Just rereading the entire “question” to try to assess it, and almost overlooked your [Viliam’s] helpful numbered list. I think I have replied as appropriate (if replying was appropriate?) and hope that the notification system will let me know if I should come back.
On the basis of your encouragement, I’m going to try to write something for the literacy software topic. Not sure upon what basis you think it might be “great”, but I could not find much that seemed to be related in my search efforts on LW. The obvious searches did produce some results, but how they are ranked is still unclear. For example, I remember a “literacy” search with four primary results, but two of them were for narrow senses of literacy such as “financial literacy”. Before starting to write, I’m going to try searching from the list of tags. (It would be helpful if there were an option to sort by the numbers there… That way I could spot the more relevant tags more easily. (I’m guessing that the numbers are the authors’ usage counts for the tags, but there should be a way to link to the readers’ counts to capture the other side of interest? (What people want to read about in contrast to what people want to write about. (Yet another symmetry thing?))))
Backing up to the top level, I haven’t obtained much insight into the original question. I guess my summary of my understanding now would be “We’re sort of above worrying about money, so go have fun with the LW tools we are creating.” I think that summary reflects input from at least two of the creators of the tools. The users’ side seems to be “We’re having fun and that’s why we do it.”
Here is a part of LW history that may be relevant to the question of money and sponsors: the Less Wrong website you see is, from a technical perspective, already a third version.
The first version was Overcoming Bias, a shared blog of Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, which started in 2006. Being just two guys’ personal WordPress blog, I assume the costs were negligible.
The second version was Less Wrong implemented with a clone of Reddit code in 2009, which started with importing the existing Eliezer’s articles. The initial software was free, but required some maintenance and extra functionality, which was provided by TrikeApps. TrikeApps is a company owned by Less Wrong user matt.
The third version that you see now, with a complete rewrite of code, was actually made only a few years ago. I couldn’t quickly find the exact year, but not sooner than 2017. This was the first version that was actually quite expensive to develop.
In other words, before Less Wrong started needing serious money to exist as a website, it already had more than 10 years of history. So there is a strong momentum. The people who donated money are presumably the people who liked the existing LW, and therefore their wish is probably to keep it roughly like it was, only more awesome. (The people who didn’t like the historical Less Wrong would probably not donate money to keep it alive.) The fans of Less Wrong, as a whole, are sufficiently rich to keep the website alive.
PS: You are taking this too seriously; probably more seriously than most users here. There is no need to overthink it. If you have an idea for a nice article, write it. If you don’t, just reading and commenting is perfectly okay.
The people who donated money are presumably the people who liked the existing LW, and therefore their wish is probably to keep it roughly like it was, only more awesome.
I think a better historical perspective would be that they liked was LessWrong was in it’s first years of existing and felt that LessWrong declined and that there was a potential to bring it back to it’s old glory and make it even beter.
I feel like this branch of the discussion might be related to Dunbar’s Number? Either for total members or for active participants. Is there any data for number of participants over time and system versions?
However I also feel like Dunbar’s Number is probably different for different people. Social hubs have large numbers of personal friends, whereas I feel overwhelmed by any group of 150. My personal Dunbar’s Number might be around 15?
Just rereading the entire “question” to try to assess it, and almost overlooked your [Viliam’s] helpful numbered list. I think I have replied as appropriate (if replying was appropriate?) and hope that the notification system will let me know if I should come back.
On the basis of your encouragement, I’m going to try to write something for the literacy software topic. Not sure upon what basis you think it might be “great”, but I could not find much that seemed to be related in my search efforts on LW. The obvious searches did produce some results, but how they are ranked is still unclear. For example, I remember a “literacy” search with four primary results, but two of them were for narrow senses of literacy such as “financial literacy”. Before starting to write, I’m going to try searching from the list of tags. (It would be helpful if there were an option to sort by the numbers there… That way I could spot the more relevant tags more easily. (I’m guessing that the numbers are the authors’ usage counts for the tags, but there should be a way to link to the readers’ counts to capture the other side of interest? (What people want to read about in contrast to what people want to write about. (Yet another symmetry thing?))))
Backing up to the top level, I haven’t obtained much insight into the original question. I guess my summary of my understanding now would be “We’re sort of above worrying about money, so go have fun with the LW tools we are creating.” I think that summary reflects input from at least two of the creators of the tools. The users’ side seems to be “We’re having fun and that’s why we do it.”
Your summary seems correct.
Here is a part of LW history that may be relevant to the question of money and sponsors: the Less Wrong website you see is, from a technical perspective, already a third version.
The first version was Overcoming Bias, a shared blog of Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, which started in 2006. Being just two guys’ personal WordPress blog, I assume the costs were negligible.
The second version was Less Wrong implemented with a clone of Reddit code in 2009, which started with importing the existing Eliezer’s articles. The initial software was free, but required some maintenance and extra functionality, which was provided by TrikeApps. TrikeApps is a company owned by Less Wrong user matt.
The third version that you see now, with a complete rewrite of code, was actually made only a few years ago. I couldn’t quickly find the exact year, but not sooner than 2017. This was the first version that was actually quite expensive to develop.
In other words, before Less Wrong started needing serious money to exist as a website, it already had more than 10 years of history. So there is a strong momentum. The people who donated money are presumably the people who liked the existing LW, and therefore their wish is probably to keep it roughly like it was, only more awesome. (The people who didn’t like the historical Less Wrong would probably not donate money to keep it alive.) The fans of Less Wrong, as a whole, are sufficiently rich to keep the website alive.
PS: You are taking this too seriously; probably more seriously than most users here. There is no need to overthink it. If you have an idea for a nice article, write it. If you don’t, just reading and commenting is perfectly okay.
I think a better historical perspective would be that they liked was LessWrong was in it’s first years of existing and felt that LessWrong declined and that there was a potential to bring it back to it’s old glory and make it even beter.
I feel like this branch of the discussion might be related to Dunbar’s Number? Either for total members or for active participants. Is there any data for number of participants over time and system versions?
However I also feel like Dunbar’s Number is probably different for different people. Social hubs have large numbers of personal friends, whereas I feel overwhelmed by any group of 150. My personal Dunbar’s Number might be around 15?
I don’t think the history here is about Dunbar’s number.