My main crux about how valuable Lightcone donations are is how impactful great web dev on LessWrong is. If I look around, impact of websites doesn’t look strongly correlated with web design, expecially on the very high end. My model is more like platforms / social networks rise or fall by zeitgeist, moderation, big influencers/campaigns (eg elon musk for twitter), web design, in that order. Olli has thought about this much more than me, maybe he’s right. I certainly don’t believe there’s a good argument for LW web dev is responsible for its user metrics. Zeitgeist, moderation, and lightcone people personally posting seems likely more important to me. Lightcone is still great despite my (uninformed) disagreement!
I think you are probably thinking of “web design” as something too narrow.
I think the key attribute of”good web design” is not that it looks particularly beautiful, but that it figures out how to manage high levels of complexity in a way that doesn’t confuse people.
And of course, a core part of that managing complexity is to make tradeoffs about the relative importance of different user actions, and communicating the consequences of user actions in a way that makes sense with the core incentives and reward loops you want to set up for your site.
On Twitter, “web design” choices are things like “do you have Twitter spaces”, “what dimensions of freedom do you give users for customizing their algorithm?”, “how do you display long-form content on Twitter?”. These choices have large effect sizes and make-or-break a platform.
On LessWrong, these choices are things like “developing quick takes and figuring out how to integrate it into the site”, or “having an annual review”, or “having inline reacts” or “designing the post page in a way that causes people to link to them externally”. And then the difficulty is not in making things nice, but in figuring out how to display all of these things in ways that doesn’t obviously look overwhelming and broken.
As a concrete example, I think quick takes have been great for the site, but they only really took off in 2023. This is because we (in this case largely thanks to the EA Forum team) finally figured out how to give them the right level of visibility for the site where it’s subdued enough to not make anything you write on shortform feel high stakes, but where the best shortforms can get visibility comparable to the best posts.
(I could also go into the relationship between web design and moderation, which is large and where of course how your website is structured will determine what kind of content people write, which will determine the core engine of your website. Moderation without tech changes I think is rarely that effective, since if there is something in your core engine that incentivizes the wrong content, you are just in a sisyphean struggle to remove it manually again and again.)
I largely think the ontology you have of what makes web platforms succeed or fail doesn’t really make sense. Like, what causes “Zeitgeist”? I think in almost all circumstances when a large social-network like thing starts failing or being outcompeted, you can trace it back to specific choices that were made in the platform development. Sometimes that means the platform isn’t adapting appropriately to the changing winds of the internet, which is maybe what you mean, but most platforms can adapt, if you are alive enough to notice and have the resources to do it. The way to do it is largely “web development”.[1]
Taking things from a different angle, even if the categorization you list here makes sense, Lightcone of course works extensively on all of them, so it’s not super clear how it would affect the value of marginal donations to Lightcone (though how we affect the “Zeitgeist” is clearly more complicated and confusing). But yeah, we definitely would do a bunch more moderation if we had more slack as an organization, and would be in a better position to work with our top authors on doing “influencer campaigns” (though that sure doesn’t feel like the term I would use). It’s definitely been historically a substantial fraction of what staff work on.
But also also, the payoff curve for our fundraiser is quite spiky. Right now Lightcone is more in the regime of “going bankrupt by default”, and even if the LessWrong team survives Lightcone defaulting on its loan obligations, I am confident it will disrupt a large fraction of all of our activities, including work on LessWrong. So I think it makes more sense to think about the value of “having a LessWrong team and a Lighthaven at all” and use that to make the donation decision, though there is of course a non-trivial chance we will end up in a healthier financial space where marginal donations are less “reducing existential risk to Lightcone” and more marginal.
This isn’t always true. For example, I think StackOverflow is kind of fundamentally doomed with AI largely obsoleting its core business model, though I think even in that case, they might end up at least with a profitable model where they can somehow license their data, or figure out some way to become an AI provider themselves.
Wow thank you for replying so fast! I donated $5k just now, mainly because you reminded me that lightcone may not meet goal 1 and that’s definitely worth meeting.
