Thanks for thinking about these things. Very useful comments and questions.
Having a karma requirement for moderating comments seems like a really, really good idea. I’m gonna sleep on that and see if I can think of any downsides. At the very least, we should probably have a requirement that you must have positive karma (which I don’t think is currently required?). I wonder how much moderation is done by people with less than a certain level of karma? It’s possible significant amounts of moderation is being done by people with zero or negative karma which is probably not good and it might improve things if only we change that. I’ll have to look at things before I implement this change to see where the best cutoff might be. You guestimate of 20 sounds like about the right ballpark but the data will be more informative.
I was actually a little sad, thinking about how maybe this campaign could dilute LW… until I remembered something subtle about LW: 96% of LW participants are lurkers—and amazingly, this is not a made-up statistic! Even though there are 5000 regular, daily readers, we only have 200 participants who actively comment in any given month. I’ve only attracted 2-3 new participants to LW with my current AdWords campaign, so you you’ll have to wait until I do 10x as much promotion before you’d expect to see a new user register and make a comment. The growth rate from this campaign is under a person a day right now and probably won’t attract more than 5 new commenters / yr unless I hit on a really good landing page or start pouring obscene amounts of money into it. My goal is to get to 1 new participant / day but I’m still only about 20% there.
A totally different way to look at things is that there are roughly 500,000 English speakers worldwide who are IQ 145+. So our community is 100x smaller than the theoretical limit of highly qualified new readers who would be able to join without lowering the intellectual quality of our community. This is just multiplying English speakers by 0.15%… I’ve been trying to think of more rigorous ways to estimate theoretical upper-bounds or lower-bounds on the potential community size of LW.
I’m not saying we could support 100x as many people as a community if we grew too fast, but there are lots of communities with 100x as many members. Obviously the participants don’t think they’ve imploded. For instance, we have less posts than all 2246 message boards tracked by Big Boards and less users than almost all of them as well. We don’t even have 15% of the content of their lowest ranked forum #2246… which happens to be about Dance Dance Revolution. So unfortunately, rationality is in no eminent danger of growing out of control unless we re-brand the site to be about “refining the art of rationality, motor-sports, video games, and hot chicks”.
Thanks for thinking about these things. Very useful comments and questions.
Having a karma requirement for moderating comments seems like a really, really good idea. I’m gonna sleep on that and see if I can think of any downsides. At the very least, we should probably have a requirement that you must have positive karma (which I don’t think is currently required?). I wonder how much moderation is done by people with less than a certain level of karma? It’s possible significant amounts of moderation is being done by people with zero or negative karma which is probably not good and it might improve things if only we change that. I’ll have to look at things before I implement this change to see where the best cutoff might be. You guestimate of 20 sounds like about the right ballpark but the data will be more informative.
I was actually a little sad, thinking about how maybe this campaign could dilute LW… until I remembered something subtle about LW: 96% of LW participants are lurkers—and amazingly, this is not a made-up statistic! Even though there are 5000 regular, daily readers, we only have 200 participants who actively comment in any given month. I’ve only attracted 2-3 new participants to LW with my current AdWords campaign, so you you’ll have to wait until I do 10x as much promotion before you’d expect to see a new user register and make a comment. The growth rate from this campaign is under a person a day right now and probably won’t attract more than 5 new commenters / yr unless I hit on a really good landing page or start pouring obscene amounts of money into it. My goal is to get to 1 new participant / day but I’m still only about 20% there.
A totally different way to look at things is that there are roughly 500,000 English speakers worldwide who are IQ 145+. So our community is 100x smaller than the theoretical limit of highly qualified new readers who would be able to join without lowering the intellectual quality of our community. This is just multiplying English speakers by 0.15%… I’ve been trying to think of more rigorous ways to estimate theoretical upper-bounds or lower-bounds on the potential community size of LW.
I’m not saying we could support 100x as many people as a community if we grew too fast, but there are lots of communities with 100x as many members. Obviously the participants don’t think they’ve imploded. For instance, we have less posts than all 2246 message boards tracked by Big Boards and less users than almost all of them as well. We don’t even have 15% of the content of their lowest ranked forum #2246… which happens to be about Dance Dance Revolution. So unfortunately, rationality is in no eminent danger of growing out of control unless we re-brand the site to be about “refining the art of rationality, motor-sports, video games, and hot chicks”.