The unprecedented gap in Methods of Rationality updates prompts musing about whether readership is increasing enough & what statistics one would use; I write code to download FF.net reviews, clean it, parse it, load into R, summarize the data & depict it graphically, run linear regression on a subset & all reviews, note the poor fit, develop a quadratic fit instead, and use it to predict future review quantities.
Then, I run a similar analysis on a competing fanfiction to find out when they will have equal total review-counts. A try at logarithmic fits fails; fitting a linear model to the previous 100 days of _MoR_ and the competitor works much better, and they predict a convergence in <5 years.
Master version: http://www.gwern.net/hpmor#analysis
That's an interesting angle. I think we actually could measure conversions to some extent.
The survey asks after MoR, and also how long a user has been around, so one could filter for any survey set mentioning MoR and subtract their longevity from the date to figure out what was their 'latest' chapter before joining LW.
A second way which would probably work better is to leverage the usernames in the review data set and compare to a list of LessWrong users & account registration date, to do much the same thing: take every username which appears on both lists, and the LW account registration date, and credit them to the chapter appearing just before their LW account registration. (If their LW account precedes their first MoR review, it'd probably be best to eliminate them from consideration.)
Also, I'd check for their mentioning MoR in introduction posts. If I hadn't taken the survey, that's how you'd pick me up, for instance.