The Case for a Bigger Audience

I'm not sure LW understands why it succeeded in the early days. There's a lot of focus on important ideas like AI risk, but they don't seem to be the main reason. Consider this: two of the most popular LW authors, Eliezer and Scott, also write fiction and blog posts on random topics, and always get tons of comments no matter what they write about. It's almost as if people are attracted to writing style, and then rationalize that as newfound interest in the topic! To be fair, our community has made some attempts at developing writing style (/r/rational), but it seems half-hearted and mostly driven by attention. Hardly anyone seems interested in writing for its own sake.

As it happens, your writing style is pretty enjoyable: I find myself reading your posts even if I don't care much about the topic - in this case, popularity hacking. So maybe you don't have to think so much about popularity hacking? Just keep writing well, and the problem will solve itself.

(I could try to guess what makes a writing style enjoyable, but since my own style is flawed in many ways, that wouldn't be right. I've been meaning to work on my writing since forever, but there always seems to be something more important...)

Have any posts from LW 2.0 generated new conceptual handles for the community like "the sanity waterline"?

As a datapoint, here's a few I've used a bunch of times in real life due to discussing them on LW (2.0). I've used most of these more than 20 times, and a few of them more like 2000 times.

Embedded Agency [LW · GW], Demon Threads [LW · GW], Slack [LW · GW], Combat vs Nurture Culture [LW · GW], Rationality Realism [LW · GW], Local Validity [LW · GW], Common Knowledge [LW · GW], Free Energy [LW · GW], Out to Get You [LW · GW], Fire Alarm [LW · GW], Robustness to Scale [LW · GW], Unrolling Social Metacognition [LW · GW], The Steering Problem [? · GW], Goodhart's Law [LW · GW].

If I put on my startup hat, I hear this proposal as "Have you considered scaling your product by 10x?" A startup is essentially a product that can (and does) scale by multiple orders of magnitude to be useful to massive numbers of people, producing a significant value for the consumer population, and if you share attributes of a startup, it's a good question to ask yourself.

That said, many startups scale before their product is ready. I have had people boast to me about how much funding they've gotten for their startup, without giving me a story for how they think they can actually turn that funding into people using their product. Remember that time Medium fired 1/3rd of its staff. There are many stories of startups getting massive amounts of funding and then crashing. So you don't want to scale prematurely.

To pick something very concrete, one question you could as is "If I told you that LW had gotten 10x comments this quarter, do you update that we'd made 10x or even 3x progress on the art of human rationality and/or AI alignment (relative to the amount of progress we made on LW the quarter before)?" I think that isn't implausible, but I think that it's not obvious, and I think there are other things to focus on. To give a very concrete example that's closer to work we've done lately, if you heard that "LessWrong had gotten 10x answers to questions of >50 karma this quarter", I think I'd be marginally more confident that core intellectual progress had been made, but still that metric is obviously very goodhart-able.

A second and related reason to be skeptical of focusing on moving comments from 19 to 179 at the current stage (especially if I put on my 'community manager hat'), is a worry about wasting people's time. In general, LessWrong is a website where we don't want many core members of the community to be using it 10 hours per day. Becoming addictive and causing all researchers to be on it all day, could easily be a net negative contribution to the world. While none of your recommendations were about addictiveness, there are related ways of increasing the number of comments such as showing a user's karma score on every page, like LW 1.0 did.

Anyway, those are some arguments against. I overall feel like we're in the 'figuring out the initial idea and product' stage rather than the 'execute' stage and is where my thoughts are spent presently. I'm interested in more things like creating basic intro texts in AI alignment, creating new types of ways of knowing what ideas are needed [LW · GW] on the site, and focusing generally on the end of the pipeline of intellectual progress [LW · GW] right now, before focusing on getting more people spending their time on the site. I do think I'd quickly change my mind if net engagement of the site was decreasing, but my current sense is that it is slowly increasing.

Thoughts?

More articles, fewer comments per article -- perhaps these two are connected. ;)

In general, I agree that I would also prefer deeper debates below the articles, and more smart people to participate at them. However, I am afraid that the number of smart people on internet is quite limited (perhaps more than even the most pessimistic of us would imagine), and they usually have other things to do with higher priority than commenting on LW.

Also, LW is no longer new and exciting -- the people who wanted to say something, often already said it; the people who would be attracted to LW probably already found it; the people able and willing to write high-quality content typically already have their personal blogs. Of course this does not stop the discussion here completely; it just slows it down.

