Does someone have a guesstimate of the ratio of lurkers to posters on lesswrong?
With ‘lurker’ defined as someone who has a habit of reading content but never posts stuff (or posts only clarification questions)
In other words, what is the size of the LessWrong community relative to the number of active contributors?
In any given week there are around 40k unique logged out users, around ~4k unique logged in users and around 400 unique commenters (with about ~1-2k comments). So the ratio of lurkers to commenters is about 100:1, though more like 20:1 for people who visit more regularly and people who comment.
That link appears not to work. I’d be quite interested in what those numbers were 10 years ago when Deepmind and the like were getting excited about DNNs, but it wasn’t that interesting to the wider world, who generally didn’t believe that something like what is happening could happen.
(I believed in the theory of superintelligence, like there’s an exponential that’s going to go past this arbitary point eventually, and IIRC had wildly wildly too distant expectations of when it might begin to happen in any meaningful way. Just thinking back to that time makes the last couple of years shocking to comprehend.)
Does someone have a guesstimate of the ratio of lurkers to posters on lesswrong? With ‘lurker’ defined as someone who has a habit of reading content but never posts stuff (or posts only clarification questions)
In other words, what is the size of the LessWrong community relative to the number of active contributors?
You could check out the LessWrong analytics dashboard: https://app.hex.tech/dac32525-33e6-44f9-bbcf-65a0ba40152a/app/9742e086-54ca-4dd9-86c9-25fc53f90f80/latest
In any given week there are around 40k unique logged out users, around ~4k unique logged in users and around 400 unique commenters (with about ~1-2k comments). So the ratio of lurkers to commenters is about 100:1, though more like 20:1 for people who visit more regularly and people who comment.
That link appears not to work. I’d be quite interested in what those numbers were 10 years ago when Deepmind and the like were getting excited about DNNs, but it wasn’t that interesting to the wider world, who generally didn’t believe that something like what is happening could happen.
(I believed in the theory of superintelligence, like there’s an exponential that’s going to go past this arbitary point eventually, and IIRC had wildly wildly too distant expectations of when it might begin to happen in any meaningful way. Just thinking back to that time makes the last couple of years shocking to comprehend.)
Thank you so much.
It would be an interesting meta post if someone did a analysis of each of those traction peaks due to various news or other articles.
There’s a rule of thumb called the “1% rule” on the internet that 1% of users contribute to a forum and 99% only read the forum.
The mods probably have access to better analytics. I, for one, was a long-time lurker before I said anything.