Discussion forum growth is not quite the same as general website growth. Having forums grow a lot while maintaining the culture that drew the initial contributors there is still something of an unsolved problem, and fast enough growth can kill forum cultures dead through the eternal September effect. It basically happens at the level of comment-response pairs. Things are good as long as most interactions have at least one side familiar with existing site culture, but once you start getting outside users talking with other outside users in volume, there's not much left maintaining the older culture. And if the outside users come from The Internet In General, the new forum culture is going to end up looking like The Internet In General.
Active and clueful moderation can help, but that requires moderators who can spend a lot of time daily doing active and clueful moderation.
Some forums make things work a bit better by managing to make their content interesting enough that people are willing to pay $5 or $10 for making a new account, and then asking that. Drive-by trolling and spam becomes harder, but regular users with various issues can still make lots of work for active and clueful m...
Things are good as long as most interactions have at least one side familiar with existing site culture, but once you start getting outside users talking with other outside users in volume, there's not much left maintaining the older culture.
Worse yet, the new users may comply with the culture in form but not in spirit. In the concrete case of LW, this means new users who are polite and non-confrontational, familiar with the common topics and the material covered in the classic OB/LW articles, making appeals to all the right principles of epistemology and logic, etc., etc., but who nevertheless lack the ability and commitment for truly unbiased and open-minded discussion at the level that used to be the standard. I think this is indeed what has been happening, and I don't see any way an open-access forum could prevent this course of events from taking place eventually.
(It's hard to make a point like this without sounding arrogant and conceited, so I should add that in retrospect, I believe that when I joined LW, at the time it probably caused a net lowering of its standards, which were higher back then.)
When I first joined, I barely commented, because I felt it would inexcusably lower the average comment quality. I still refrain on topics which I’m interested, but not competent in; but for the last 18 months or so I’ve felt more comfortable with the vector my comments apply to the site average.
Separately, I generally agree with Will Newsome about the high quality of your contributions.
Its also worth noting that one of Hacker News' main strategies is flooding the page with advanced math and other highly technical topics whenever it gets serious mainstream attention.
I already have a solution. To reduce the bounce rate on Less Wrong, we just remove all the math and rationality stuff that requires high IQ and metacognition, and replace all that with lolcats.
I'm all for trying to make the LW front page more engaging, but I am skeptical about an assumption pervading this post: that growth should be a major goal, and that faster growth is better aside from major pathologies like spammers and trolls.
For a website that exists mostly to make money (by selling things, advertising a product, gaining visibility for a person or company, etc.) this is a good assumption: all else being equal, you want more page views, lower bounce rates, higher conversion rate, etc. But LW doesn't exist mostly to make money; it exists (in high-minded principle) to refine the art of human rationality and (more prosaically) to provide interest and entertainment for its participants, and for these purposes some visitors are much, much more valuable than others and many have negative value. (This is true even taking into account the prospective value of LW to those visitors.)
By definition, LW wants (or should want) to "grow optimally" -- but that may mean "grow very rapidly" or "grow slowly" or even "not grow at all, at present".
(I think you may have a wrong idea of what "pontificate" means. Either that or you're being gratuitously rude, which I'm going to assume you aren't.)
The following two propositions are different. (1) Growth is not always 100% good. (2) Growth is not always good. #1 is what you stated. #2 is what I'm saying. #2 goes much further than #1 does. The obvious inference from #1 is "make sure you grow, but take some measures to mitigate the possible downsides"; the obvious inference from #2 is "consider carefully whether growth is what you want".
I don't know whether I want LW to grow, or how fast, or when (which is why I said that optimal growth for LW could be any of several things, including "grow very rapidly") so I can't really give you "[my] reasons for not wanting it to grow". What I can do is to give some possible reasons why growth -- especially rapid growth, especially especially rapid growth by the mechanism you're implicitly proposing -- might be the Wrong Thing.
The main reason is this: It may not be possible to grow rapidly by the sort of means you describe without changing the demographics of LW in a way that would lower its qua...
Epiphany, I'd love to see you actually take a stab at an introductory paragraph for the About page that you think would work well.
I don't think anyone has the budget to hire a professional web marketer. Additionally, the crowd we're "marketing" to is a bit atypical, so it's not clear how well standard principles would transfer. Less Wrong is full of long-form essays on rationality; if you don't like reading, you're probably not going to like the site.
I think it would be great for more people to produce variations and suggestions for the LW newc...
I would like to see more diversity. Not just in terms of demographics (though that too), but in terms of fields and specialties. There is nothing inherent in rationality that should limit it to computer/ math/ physics/ philosophy types. There are highly intelligent people in other fields also, and I feel like people from other disciplines could introduce an influx of new ideas.
