I do not agree that the monetary value of this intervention is anywhere near that.
I didn’t notice—I don’t look at the front page, just using my bookmark to /allPosts. Many use GreaterWrong or RSS, and would be unaffected. Are there logs on how many actual visitors saw the front page down and did not hit any other pages until it was back up?
I’m a pretty heavy site user, and I would not pay $1 to have the site up a few hours or a day earlier in case of an outage. I’d likely pay on the order of $0.10-0.25/day on an annual basis if asked (and if it were a registered charity where I understood how my donation would be used), but having a day or two of downtime is just fine with me.
I’d especially not pay $1 to have the site be up sooner in case of a ritual/demonstration that is intentionally created by a site admin. If they think having the site down for a bit is a positive thing (indicated by the fact they wrote the code to do it), I defer to their wisdom.
You don’t look at the LW Frontpage, and neither do GW users or RSS users. This means you and they are outside the set of 2,000 daily visitors, so your lack of inconvenience is not evidence about theirs.
(I don’t have any logs, may look into getting some. As we don’t have that info our uncertainty around that should be factored into the estimate.)
You not wanting to pay $1 if the site was down is indeed a datapoint. I think many people would be fine with an outage. (I still think many would find it irritating.)
I understand that you especially wouldn’t in the case of the symbolism. I’m just trying to pin down the object level effects, to understand what was at stake before counting in all the symbolism.
Overall I’m not certain, it’s plausible the number is lower...
I don’t know how many of the 2000 would do the same thing but switching to GW for the day was fairly obvious to me. On the other hand I use GW on and off so this maybe gave me an advantage but I think the post on surviving the outage suggested doing that too. Short of checking GW traffic I guess it’s hard to know how many did this.
It is noteworthy that I think the sort of person who would bother to pay a dollar to keep the site up is also the sort of person who disproportionately might use greaterwrong (or, for that matter, the /allPosts page). The frontpage gets a lot of views but I think most of them are people who aren’t using LessWrong that seriously.
I said earlier to Ben I thought the $3k number was at least plausible and seemed within an order of magnitude of right. But thinking more I do suspect it’s on the lower end of that order of magnitude I think there’s only a few hundred users for whom the LessWrong frontpage is actually enough-better than whatever else they might be doing that day that they might pay a dollar.
I do not agree that the monetary value of this intervention is anywhere near that.
I didn’t notice—I don’t look at the front page, just using my bookmark to /allPosts. Many use GreaterWrong or RSS, and would be unaffected. Are there logs on how many actual visitors saw the front page down and did not hit any other pages until it was back up?
I’m a pretty heavy site user, and I would not pay $1 to have the site up a few hours or a day earlier in case of an outage. I’d likely pay on the order of $0.10-0.25/day on an annual basis if asked (and if it were a registered charity where I understood how my donation would be used), but having a day or two of downtime is just fine with me.
I’d especially not pay $1 to have the site be up sooner in case of a ritual/demonstration that is intentionally created by a site admin. If they think having the site down for a bit is a positive thing (indicated by the fact they wrote the code to do it), I defer to their wisdom.
Right. I’ll briefly reply to each point:
You don’t look at the LW Frontpage, and neither do GW users or RSS users. This means you and they are outside the set of 2,000 daily visitors, so your lack of inconvenience is not evidence about theirs.
(I don’t have any logs, may look into getting some. As we don’t have that info our uncertainty around that should be factored into the estimate.)
You not wanting to pay $1 if the site was down is indeed a datapoint. I think many people would be fine with an outage. (I still think many would find it irritating.)
I understand that you especially wouldn’t in the case of the symbolism. I’m just trying to pin down the object level effects, to understand what was at stake before counting in all the symbolism.
Overall I’m not certain, it’s plausible the number is lower...
I don’t know how many of the 2000 would do the same thing but switching to GW for the day was fairly obvious to me. On the other hand I use GW on and off so this maybe gave me an advantage but I think the post on surviving the outage suggested doing that too. Short of checking GW traffic I guess it’s hard to know how many did this.
It is noteworthy that I think the sort of person who would bother to pay a dollar to keep the site up is also the sort of person who disproportionately might use greaterwrong (or, for that matter, the /allPosts page). The frontpage gets a lot of views but I think most of them are people who aren’t using LessWrong that seriously.
I said earlier to Ben I thought the $3k number was at least plausible and seemed within an order of magnitude of right. But thinking more I do suspect it’s on the lower end of that order of magnitude I think there’s only a few hundred users for whom the LessWrong frontpage is actually enough-better than whatever else they might be doing that day that they might pay a dollar.
GW had about 40 additional users show up on that day (which corresponds to roughly 35% traffic increase)