On Less Wrong traffic and new users -- and how you can help

When you stumble something on Less Wrong you like or post a link to Less Wrong on the greater Internet, post here. You will be rewarded with large amounts of karma and kudos. Also, cake.

Haven't been Stumbling anything (I may start), but I've been sneaking LW links into Reddit comments from time to time. Mostly on /r/atheism when I notice fellow atheists not being as rational as they think they are. (It's a good place to spread advanced rationality because it's a group of people who are already mostly trying to be rational, if not always succeeding, or people who at least realize that science and rationality are good ideas. e.g. I'll link to The Bottom Line if someone's gotten into a silly Facebook-comment debate and they've come asking for help thinking up arguments for a conclusion they've already decided. Or when a debate over the definitions of "atheist" and "agnostic" starts up (this happens about fifteen thousand times a day), sometimes I'll point people to things like Disputing Definitions and other things in the Words sequence. I've also been trying to propagandize transhumanism a bit when there's an opportunity to do so non-obnoxiously/fanatically, e.g. when a discussion of death comes up and the "yes, death is obviously a bad thing" side is underrepresented.)

(I can haz caek nao?)

Fair warning: Stumbleupon is perhaps not TV Tropes grade, but it is a definite life-eating hazard. It is a very good way to fill out your collection of pictures of kittens, though.

I don't know their current algorithm but last time I checked StumbleUpon used to divide all votes by number of urls user submitted from a particular domain, so what you're suggesting in #1 has zero value - upvoting 100 links from lesswrong or 1 gives identical result (or even less if thet have spam detection on top of that).

If you're trying to outpaperclip SEO-paperclippers you'll need a lot better than that.

If you're trying to outpaperclip SEO-paperclippers you'll need a lot better than that.

I doubt LessWrong has any competitors serious enough for SEO.

Yudkowsky.net comes up as #5 on the "rationality" search, and being surrounded by uglier sites it should stand out to anyone who looks past Wikipedia. But LessWrong is only mentioned twice, and not on the twelve virtues page that new users will see first. I think you could snag a lot of people with a third mention on that page, or maybe even a bright green logo-button.

I've been carrying out a minor LW jihad on Facebook, for what it's worth. Will join stumbleupon forthwith.

You mention an article making the rounds about imagining your life without something good. A quick Google search didn't turn anything up, can anyone provide me with a link?

Kevin, can you clarify what you mean by "real chance" when you say

We try to take existential risk seriously around these parts. Each marginal new user that reads anything on Less Wrong has a real chance of being the one that tips us from existential Loss to existential Win.

?

Your statement is clearly true, but so is the statement "there's a real chance that there are unicorns in Asia" which is nobody makes. How likely do you think it is that Less Wrong will prevent an existential risk?

For concreteness, I'll say that I personally view Less Wrong and the dating website OkCupid as having similar order of magnitude likelihood of making a difference. Both websites connect smart people. Less Wrong's population is smarter and more interested in existential risk than OkCupid's population. But OKCupid reaches many more people than Less Wrong does (having something like 1.2 million members) and I don't think that what people do on Less Wrong is so much more valuable than what people do on OkCupid for Less Wrong's superior content to swamp the size difference between the two communities.

A quick google search tells me that stumbleupon bots have already been written. This saves me several hours of coding time.

;)

The effectiveness of StumbleUpon can be greatly over represented by raw traffic. For example, I added HP:MOR. At the time of this comment, it has received 6704 views, but only 59 thumb ups (of which two are myself and MikeBlume). Stumblers will leave a site quickly for the next Stumble, if it doesn't grab their attention.

(Though I do consider it worthwhile to have introduced the fan fic to 57 people who liked it enough to give the thumbs up.)

I thought LW traffic was skyrocketing (there was a graph) because of the HP fanfic. Maybe not?

The 16% for Google is artificially high because many of those hits are users that are using Google as an address bar by searching for Less Wrong.

Can you break out the people searching for "lesswrong" or "less wrong"?

Does linking to LW on facebook help?