I suspect that at the beginning LW was simply too small to provide enough meta-contrarian points to people attacking Eliezer.
When it’s just a personal blog of two people (Yudkowsky, Hanson), if you come and attack them, you are an asshole. When it becomes a popular website, coming and attacking the owner feels like a heroic fight against “the establishment”.
Overcoming Bias was technically a group blog, with a long list of contributors on the side. But in practice Yudkowsky/Hanson wrote the vast majority of the posts. I don’t know about traffic volume, but commenting volume did seem lower than LW in its heyday (though possibly more than LW nowadays). There was this commenter Caledonian that Eliezer was always complaining about.
These are just my memories, you could easily look this stuff up in the Internet Archive or whatever.
I suspect that at the beginning LW was simply too small to provide enough meta-contrarian points to people attacking Eliezer.
When it’s just a personal blog of two people (Yudkowsky, Hanson), if you come and attack them, you are an asshole. When it becomes a popular website, coming and attacking the owner feels like a heroic fight against “the establishment”.
Overcoming Bias was technically a group blog, with a long list of contributors on the side. But in practice Yudkowsky/Hanson wrote the vast majority of the posts. I don’t know about traffic volume, but commenting volume did seem lower than LW in its heyday (though possibly more than LW nowadays). There was this commenter Caledonian that Eliezer was always complaining about.
These are just my memories, you could easily look this stuff up in the Internet Archive or whatever.