Traffic is up 30% from last month (which is very significant given that usually most of LessWrong’s traffic is driven by the large number of distributed links strewn all around the internet, and so is very stable and already quite high).
We also are being linked from a lot of places. A lot of Facebook links and a lot of Twitter links. I am not sure how to translate Google Sheets visitor numbers into traffic, but we’ve had pretty consistently 70+ people concurrently on the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, which is more than I’ve seen on basically any other Google Doc linked, and LessWrong, which usually has around 120k unique users a month usually gets around 40 concurrent users. So the additional traffic here seems pretty significant.
I have also heard of at least one higher up place in the UK government which said that they were actively following LessWrong to keep track of the Coronavirus stuff, though this is now a second-degree rumor, so treat this with some salt.
My sense is also that there is a broader ecosystem of people around LessWrong and the rationality community (which includes the EA and SSC communities), which ended up putting a lot of their coronavirus related thoughts here, and who are referring a lot to our content.
I don’t think any of this indicates overwhelming amounts of attention on us (which I am mostly glad for), but I do think it indicates attention from a significant subset of smart and informed people that I care a lot about.
Outsiders are paying attention to our coverage of the coronavirus? To a significant degree?
Traffic is up 30% from last month (which is very significant given that usually most of LessWrong’s traffic is driven by the large number of distributed links strewn all around the internet, and so is very stable and already quite high).
We also are being linked from a lot of places. A lot of Facebook links and a lot of Twitter links. I am not sure how to translate Google Sheets visitor numbers into traffic, but we’ve had pretty consistently 70+ people concurrently on the LessWrong Coronavirus Link Database, which is more than I’ve seen on basically any other Google Doc linked, and LessWrong, which usually has around 120k unique users a month usually gets around 40 concurrent users. So the additional traffic here seems pretty significant.
I have also heard of at least one higher up place in the UK government which said that they were actively following LessWrong to keep track of the Coronavirus stuff, though this is now a second-degree rumor, so treat this with some salt.
My sense is also that there is a broader ecosystem of people around LessWrong and the rationality community (which includes the EA and SSC communities), which ended up putting a lot of their coronavirus related thoughts here, and who are referring a lot to our content.
I don’t think any of this indicates overwhelming amounts of attention on us (which I am mostly glad for), but I do think it indicates attention from a significant subset of smart and informed people that I care a lot about.