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.
This is a breakdown of Less Wrong's recent new user traffic, data sourced from the Less Wrong Google Analytics account.
67% StumbleUpon
16% Google
5.4% Reddit
3.6% Hacker News
3% Harry Potter story
0.7% Facebook
0.3% Overcoming Bias
4% "The Long Tail"
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.
So we get an order of magnitude more traffic from Stumble Upon than anywhere else -- sometimes thousands of new users a day. Stumble Upon has been Less Wrong's biggest referrer of new users from the beginning of the site. That was surprising to me and I suspect it is also surprising to you. Some of our very best users, like Alicorn, came from Stumble Upon.
What can you do?
In order to get maximum Stumble power, you can't just stumble LW articles and only LW articles. You need to use Stumble Upon for a minute or two every now and then and vote up or down the random links it gives you. I know, it's annoying, but what are a few dust specks when we are talking about saving the world?
Thanks to Louie for help with this post.