Also, I think recruiting new members is a positive goal, and fully support it. I would like to see the community grow.
There is nothing inherent in rationality that should limit it to computer/ math/ physics/ philosophy types.
Actually, I'm pretty sure there is.
It really really helps to be comfortable with math to do rationality, there is no way around it. The kind of people who have both the capability and interest to master things like programming or probability theory or Quantum mechanics will tend to be what you call "computer/ math/ physics/ philosophy types".
There are highly intelligent people in other fields also, and I feel like people from other disciplines could introduce an influx of new ideas.
But again how do you know we don't already efficiently mine smart people from other disciplines? Surely you don't expect smart people to be evenly distributed between professions? Consider the 2011 census:
In order of frequency, we include 366 computer scientists (32.6%), 174 people in the hard sciences (16%) 80 people in finance (7.3%), 63 people in the social sciences (5.8%), 43 people involved in AI (3.9%), 39 philosophers (3.6%), 15 mathematicians (1.5%), 14 statisticians (1.3%), 15 people involved in law (1.5%) and 5 people in medicine (.5%).
Computer scientists probably are...
Potentially useful: When I first got linked to LW. the thing that hooked me was the "featured articles" thing (which prompted me to read "rational home buying", which was totally awesome) and the "yes, a blog" post in the about page.
EDIT: IMO, we should gather more stories of people getting hooked to see what actually works and what to emphasize.
Is it known what portion of new users land on the front page versus, say, being linked directly to an article?
Is 60% actually high for a blog/forum? I'm not a professional but I was under the impression that it varied drastically based on what your website is, and that blogs/forums are naturally really low. I'd imagine it would be especially true for LessWrong, simply because of the nature of the material.
Google Analytics Benchmark Averages for Bounce Rate
- 40-60% Content websites
- 30-50% Lead generation sites
- 70-98% Blogs
- 20-40% Retail sites
- 10-30% Service sites
- 70-90% Landing pages
This is what a cursory search pulled up. Is this way off base...
I want to prefix this by saying I am interested in improving the front page anyways and that I'm not experienced with google analytics, but did check its help page before posting.
As far as I can tell the bounce rate includes return visitors. This leads me to suspect that the high bounce rate could be from regulars checking LW and leaving when they don't see any interesting new posts or recent comments. Also, I think we can do a better job of meeting both goals, but I for one am willing to accept a fairly high bounce rate if it keeps the quality of newcomers high and the current system seems to be doing a passible job there.
Sure, the bounce rate may include returning users, but you seem to be missing this really important point:
When I first saw the site, I had no idea what it was about. I left. Without clicking anything.
When I saw the site the second time, I read the about us page, still didn't know what it was about, and left. Without clicking anything.
A web professional who has worked with marketers (me) is telling you "the web marketing sucks".
We really don't know what percentage of the bouncers are new users from this page. But if we want growth, we can't just tell ourselves that most of the people who are leaving are returning users and brush this off. Consider this:
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s18lesswrong&r=36
If the new users were all registering, the growth should be how much faster than that?
(I'm hereby updating the OP with this. Thanks for pointing it out.)
Something just clicked in my brain... As far as I can tell, the LW front page doesn't have a link to either the Welcome thread or the FAQ. Instead, the intro section alone has a dozen links, and even the About page doesn't get mentioned until the end, and is perhaps awkwardly prefaced "For more..." as if the previous reading material wasn't enough to start with. (The FAQ is linked on the About page though, albeit hidden in the middle.)
No idea if this comment will even get seen by anybody, but I felt like giving some anecdotal insight since I have an oddball curiosity in how website communities grow and how webdesign can make that growth positive or negative.
I've never heard of Less Wrong before 20 minutes ago. Found it randomly via a video game website where someone had linked to an article here, took a few moments to look around...
And I almost bounced from the main page. Why? My guess is jargon. There's a lot of it on your main page, and the first link in the "Welcome to Less Wron...
I'm not sure growth is necessarily a thing LW needs per se, as some of the other commenters have pointed out. But I do think there is scope for improving the landing page and decreasing the bounce rate of people we want to be here. That last is crucial.
In my case, I still only have a handful of comments due to not having much time to post at the moment, but I got here through HPMOR and read the Sequences... and still had problems sticking around to post anything as I was somewhat underwhelmed by the design and ease of navigation. I think things can definitely be made a little more user-friendly without ruining the community.
There is a additional responses that people go out for reasons than bad desing or misinformation. The goal is not "outsiders completely agree with the core mission in the first phrase", but a broad idea. Sites like facingthesingularity.com and intelligenceexplosion.com seems like paradigms of good exposition.
