This comment helped me understand better what it looks like without the ‘cultural context’, thx.
Just to reply to one particular thing:
seeing people genuinely debate “is this worth more than $1.6K” [led me] to realise that people took the symbolic value really seriously
Do you agree that the literal monetary value of the site being down for a day is (likely) greater than that? Never mind the symbolism, there’s just like two thousand people who visit the Frontpage in a day, around half of whom might pay something in the range of $1-$10 for the site not to be randomly down on them for a day?
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.
If the entire site (not just the front page) was down, then I might on some days pay $1, if I was writing something where I wanted to cite/reference an older article. Otherwise, if I knew it would only last for a day, I would just wait it out.
Do you agree that the literal monetary value of the site being down for a day is (likely) greater than that? Never mind the symbolism, there’s just like two thousand people who visit the Frontpage in a day, around half of whom might pay something in the range of $1-$10 for the site not to be randomly down on them for a day?
Interesting. My intuition was “24 hours isn’t a long time, and it’s just the front page, people can surely come back later”. But while that’s a small inconvenience, $1 worth of inconvenience sounds plausible. So yeah, fair point! $1-10k actually seems like a fair value for this, thanks
EDIT: Reading the other comments on that point, it seems reasonable that LessWrong power users are best able to work around the outage, and the people who’d be most inconvenienced. And I expect most of those people to not know about GW (what is GreaterWrong anyway?), but this to correlate with caring less about the existence of LW. So I guess I’d lower the estimate a bit
https://greaterwrong.com is an alternate interface to LessWrong, implemented by… I think Clone of Saturn does most of the coding and Said Achmiz does most of the design work?
Same content, different design, slightly different set of features. (E.g. no karma change notification, no voting on tags, but comment navigation is improved.) I tend to use it over LW because it’s faster.
You can generally just replace lesswrong with greaterwrong in a URL.
This comment helped me understand better what it looks like without the ‘cultural context’, thx.
Just to reply to one particular thing:
Do you agree that the literal monetary value of the site being down for a day is (likely) greater than that? Never mind the symbolism, there’s just like two thousand people who visit the Frontpage in a day, around half of whom might pay something in the range of $1-$10 for the site not to be randomly down on them for a day?
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)
If the entire site (not just the front page) was down, then I might on some days pay $1, if I was writing something where I wanted to cite/reference an older article. Otherwise, if I knew it would only last for a day, I would just wait it out.
Interesting. My intuition was “24 hours isn’t a long time, and it’s just the front page, people can surely come back later”. But while that’s a small inconvenience, $1 worth of inconvenience sounds plausible. So yeah, fair point! $1-10k actually seems like a fair value for this, thanks
EDIT: Reading the other comments on that point, it seems reasonable that LessWrong power users are best able to work around the outage, and the people who’d be most inconvenienced. And I expect most of those people to not know about GW (what is GreaterWrong anyway?), but this to correlate with caring less about the existence of LW. So I guess I’d lower the estimate a bit
https://greaterwrong.com is an alternate interface to LessWrong, implemented by… I think Clone of Saturn does most of the coding and Said Achmiz does most of the design work?
Same content, different design, slightly different set of features. (E.g. no karma change notification, no voting on tags, but comment navigation is improved.) I tend to use it over LW because it’s faster.
You can generally just replace lesswrong with greaterwrong in a URL.
Oh, thanks! That sounds really useful when LW is being slow on mobile