I think this is a cool feature and it would be nice if LessWrong also adopted it.
As a counterpoint, knowing that the EA forums expose this significantly disincentivizes me, at the very least, from ever looking at or recommending the EA forums.
There is no way to track these statistics in a way that isn’t either inaccurate in adversarial scenarios or leaks far too much user information, or both. And there tends to be a certain cat-and-mouse game:
Initially there’s something absolutely basic like a hit counter.
Someone writes a script that hammers a page from a single IP, to boost the seeming engagement.
A set cardinality estimator is added to e.g. filter by only a single hit per IP.
Someone writes a script that hammers a page from many IPs, to boost the seeming engagement.
The hit counter is modified to e.g. only work if Javascript is enabled.
The script is ported to use a JS interpreter, or to directly poke the backend.
The hit counter is modified to e.g. also fingerprint what browser is being used.
The script is ported to use headless Chrome or somesuch.
The hit counter is modified to e.g. only capture views from logged-in visitors.
The script is modified to automatically create accounts and use them.
Account creation is modified to include a CAPTCHA or similar.
The script is modified to include a tool to bypass CAPTCHAs[1]
etc.
Note that every one of these back-and-forths a) also drop or distort data, or otherwise make life harder, for legitimate users, and b) leak more and more information about visitors.
I would not have too much of a problem with readership statistics if the resulting entropy was explicitly calculated, and if the forum precommitted to not in future making changes that continued the ratchet; without these I have serious concerns.
2. Someone writes a script that hammers a page from a single IP, to boost the seeming engagement.
In the case of EA forum, the readership statistics have no consequences whatsoever. They’re not even publicly viewable. Why would anyone try to artificially inflate them?
Hmm, well, I guess we could imagine a scenario where someone works at an EA nonprofit, and wants to impress their boss, so they write a blog post, and artificially inflate the readership statistics, and then show their boss a printout of how many people have read their blog post. And then the boss goes to EA Forum mods and says “I want these statistics to be harder to fake”. But then I imagine the EA Forum mods would respond “Why should we spend our time doing that? This is your problem, not ours. You should come up with a less stupid way to judge your underlings.”
As a counterpoint, knowing that the EA forums expose this significantly disincentivizes me, at the very least, from ever looking at or recommending the EA forums.
There is no way to track these statistics in a way that isn’t either inaccurate in adversarial scenarios or leaks far too much user information, or both. And there tends to be a certain cat-and-mouse game:
Initially there’s something absolutely basic like a hit counter.
Someone writes a script that hammers a page from a single IP, to boost the seeming engagement.
A set cardinality estimator is added to e.g. filter by only a single hit per IP.
Someone writes a script that hammers a page from many IPs, to boost the seeming engagement.
The hit counter is modified to e.g. only work if Javascript is enabled.
The script is ported to use a JS interpreter, or to directly poke the backend.
The hit counter is modified to e.g. also fingerprint what browser is being used.
The script is ported to use headless Chrome or somesuch.
The hit counter is modified to e.g. only capture views from logged-in visitors.
The script is modified to automatically create accounts and use them.
Account creation is modified to include a CAPTCHA or similar.
The script is modified to include a tool to bypass CAPTCHAs[1]
etc.
Note that every one of these back-and-forths a) also drop or distort data, or otherwise make life harder, for legitimate users, and b) leak more and more information about visitors.
I would not have too much of a problem with readership statistics if the resulting entropy was explicitly calculated, and if the forum precommitted to not in future making changes that continued the ratchet; without these I have serious concerns.
Be it ‘feeding audio captchas to a speech-to-text program’, or ‘just use Mechanical Turk’.
In the case of EA forum, the readership statistics have no consequences whatsoever. They’re not even publicly viewable. Why would anyone try to artificially inflate them?
Hmm, well, I guess we could imagine a scenario where someone works at an EA nonprofit, and wants to impress their boss, so they write a blog post, and artificially inflate the readership statistics, and then show their boss a printout of how many people have read their blog post. And then the boss goes to EA Forum mods and says “I want these statistics to be harder to fake”. But then I imagine the EA Forum mods would respond “Why should we spend our time doing that? This is your problem, not ours. You should come up with a less stupid way to judge your underlings.”