About web design, am only slightly persuaded by your response. In the example of Twitter, I don’t really buy that there’s public evidence that twitter’s website work besides user-invisible algorithm changes has had much impact. I only use Following page, don’t use spaces, lists, voice, or anything on twitter. Comparing twitter with bluesky/threads/whatever, really looks to me like cultural stuff, moderation, and advertisement are the meat, not the sites. Something like StackOverflow has more complexity that actually impacts website, in some way (like there is lots of implicit complexity in tweet reply trees and social groups but that only impacts website through user-invisible algorithms). And a core part of my model is that recommendation algoritms have a much lower ceiling for LessWrong because it doesn’t have enough data volume. Like I don’t expect to miss stuff i really wanted to see on LW, reading the titles of most posts isn’t hard (i also have people recommend posts in person which helps...). Maybe in my model StackOverflow is at the ceiling of web dev leveraged-ness, because there is enough volume of posts written by quality people who can be nudged to spend a little more time on quality and can be sorted through, or something (vague thought).
When I look at lesswrong, it seems extremely bottlenecked on post quality. I think having the best AIs (o3 when it comes out might help significantly) help write and improve the core content of posts might make a big difference. I would bet that interventions that don’t route through more effort/intelligence/knowledge going into writing main posts would make me like LessWrong much more.
Like I don’t expect to miss stuff i really wanted to see on LW, reading the titles of most posts isn’t hard (i also have people recommend posts in person which helps...).
I do think you are very likely overfitting heavily on your experience :P
As an example, the majority of traffic on LW goes to posts >1 year old, and for those, it sure matters how people discover them, and what UI you have for highlighting which of the ~100k LessWrong posts to read. Things like the Best of LessWrong, Sequences and Codex pages make a big difference in what people read and what gets traffic, as does the concept page.
I agree for some of the most engaged people it matters more what the culture and writing tools and other things are, but I think for the majority of LessWrong users, even weighted by activity, recommendation systems and algorithm changes and UI affordances make a big difference.
Like I don’t expect to miss stuff i really wanted to see on LW, reading the titles of most posts isn’t hard
It’s hard for me! I had to give up on trying.
The problem is that if I read the titles of most posts, I end up wanting to read the contents of a significant minority of posts, too many for me to actually read.
I strongly disagree. In fact, Less Wrong is an excellent example of the effect of web design on impact/popularity/effectiveness (both for better and for worse; mostly better, lately).
My main crux about how valuable Lightcone donations are is how impactful great web dev on LessWrong is. If I look around, impact of websites doesn’t look strongly correlated with web design, expecially on the very high end. My model is more like platforms / social networks rise or fall by zeitgeist, moderation, big influencers/campaigns (eg elon musk for twitter), web design, in that order. Olli has thought about this much more than me, maybe he’s right. I certainly don’t believe there’s a good argument for LW web dev is responsible for its user metrics. Zeitgeist, moderation, and lightcone people personally posting seems likely more important to me. Lightcone is still great despite my (uninformed) disagreement!
I think you are probably thinking of “web design” as something too narrow.
I think the key attribute of”good web design” is not that it looks particularly beautiful, but that it figures out how to manage high levels of complexity in a way that doesn’t confuse people.
And of course, a core part of that managing complexity is to make tradeoffs about the relative importance of different user actions, and communicating the consequences of user actions in a way that makes sense with the core incentives and reward loops you want to set up for your site.
On Twitter, “web design” choices are things like “do you have Twitter spaces”, “what dimensions of freedom do you give users for customizing their algorithm?”, “how do you display long-form content on Twitter?”. These choices have large effect sizes and make-or-break a platform.
On LessWrong, these choices are things like “developing quick takes and figuring out how to integrate it into the site”, or “having an annual review”, or “having inline reacts” or “designing the post page in a way that causes people to link to them externally”. And then the difficulty is not in making things nice, but in figuring out how to display all of these things in ways that doesn’t obviously look overwhelming and broken.
As a concrete example, I think quick takes have been great for the site, but they only really took off in 2023. This is because we (in this case largely thanks to the EA Forum team) finally figured out how to give them the right level of visibility for the site where it’s subdued enough to not make anything you write on shortform feel high stakes, but where the best shortforms can get visibility comparable to the best posts.
