I think you are spot on with your points about engagement. One of the thing that strikes me when reading old sequence posts is the amount of positive feedback Eliezer gets in the comments (way more than any LW posts ever get nowadays). I imagine this feedback played a role in motivating him to blog daily for such an extended run.
I wonder how many comments non-Eliezer/Scott(Yvain) threads got on the old lesswrong. Though even if other posters got alot of comments its possible the pressence of Eliezer/Scott drove alot of people to check the site (and subsequently comment on many threads). But it would still be a good sign if the engagement level was higher on general non-seqence threads. Perhaps we could eventually re-start the old dynamics.
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 think you are spot on with your points about engagement. One of the thing that strikes me when reading old sequence posts is the amount of positive feedback Eliezer gets in the comments (way more than any LW posts ever get nowadays). I imagine this feedback played a role in motivating him to blog daily for such an extended run.
I wonder how many comments non-Eliezer/Scott(Yvain) threads got on the old lesswrong. Though even if other posters got alot of comments its possible the pressence of Eliezer/Scott drove alot of people to check the site (and subsequently comment on many threads). But it would still be a good sign if the engagement level was higher on general non-seqence threads. Perhaps we could eventually re-start the old dynamics.
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.