I believe that LW must be have a readership two orders of magnitude lower than SSC/ACX (in the thousands, or even just the hundreds, for LW, in the hundreds of thousands for SSC/ACX)
LW’s readership is about the same order of magnitude as SSC. Depending on the mood of the HN and SEO gods.
Not that I don’t believe you, but that’s also really hard for me to wrap my head around. Can you put numbers on that claim? I’m not sure if ACX has a much smaller readership than I’d imagined, or if LW has a much bigger one, but either way I’d like to know!
That is vastly more readership than I had thought. A naive look at these numbers suggests that a small city’s worth of people read Elizabeth’s latest post. But I assume that these numbers can’t be taken at face value.
It’s very hard for me to square the idea that these websites get roughly comparable readership with my observation that ACX routinely attracts hundreds of comments on every post. LW gets 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer comments than ACX.
So while I’m updating in favor of the site’s readership being quite a bit bigger than I’d thought, I still think there’s some disconnect here between what I’m thinking of by “readership” and the magnitude of “readership” is coming across in these stats.
Note that LW gets 1-2 OOM fewer comments on the average post, but not in total. I reckon monthly comments is same OOM. And if you add up total word count on each site I suspect LW is 1 OOM bigger each month. ACX is more focused and the discussion is more focused, LW is a much broader space with lots of smaller convos.
That makes a lot of sense. I do get the feeling that, although total volume on a particular topic is more limited here, that there’s a sense of conversation and connection that I don’t get on ACX, which I think is largely due to the notification system we have here for new comments and messages.
This is weekly comments for LessWrong over the last year. Last we counted, something like 300 on a SSC post? So if there are two SSC posts/week, LessWrong is coming out ahead.
I think ACX is ahead of LW here. In October, it got 7126 comments in 14 posts, which is over 1600/week. (Two of them were private with 201 between them, still over 1500/week if you exclude them. One was an unusually high open thread, but still over 1200/week if you exclude that too.)
In September it was 10350 comments, over 2400/week. I can’t be bothered to count August properly but there are 10 threads with over 500 comments and 20 with fewer, so probably higher than October at least.
Not too far separate though, like maybe 2x but not 10x.
(E: to clarify this is “comments on posts published in the relevant month” but that shouldn’t particularly matter here)
I don’t think LW gets at all fewer comments than ACX. I think indeed LW has more comments than ACX, it’s just that LW comments are spread out over 60+ posts in a given week, whereas ACX has like 2-3 posts a week. LessWrong gets about 150-300 comments a day, which is roughly the same as what ACX gets per day.
That is vastly more readership than I had thought. A naive look at these numbers suggests that a small city’s worth of people read Elizabeth’s latest post. But I assume that these numbers can’t be taken at face value.
I think this number can be relatively straightforwardly taken at face value. Elizabeth’s post was at the top of HN for a few hours, so a lot of people saw it. A small city’s worth seems about right for the number of people who clicked through and at least skimmed it.
LW’s readership is about the same order of magnitude as SSC. Depending on the mood of the HN and SEO gods.
Not that I don’t believe you, but that’s also really hard for me to wrap my head around. Can you put numbers on that claim? I’m not sure if ACX has a much smaller readership than I’d imagined, or if LW has a much bigger one, but either way I’d like to know!
https://www.similarweb.com/website/astralcodexten.substack.com/?competitors=lesswrong.com Currently shows ACX at something like 1.7x of LessWrong. At some points in the past LessWrong was slightly ahead.
LessWrong is a pretty big website. Here is a random snapshot of top-viewed pages from the last month from Google Analytics:
As you can see from the distribution, it’s a long tail of many pages getting a few hundred pageviews each month, which adds up a lot.
That is vastly more readership than I had thought. A naive look at these numbers suggests that a small city’s worth of people read Elizabeth’s latest post. But I assume that these numbers can’t be taken at face value.
It’s very hard for me to square the idea that these websites get roughly comparable readership with my observation that ACX routinely attracts hundreds of comments on every post. LW gets 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer comments than ACX.
So while I’m updating in favor of the site’s readership being quite a bit bigger than I’d thought, I still think there’s some disconnect here between what I’m thinking of by “readership” and the magnitude of “readership” is coming across in these stats.
Note that LW gets 1-2 OOM fewer comments on the average post, but not in total. I reckon monthly comments is same OOM. And if you add up total word count on each site I suspect LW is 1 OOM bigger each month. ACX is more focused and the discussion is more focused, LW is a much broader space with lots of smaller convos.
That makes a lot of sense. I do get the feeling that, although total volume on a particular topic is more limited here, that there’s a sense of conversation and connection that I don’t get on ACX, which I think is largely due to the notification system we have here for new comments and messages.
This is weekly comments for LessWrong over the last year. Last we counted, something like 300 on a SSC post? So if there are two SSC posts/week, LessWrong is coming out ahead.
I think ACX is ahead of LW here. In October, it got 7126 comments in 14 posts, which is over 1600/week. (Two of them were private with 201 between them, still over 1500/week if you exclude them. One was an unusually high open thread, but still over 1200/week if you exclude that too.)
In September it was 10350 comments, over 2400/week. I can’t be bothered to count August properly but there are 10 threads with over 500 comments and 20 with fewer, so probably higher than October at least.
Not too far separate though, like maybe 2x but not 10x.
(E: to clarify this is “comments on posts published in the relevant month” but that shouldn’t particularly matter here)
I don’t think LW gets at all fewer comments than ACX. I think indeed LW has more comments than ACX, it’s just that LW comments are spread out over 60+ posts in a given week, whereas ACX has like 2-3 posts a week. LessWrong gets about 150-300 comments a day, which is roughly the same as what ACX gets per day.
I think this number can be relatively straightforwardly taken at face value. Elizabeth’s post was at the top of HN for a few hours, so a lot of people saw it. A small city’s worth seems about right for the number of people who clicked through and at least skimmed it.
I’m surprised to see how many people view the Roko’s Basilisk tag. Is that a trend over more than just the last month?
It’s the norm, alas.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ndtb22KYBxpBsagpj/eliezer-yudkowsky-facts?commentId=u7iYAQM7MkGdhyTL9