Can we include save the world funding advertisements on Less Wrong? I don’t know how much that would be worth, but it could give us more credibility when we say that CraigsList (or Wikipedia) should do it. The credibility would be especially useful if we are actually talking about saving the world, and not just supporting the far less effecient charities supported by the general public.
Why not just start a fund that takes ad revenues from any site that wants to join. Less Wrong could be the founding member but any site that wanted to could direct ad revenue to the fund. A lot of sites don’t make enough to bother- a few dollars a month. But if you get 10,000 small blogs and a couple hundred large ones… thats a decent sized fund. And once the system is already in place then it gets easier to convince larger sites to join. There is a norm of sites giving their ad revenue to charity, etc.
This seems like both a wonderful idea, and not mutually exclusive with the original. Having this organization could potentially increase the credibility of the entire thing, get some underdog points with the general public (although I don’t know how powerful this is for average people), and act as a backup plan.
I think they actually are mutually exclusive. The original plan calls for quickly getting lots of people to support using ads on CraigsList to support inefficient causes that are already popular with the general public.
The plan to start with ads on LessWrong supporting high value organizations such as SIAI, and then expanding virally through other blogs has a long term goal of getting big sites such as CraigsList to join. If these big targets already have entrenched competing programs, this would be much harder.
To be compatible, the original plan needs to involve convincing people to support high value causes.
Can we include save the world funding advertisements on Less Wrong? I don’t know how much that would be worth, but it could give us more credibility when we say that CraigsList (or Wikipedia) should do it. The credibility would be especially useful if we are actually talking about saving the world, and not just supporting the far less effecient charities supported by the general public.
Why not just start a fund that takes ad revenues from any site that wants to join. Less Wrong could be the founding member but any site that wanted to could direct ad revenue to the fund. A lot of sites don’t make enough to bother- a few dollars a month. But if you get 10,000 small blogs and a couple hundred large ones… thats a decent sized fund. And once the system is already in place then it gets easier to convince larger sites to join. There is a norm of sites giving their ad revenue to charity, etc.
This seems like both a wonderful idea, and not mutually exclusive with the original. Having this organization could potentially increase the credibility of the entire thing, get some underdog points with the general public (although I don’t know how powerful this is for average people), and act as a backup plan.
I think they actually are mutually exclusive. The original plan calls for quickly getting lots of people to support using ads on CraigsList to support inefficient causes that are already popular with the general public.
The plan to start with ads on LessWrong supporting high value organizations such as SIAI, and then expanding virally through other blogs has a long term goal of getting big sites such as CraigsList to join. If these big targets already have entrenched competing programs, this would be much harder.
To be compatible, the original plan needs to involve convincing people to support high value causes.
Excellent idea. How many Less Wrong members have their own blogs and would participate in this?