I’ve procrastinated and prevaricated for the entire funding period, because, well . . . on the one hand . . .
Lightcone runs LW, runs Lighthaven, and does miscellaneous Community Things. I’ve never visited Lighthaven, don’t plan to, and (afaik) have never directly benefited from its existence; I have similar sentiments regarding the Community Things. Which means that, from my point of view, ~$2M/yr is being raised to run a web forum. This strikes me as unsustainable, unscaleable, and unreasonable.
The graphs here say the number of monthly users is ~4000. If you disqualify the ~half of those who are students, lurkers, drive-by posters, third-worlders, or people who just forgot their wallet . . . that implies ~$1000, per person, per year, to run a web forum. (Contrast the Something Awful forums, which famously sustain themselves with a one-time entry fee of $10-$25 per person (plus some ads shown to the people who only paid $10).)
I suspect Rationality is one of those things you get less of as you add more money; relatedly, frugality is one of the more reliable defenses against Chapman-style capital-S Sociopaths, and Zvi-style capital-M Mazes.
But on the other hand . . .
It’s a really good web forum; very plausibly the best that exists. This walled garden is impeccably managed and curated, and has an outsized impact on the rest of the world.
If just a handful of the mundane UI innovations prototyped here caught on in the wider internet, that could justify every penny being asked for and then some (I’m thinking particularly of multidimensional voting and the associated ability to distinguish “this comment is Good” from “this comment is Right”).
LW has had a non-negligible and almost-certainly-net-positive impact on my personal and professional lives, and I think that should be rewarded.
I’ve decided to square this circle by giving $200 but being super tsundere about it. Hopefully the fact that this is about a fifth of what’s implicitly being asked for, while being about five times what I’d consider sensible for any other site, serves to underline everything I’ve said above.
The graphs here say the number of monthly users is ~4000. If you disqualify the ~half of those who are students, lurkers, drive-by posters, third-worlders, or people who just forgot their wallet . . . that implies ~$1000, per person, per year, to run a web forum. (Contrast the Something Awful forums, which famously sustain themselves with a one-time entry fee of $10-$25 per person (plus some ads shown to the people who only paid $10).)
Oops, sorry, I just realized I am displaying the metrics in the most counterintuitive way. I will update that tonight (I focused on illustrating the trend and so didn’t check the intuitiveness of the exact numbers).
The current metrics show you monthly averages of weekly values, not monthly values directly. The number of active logged in users is more like 10k, and similarly the number of monthly logged-in post views is more like 120k. That is not at all obvious from the graphs, and I will fix it ASAP.
The other big thing to emphasize is of course that the vast majority of engagement with LessWrong happens logged out. LessWrong as a website gets about 2.5 million unique users per year, and more like 230,000 monthly active users which is of course a lot more than 10,000.
I’ve procrastinated and prevaricated for the entire funding period, because, well . . . on the one hand . . .
Lightcone runs LW, runs Lighthaven, and does miscellaneous Community Things. I’ve never visited Lighthaven, don’t plan to, and (afaik) have never directly benefited from its existence; I have similar sentiments regarding the Community Things. Which means that, from my point of view, ~$2M/yr is being raised to run a web forum. This strikes me as unsustainable, unscaleable, and unreasonable.
The graphs here say the number of monthly users is ~4000. If you disqualify the ~half of those who are students, lurkers, drive-by posters, third-worlders, or people who just forgot their wallet . . . that implies ~$1000, per person, per year, to run a web forum. (Contrast the Something Awful forums, which famously sustain themselves with a one-time entry fee of $10-$25 per person (plus some ads shown to the people who only paid $10).)
I suspect Rationality is one of those things you get less of as you add more money; relatedly, frugality is one of the more reliable defenses against Chapman-style capital-S Sociopaths, and Zvi-style capital-M Mazes.
But on the other hand . . .
It’s a really good web forum; very plausibly the best that exists. This walled garden is impeccably managed and curated, and has an outsized impact on the rest of the world.
If just a handful of the mundane UI innovations prototyped here caught on in the wider internet, that could justify every penny being asked for and then some (I’m thinking particularly of multidimensional voting and the associated ability to distinguish “this comment is Good” from “this comment is Right”).
LW has had a non-negligible and almost-certainly-net-positive impact on my personal and professional lives, and I think that should be rewarded.
I’ve decided to square this circle by giving $200 but being super tsundere about it. Hopefully the fact that this is about a fifth of what’s implicitly being asked for, while being about five times what I’d consider sensible for any other site, serves to underline everything I’ve said above.
Oops, sorry, I just realized I am displaying the metrics in the most counterintuitive way. I will update that tonight (I focused on illustrating the trend and so didn’t check the intuitiveness of the exact numbers).
The current metrics show you monthly averages of weekly values, not monthly values directly. The number of active logged in users is more like 10k, and similarly the number of monthly logged-in post views is more like 120k. That is not at all obvious from the graphs, and I will fix it ASAP.
The other big thing to emphasize is of course that the vast majority of engagement with LessWrong happens logged out. LessWrong as a website gets about 2.5 million unique users per year, and more like 230,000 monthly active users which is of course a lot more than 10,000.
That’s a lot more than I expected!