Should Rational Animations invite viewers to read content on LessWrong?

I think lesswrong would need a beginner/application section to deal with something like this. I'd also suggest doing it at the end of a long and very detailed single video with intentionally lower production value and much higher math content, more like a manim video than a mainline youtube video. That will produce more natural filtering; in order to get into the technical side of youtube you need to speedwatch long, highly technical videos, and skim the beginnings of many long technical videos when the recommender gives them to you, while also being disciplined about not watching nontechnical stuff. people who are using that pattern of videowatching are the ones who should almost certainly get encouraged to come visit lesswrong.

When new users pop up in the moderation dashboard (which happens when they make their first post/comment), we see the HTTP referrer they had the first time they landed on the site. (At domain granularity, not page-level granularity, and only for users who clicked a link not users who typed the URL into the address bar). So, if we get a bunch of users coming from YouTube leaving bad comments that would make the site worse, we do have the ability to notice that's what happening.

That said, I do think that there's a real risk here. Among all the places on the internet, YouTube is unique in that it isn't filtering for people who read a lot, so it may attract a crowd that's both much larger and much less intellectually sophisticated than LW is used to. On the other hand, maybe the subset of people who wouldn't fit on LW wind up bouncing off the walls of text anyways. I could see it going either way.

Just my opinion, not based on any data...

Good:

• including a link to a relevant LW article in the description of the video

Bad:

• link to LW homepage or the Sequences
• link directly in the video, or the video explicitly encouraging people to click a link

The intuition is that people who read the video descriptions are more likely the kind of people we want here than those who only watch videos; and that discussions of specific topics under specific articles are more likely to be productive than just "here is a rationality website, do something".

First things first, I'm pro experiments so would be down to experiment with stuff in this area.

Beyond that, seems to depend on a couple of things:

• The details of what inviting viewers to LW would look like.
• What the LessWrong team thinks is the best use of our time.

The Details Matter

LessWrong currently has about 2,000 logged in users per day.  And to 20-100 new users each day (comparing the wide range including peaks recently). If the numbers of viewers wouldn't change that much, perhaps +10%, it wouldn't be a big deal. On the other hand, if Rational Animations was wildly successful and driving several hundred people to create LW accounts a day (with flow through to posts/comments), that'd be a big deal. That would require work to handle.

Another big question is the level of sophistication of users. If you're sending people to engage with more advanced stuff vs more intro content, that's a big difference in how I expect them to relate to the site.

Should LessWrong be providing intro material and answers?

Even before you posted this, I'd been thinking about this question. I think it terms of knowledge and skill, we're well positioned to provide a web resource of intro Alignment stuff. It's not quite the core thing of "create a thriving intellectual community that can make progress on the important hard problems", but might be a worthwhile enough opportunity that we should put time into it. I'd already been planning to do some work on our wiki system with an eye towards having more intro AI content for a broader audience.

So maybe. Maybe we should leaning into this as an opportunity even though it'll take work of both not letting it affect the site in bad ways (moderation, etc). and also possibly preparing better material for a broader audience.

Moderation Costs

To provide some insight: on the margin, more new users means more work for us. We process all first time posters/commenters manually, so there's a linear factor there, and of new users, some require follow-up and then moderation action. So currently, there's human cost in adding more people.

It might be possible to build tech to reduce the marginal cost of new users, but that itself is upfront work. Our recent moderation sprint cut down moderation effort a lot, but that was 3-4 weeks worth of work, and I think getting further gains would take at least similar time.

The other thing is it's one thing to have a system under mild pressure vs intense pressure. With the later, I think we'd find we have to do lots of things to plug the gap.

There's a question of whether huge influxes will happen involuntarily (somewhat my expectation), and in a world where we've built the tech to handle them, for sure also we should invite Rational Animations viewers.

Some rough thoughts:

I think it's kind of inevitable that LessWrong will eventually get a huge number of people attempting to join. I do think we’ll need to deal with that somehow or other sooner or later. I don't think we're ready yet. I think it’s possible for us to become ready if we prioritize it.

We’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. In addition to the rejected section we also recently shipped AutoRateLimits for low and negative karma users. I'll have a post about this soon, but the basic gist is that users start with a rate limit of 3 comments per day and 2 posts per week. That rate limit disappears once they hit 5 karma. If their karma becomes negative, this limit is made more strict. (At -1 karma, it becomes 1 post per week and 1 comment per day. At -15 karma they can only write 1 comment every 3 days. At -30 karma they can only submit 1 post every 2 weeks)

I don’t think this is enough to handle a really large influx. Even if they’re heavily rate limited, a bunch of people posting a mediocre comment every 3 days would add up to a significant drop in the site signal noise ratio. You could increase the rate limit but that does make things harder for new users and would make the site feel more punishing. Karma is only a rough measure of quality and there's a lot of room for disagreement over whether a given downvote is fair.

In the pre-GPT world I'd be more optimistic about making some kind of test that checks for whether a user has a reasonable understanding of what LessWrong is about. and is able to participate. In the post GPT world it's less clear how to do that sort of thing – any kind of automated test is basically a test for “do they know how to use an LLM?”.

There are options like “Let established users approve new users.” I'd set my bar fairly high for established users to avoid a situation where each generation of users lets in a somewhat weaker set of users. The kind of bar I’d feel safe with for users-with-approval-power is something like “They’ve gotten 2-3 posts highly uploaded in the LessWrong Annual Review”.

That all said, I'm not actually sure how big an influx we're likely to be talking about from your video. Would it be larger than the TIME article? 
 

I've seen this and will write up some thoughts / start participating in conversation in the next day or two.