(I could also go into the relationship between web design and moderation, which is large and where of course how your website is structured will determine what kind of content people write, which will determine the core engine of your website. Moderation without tech changes I think is rarely that effective, since if there is something in your core engine that incentivizes the wrong content, you are just in a sisyphean struggle to remove it manually again and again.)
I largely think the ontology you have of what makes web platforms succeed or fail doesn’t really make sense. Like, what causes “Zeitgeist”? I think in almost all circumstances when a large social-network like thing starts failing or being outcompeted, you can trace it back to specific choices that were made in the platform development. Sometimes that means the platform isn’t adapting appropriately to the changing winds of the internet, which is maybe what you mean, but most platforms can adapt, if you are alive enough to notice and have the resources to do it. The way to do it is largely “web development”.[1]
Taking things from a different angle, even if the categorization you list here makes sense, Lightcone of course works extensively on all of them, so it’s not super clear how it would affect the value of marginal donations to Lightcone (though how we affect the “Zeitgeist” is clearly more complicated and confusing). But yeah, we definitely would do a bunch more moderation if we had more slack as an organization, and would be in a better position to work with our top authors on doing “influencer campaigns” (though that sure doesn’t feel like the term I would use). It’s definitely been historically a substantial fraction of what staff work on.
But also also, the payoff curve for our fundraiser is quite spiky. Right now Lightcone is more in the regime of “going bankrupt by default”, and even if the LessWrong team survives Lightcone defaulting on its loan obligations, I am confident it will disrupt a large fraction of all of our activities, including work on LessWrong. So I think it makes more sense to think about the value of “having a LessWrong team and a Lighthaven at all” and use that to make the donation decision, though there is of course a non-trivial chance we will end up in a healthier financial space where marginal donations are less “reducing existential risk to Lightcone” and more marginal.
This isn’t always true. For example, I think StackOverflow is kind of fundamentally doomed with AI largely obsoleting its core business model, though I think even in that case, they might end up at least with a profitable model where they can somehow license their data, or figure out some way to become an AI provider themselves.
Wow thank you for replying so fast! I donated $5k just now, mainly because you reminded me that lightcone may not meet goal 1 and that’s definitely worth meeting.
About web design, am only slightly persuaded by your response. In the example of Twitter, I don’t really buy that there’s public evidence that twitter’s website work besides user-invisible algorithm changes has had much impact. I only use Following page, don’t use spaces, lists, voice, or anything on twitter. Comparing twitter with bluesky/threads/whatever, really looks to me like cultural stuff, moderation, and advertisement are the meat, not the sites. Something like StackOverflow has more complexity that actually impacts website, in some way (like there is lots of implicit complexity in tweet reply trees and social groups but that only impacts website through user-invisible algorithms). And a core part of my model is that recommendation algoritms have a much lower ceiling for LessWrong because it doesn’t have enough data volume. Like I don’t expect to miss stuff i really wanted to see on LW, reading the titles of most posts isn’t hard (i also have people recommend posts in person which helps...). Maybe in my model StackOverflow is at the ceiling of web dev leveraged-ness, because there is enough volume of posts written by quality people who can be nudged to spend a little more time on quality and can be sorted through, or something (vague thought).
When I look at lesswrong, it seems extremely bottlenecked on post quality. I think having the best AIs (o3 when it comes out might help significantly) help write and improve the core content of posts might make a big difference. I would bet that interventions that don’t route through more effort/intelligence/knowledge going into writing main posts would make me like LessWrong much more.
I do think you are very likely overfitting heavily on your experience :P
As an example, the majority of traffic on LW goes to posts >1 year old, and for those, it sure matters how people discover them, and what UI you have for highlighting which of the ~100k LessWrong posts to read. Things like the Best of LessWrong, Sequences and Codex pages make a big difference in what people read and what gets traffic, as does the concept page.
I agree for some of the most engaged people it matters more what the culture and writing tools and other things are, but I think for the majority of LessWrong users, even weighted by activity, recommendation systems and algorithm changes and UI affordances make a big difference.
It’s hard for me! I had to give up on trying.
The problem is that if I read the titles of most posts, I end up wanting to read the contents of a significant minority of posts, too many for me to actually read.
I strongly disagree. In fact, Less Wrong is an excellent example of the effect of web design on impact/popularity/effectiveness (both for better and for worse; mostly better, lately).