I don't know if we want more visitors as much as we want more converts. We really do have a lot in common with a phyg, in that we have a particular worldview that isn't mainstream and that we're trying to spread.
If you could find more detailed information on referring sites or searches that are driving people to the site, that could be helpful. I don't know squat about it, but I'd think on site web analytics would provide direction on improving retention. I do hope that the keepers of the site avail themselves of your web marketing experience.
How do I know this? I got a copy of the website analytics.
The bounce rate for LessWrong's home page is 60%!
To be clear: Over half the people who visit LessWrong are going away without even clicking anything.
Yet how many NEW visitors are there? Almost half of the visitors are new!
Granted, new visitor statistics aren't perfect, but that's a LOT of people.
Simple math should tell us this:
If we got the bounce rate down around 30% (a reasonable rate for a good site) by making sure every visitor sees something awesome immediately, AND make sure that each visitor can quickly gauge how much they're going to relate to the community (assuming the new users are the right target audience), it would theoretically double the rate of growth, or more. There's a multiplier effect if the bounce rate is improved: you get better placement in search engines. Search engines get more users if they feel that the engine finds interesting content, not just relevant content.
It's been argued that it's possible that most of the bounces are returning visitors checking for new content. Well if half the visitors to the site each month are new, and we did a wonderful job of showing them that LessWrong is awesome, then the amount of returning visitors could double each month. We're getting a tiny, tiny fraction of that growth:
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s18lesswrong&r=36
Why did I write you guys so much in the home page rewrites thread? Because I am a web professional who works with web marketing professionals at my job and to me it was blatantly obvious that there's that much room for improvement in the growth of LessWrong. Doing changes like the ones I suggested wouldn't even take long. Because I like this site, and I knew it had potential to grow by leaps and bounds if somebody just paid a little bit of attention to real web marketing. Because I was confused when I first found this site - I had no idea what it's about, or why it's awesome. I closed the home page, myself. Another friend mentioned LessWrong. Curiosity perked up again. I came back and read the about page. That didn't make things clearer either. I left again without going further. Friends kept telling me it was awesome. I came back one day and finally found an awesome article! It took me three tries to figure out why you guys are awesome because the web marketing is so bad. The new proposals, although they are well-meaning and it's obvious that John_Maxwell_IV cares about the site, are more of the same bad marketing.
I've been interested in web marketing for ten years. It's a topic I've accumulated a lot of information about. As I see it, the way these guys are going about this is totally counter-intuitive to web basic marketing principles. They don't even seem to know how harsh users are the first time they see a new website. They tend to just go away if it doesn't grab them in a few seconds. They're like "well we will put interesting links in" but that's not how it works! The links don't make the site interesting - the site has got to be interesting enough for users to click the links. Thinking the links will make the site interesting is backward. If you want to improve your bounce rate, your goal is to be awesome immediately in order to get the user to stay on the page long enough to want to click your link. If it wasn't usually hard to get users to click links, we wouldn't track bounce rates. These guys know this particular group of users better than I do, but I know web marketing principles that they're not even seeing when pointed out. To me, they seem to be totally unaware of the field of web marketing. The numbers don't lie and they're saying there's huge room for improvement.
If you want to grow, it's time to try something different.
Here's a thought: There is a lot awesome content that's on this website. We need to take what's awesome and make it in-your-face obvious. I wrote a plan for how to quickly find the most effective awesome content (the website statistics will tell you which pages keep new visitors on them the longest), and how to use them to effectively get the attention of new users - copy the first paragraph from one of those pages, which was most likely constructed by a competent writer in a way that hooks people (if it's keeping them on the page then it's essentially proven to!) and place that as bait right on the front page. (There is also a wrong way to do this.) Then of course, the user needs to find out why the LessWrong community might be a place where they belong. I shared ideas for that in "About us - Building Interest".
Don't let's assume that growth is going to be good. You're going to get more internet trolls, more spam, (there's a way to control spam which I would be happy to share) and more newbies who don't know what they're doing (I provided some suggestions to help get them on track quickly, preventing annoyance for both you and them). There will be people with new ideas, but if the wrong audience is targeted... well. We'd better choose what audience to target. I saw an internet forum take off once - it seemed to be growing slowly, until we looked at the curve and saw that it was exponential. That of course quickly turned to a dazzling exponential curve. Suddenly the new users outnumbered the old ones. That could happen here -- even if we do nothing. YOU can get involved. YOU can influence who to target. They're taking suggestions on rewrites right now. Go to the thread. I invite brutal honesty on everything I wrote there. Or pick my brain, if you'd prefer.
What do you want, LessWrong? Do you want to grow optimally? Who do you want to see showing up?