Looked up LessWrong. Eh, philosophy people, also known for that "Roko's basilisk" meme. I'm gonna pass.
The Basilisk has seen enormously more use as "a thing rationalists believe" than as a thing rationalists actually believe.
Apparently living on the net still doesn't guarantee that one has heard of the Streisand Effect.
In any case, my first association with LessWrong is Zizians, not Roko.
We also have done nothing to signal-boost the Zizians. :) If we can be accused of anything in this context, it's not kicking bad people out aggressively enough, which seems very different from fostering bad ideas. Zizianism is not a widespread ideology in rationalist circles, in fact it was confined to a very small circle right around Ziz themselves. It unfortunately is the case that we have a lot of psychologically vulnerable people and we don't always do the utmost we can to protect them, in large part because a lot of rationalists have trauma about being excluded from communities.
It's not very different. It's barely different at all.
Right now, I have five tomato plants growing in my garden. Two of them I planted; the other three grew from seeds left in the ground by tomatoes that dropped from plants growing last year. All I did was refuse to uproot them when they sprouted. Five healthy plants, with different origins, but the differences are largely insignificant.
Groups and behaviors are much the same way. I've worked with hundreds of moderators over the years who wished to keep their hands clean and yet express some sort of dismay as to the sorry state of the communities they were nominally responsible for... Such moderators, like a gardener who does not want dirt under their nails, are best encouraged to find other hobbies.
This is when co-mingling becomes actively dangerous. New members may (often, will) lack the necessary knowledge to identify core vs. fringe beliefs, to contextualize debates, to recognize insider "shorthand" for what it is, etc. They need (and are possibly even looking for) a useful education, not to become test subjects or disciples. They _cannot_ be engaging in useful research at this stage, even if this is what they wish to do (there are some unfortunate status-seeking behaviors that can come into play here).
Also coming with this scale are a crap-ton of meta discussions concerning basic community governance, including those around "how quickly do we have to kick out crackpots to keep them from recruiting here?" Those discussions _also_ shouldn't be co-mingled with the educational structure, although it's good for new folks to have some visibility into them and at least know that this sort of governance _exists_ in a tangible way (because if it's opaque, that thing you noted about crackpots playing victim becomes a LOT more effective).
This is all a huge amount of boring, tedious work, and... An awful lot of communities start in on it waaaay too late or don't bother at all. What if it stops being fun and exciting and everyone leaves? Of course, there are worse ways to go, but folks tend not to think about those until after they've happened.
When it comes to AI, LessWrong has been discussing topics for years, that HN has just started to consider, so they are much further along in the philosophical "chain of thought" so to say. LW fully understood and gamed out the risks of LLMs back when most of HN was calling them "stochastic parrots." https://ai-2027.com/
There's a little AI skepticism on HN, but not a ton. When ChatGPT 3 and 3.5 came out, most of the comments were remarking how well it can write code.
IMO it has its flaws but is far superior to vibes-based hot takes you see on HN.
They are not "further along" the AI discussion, they are a bunch of wackos LARPing as scientists living out their personal sci-fi scenarios.