There was a time before LW2 when people complained that LW wasn't getting enough posts, but no one complained that posts weren't getting enough comments. I checked my own post history and there's a noticeable decline in average number of comments per post between now and 4 years ago (there's a gap in my posting history so I'm sure exactly when the decline in comments happened). Maybe someone could plot the average number of comments for all posts over time and check if it correlates with any changes that have been made to LW?

My guess is maybe it has to do with the old 10x karma multiplier for posts, which paradoxically discouraged people from making posts and redirected their energy into commenting. If that's the case maybe we can institute a smaller karma multiplier to better balance posts vs comments.

I’ve been reading basically every post for the past few months. I don’t usually leave comments though, unless it’s to support and thank the author. (Thanks for writing this! Funny enough I also noticed recently how few comments there are, and it seemed worth bringing up.) I guess I feel like I just don’t have much to add to most posts.

Regarding RSS: yes, it is still running. In fact, that’s how I found this post!

Have any posts from LW 2.0 generated new conceptual handles for the community like "the sanity waterline"? If not, maybe it's because they just aren't reaching a big enough audience.

Doesn't this get the causality backwards? I'm confused about the model that would generate this hypothesis.

One way I can imagine good concepts not taking root in "the community" is if not enough of the community is reading the posts. But then why would (most of) the prescriptions seem to be about advertising to the outside world?

As someone new to the community i can testify that i probably would have had more motivation to write if i gotten more comments and discussion. especially since, at least for me, the things i think to publish aren't necessarily very polished ideas, but things i would like to get input on.

Get Scott Aaronson to mention the fact that LW 2.0 is a real-life instance of eigendemocracy in one of his "announcements" posts. The credit is his for inspiring the new voting system.

Have you talked about what LW2's system actually is, in detail, anywhere?

I consider these sorts of things (collaborative filtering) to be incredibly important, it's become obvious that, say, reddit's one account, one vote in any context system is inadequate.

It seems to me that eigentrust, or something like it, probably models rank aggregation correctly. That is, I'm getting a sense that you could probably sort content very efficiently by asking users for comparison judgements between candidates, building a graph where each comparison is an edge, then running eigentrust to figure out what's at the top.

So I've been thinking about eigentrust. Gradually working my way through this Eigentrust++ paper (though I have no idea whether this is a good place to start digging into the literature and probably wont make it very far)

My current position is that sometime around now, or maybe in the next two or three months, is the time to experiment with getting more core engagement and generally reaching a broader audience. Q&A in particular is something that I can imagine productively scaling to a larger audience, in a way that actually causes the contributions from the larger audience to result in real intellectual progress.

Ben summarized a lot of my general thoughts on this, but overall I think I agree with a good chunk of your sentiment. I think all the four things you list seem like good things to try, though I am kind of holding off on doing them until I feel more comfortable with the scalability of our intellectual progress machine.

The credit is his for inspiring the new voting system.

Are you sure? I don't think I have read the post you linked but I do remember having discussed changing the voting system in such a direction on the old LessWrong.

I think people are just writing about less accessible things on average. I wouldn't want to have more comments just by not talking about abstruse topics, at the moment. I love you all, but I also love AI safety :P

I briefly looked at the comments within 1 year on some old LW posts, and the numbers seem to match from then too - only ~25 comments on the more rareified meta-ethics posts, well below average.

Hi all,

I run growth for a decently large startup, if you wanted to increase the audience for LW, there are numerous things you could do differently.

For better or for worse, individual blogs/content websites are fading on the web with a few notable exceptions that do growth really well. If you want to increase your audience, engaging with the large networks is generally a good first start.

Speaking as an outsider, the site seems geared to explicitly not wanting a large audience. That's a completely reasonable decision. You should be explicit about what the goals are for this platform.

So this post seemed to get a pretty healthy number of comments. I think others have suggested the idea of discussion prompts or discussion questions to engage commenters at the end of the post; maybe just having this post say "I want more comments" played a similar role. I was implicitly assuming that readership and comment numbers track each other closely, but maybe that's not true. It might be interesting to analyze the LW article database and see how ratios between viewership, comments, and votes have changed over time.

I was coining more terms and bringing them to lesswrong. I still do that but me doing that depends on my available time to write. Which is variable.

Well, what's the purpose of a bigger audience?

What is the purpose of LW in the first place?

Folks! What you have here is the explanation of all man made issues and thus a

MANUAL TO SAVING HUMANITY!

THIS is what makes LW (or at least it's content) not only WORTHY but OBLIGED to get a bigger audience!!!

I am passionate for and working on this - who is with me?