Potentially confounding factors: People might visit LW from multiple computers/smartphones; people might have multiple accounts; many of those accounts areeitherspammers or from peoplewhono longer visit LW. I’m not sure which direction these factors would bias the overall number of lurkers in.
In my experience, internet forums tend to have many times as many lurkers as posters. Also, it’s a bit tricky to take all the “noise” out of the data, as you’re suggesting, and another thing to add to the list of noisemakers are the search engine crawling robots. They don’t all use the term “robot” in their user agents, and anybody can build a robot, so it’s hard to filter them all out.
That is surprisingly low- sitemeter indicates that LessWrong receives ~12,000 daily visits, and ~14,000 today. (I assume that that figure refers to unique visitors.) So there are probably ~3K lurkers.
Potentially confounding factors: People might visit LW from multiple computers/smartphones; people might have multiple accounts; many of those accounts are either spammers or from people who no longer visit LW. I’m not sure which direction these factors would bias the overall number of lurkers in.
In my experience, internet forums tend to have many times as many lurkers as posters. Also, it’s a bit tricky to take all the “noise” out of the data, as you’re suggesting, and another thing to add to the list of noisemakers are the search engine crawling robots. They don’t all use the term “robot” in their user agents, and anybody can build a robot, so it’s hard to filter them all out.