regimen to start).

Like the others said, maintenance, QA, is where things always get hairy and that’s something I’m not well acquainted with or know how to think about.

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#17

yea all good questions. maybe this site is indeed sufficient for now and appropriate for its size. but would be good to know if anyone had pain points when it came to format, finding info, or what their hopes were.

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#18

Not sure I get that…I’m the only “scary” person on here (now that @SNK is gone). Sure, @AnUser can get in a bad mood sometimes but overall I think we’re pretty friendly and welcoming.

That would be great! @ConquerAging you out there?

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#19

I don’t think categories add much value… and are too hard /vague to use. I view categories as a very rough and imperfect and ultimately unhelpful way to organize information; a little like how Yahoo in the first generation internet tried to split everything up into categories or groups and ultimately it was just replaced with google and search. I think that discussion forums have evolved the same way. If you want to find something - use the search field. Categories are too much of a pain in the butt to use, too unprecise and to much friction for people. This is obviously only my opinion.

3 Likes
#20

Another slight tangent: one way I’m framing this movement in my own head is as an analogy to something like Bitcoin or crypto. For anyone who follows that space, Bitcoin was the paradigm shift that caused a whole industry, and more than just an industry, a movement, to spread to the masses (although it’s debatable how widespread it really is). My understanding is that Btc was originally a small cypherpunk community that lived on the forums, even with its creator, and much of the discussion was focused on the technical, nitty-gritty details of Btc implementation (similar to how a lot of discussions here are focused on technical papers, details of protocols, methods, etc). But the movement itself grew way beyond that niche community where the masses now don’t go there. If they’re interested in learning about Btc or following it, they go to some dashboard (coinmarketcap.com) to follow the price movement, or buy books/listen to podcasts/read informational sites.

I somewhat view Rapamycin (so far) as having the same paradigm shift potential for the longevity space. Of course, just like with Bitcoin there spawned an infinite number of other crypto coins, in the same way this will happen with Rapamycin. But Rapamycin has a similar Lindy advantage as Bitcoin in that it has stood the test of time so far, best out of anything else on the market, it’s essentially open-source (as this forum is demonstrating), and has captured mindshare more than derivatives or newly hyped molecules. Bitcoin and Rapamycin are both dinosaurs in a way, but ones that are still increasingly becoming more adopted.

Maybe another similarity is that while you could argue on theoretical grounds why Bitcoin should fail, why it’s destined to go to zero or nowhere, so far at least it’s proving to be the opposite in practice. It will just continue to exist, since it’s a digital ledger on any computer. In the same way, you could argue perhaps Rapamycin can not be proven to ever work in a human (or almost impossible to do the right experiments), but practically I don’t see how adoption could decrease, given the current scientific data. It’s one of those ‘it takes on a life of its own’ phenomenon where Rapamycin becomes a schelling point.

So, what does the future of Rapamycin look like when it comes to information spreading? Is it possible it follows Btc in that the public will more often go to a dashboard type page to see what the trends are with all the new users? Will it remain as a niche community living on a forum? Interesting questions to ponder.

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