If the ‘How did you come to find less wrong’ thread is accurate, a lot of people came here through HPMoR. I’m not sure how many would have come if the HPMoR forums were elsewhere, but it seems like a non-negligible fraction of the community.
I got here through HPMoR, too, but not at all because of these discussions; I got here through Eliezer’s links in the Author’s Notes. Indeed, I had no idea this was the primary venue for MoR discussions until the link on hpmor.com made it obvious. I don’t think it was very obviously linked to from anywhere on FFN before; or at least, I never saw it.
If we had dedicated forums, I think a series of banner “ads” (“Learn everything Rationalist Harry knows by reading the Sequences at Less Wrong”, etc.), in addition to the frequent links to MoR-related posts by commenters, might be just as good as (or maybe better than) these suboptimal discussion threads for awareness and traffic.
If the ‘How did you come to find less wrong’ thread is accurate, a lot of people came here through HPMoR. I’m not sure how many would have come if the HPMoR forums were elsewhere, but it seems like a non-negligible fraction of the community.
I got here through HPMoR, too, but not at all because of these discussions; I got here through Eliezer’s links in the Author’s Notes. Indeed, I had no idea this was the primary venue for MoR discussions until the link on hpmor.com made it obvious. I don’t think it was very obviously linked to from anywhere on FFN before; or at least, I never saw it.
If we had dedicated forums, I think a series of banner “ads” (“Learn everything Rationalist Harry knows by reading the Sequences at Less Wrong”, etc.), in addition to the frequent links to MoR-related posts by commenters, might be just as good as (or maybe better than) these suboptimal discussion threads for awareness and traffic.