This is really sad. I'm sorry to hear things didn't work out, but I'm still left wondering why not.
I guess I was really hoping for a couple thousand+ word post-mortem, describing the history of the project, and which hypotheses you tested, with a thorough explanation of the results.
If you weren't getting enough math input, why do you think that throwing more people at the problem wouldn't generate better content? Just having a bunch of links to the most intuitive and elegant explanations, gathered in one place, would be a huge help to both readers and writers. Students trying to learn are already doing this through blind googling, so the marginal work to drop the links is low.
Pulling all the info together into a good explanation still requires one dedicated person, but perhaps that task can be broken down into chunks too. Like, once one version is written, translating it for non-mathy people should be relatively easy. Same for condensing things for mathy people.
But, why wouldn't adding more mathematicians mean a few would be good at and interested in writing new articles? Where did you do outreach? What did you do? There are entire communities, scattered across the web, who exist to try and learn and teach math. Have you tried partnering with any of them, or recruiting members?
If not, why do you think it won't work? Do you see promising alternative approaches, or are good explanations impossible even in principle?
Sorry for the flood of questions. I've just been waiting with baited breath for Arbital to stop pushing me away and start pulling people in. I even linked some people, but felt guilty about it for putting a strain on your overloaded servers before you were ready for the general public.
Yes, many students would benefit from a math explanation platform. But it was hard for us to find writers, and we weren't getting as much traction with them as we wanted. We reached out to some forums and to many individuals. That version of Arbital was also promoted by Eliezer on FB. When we switched away from math, it wasn't because we thought it was hopeless. We had a lot of ideas left to try out. But when it's not going well, you have to call it quits at some point, and so we did. There was also the consideration that if we built a platform for (math) ...
This post is for all the people who have been following Arbital's progress since 2015 via whispers, rumors, and clairvoyant divination. That is to say: we didn't do a very good job of communicating on our part. I hope this posts corrects some of that.
The top question on your mind is probably: "Man, I was promised that Arbital will solve X! Why hasn't it solved X already?" Where X could be intuitive explanations, online debate, all LessWrong problems, AGI, or just cancer. Well, we did try to solve the first two and it didn't work. Math explanations didn't work because we couldn't find enough people who would spend the time to write good math explanations. (That said, we did end up with some decent posts on abstract algebra. Thank you to everyone who contributed!) Debates didn't work because... well, it's a very complicated problem. There was also some disagreement within the team about the best approach, and we ended up moving too slowly.
So what now?
You are welcome to use Arbital in its current version. It's mostly stable, though a little slow sometimes. It has a few features some might find very helpful for their type of content. Eliezer is still writing AI Alignment content on it, and he heavily relies on the specific Arbital features, so it's pretty certain that the platform is not going away. In fact, if the venture fails completely, it's likely MIRI will adopt Arbital for their personal use.
I'm starting work on Arbital 2.0. It's going to be a (micro-)blogging platform. (If you are a serious blogger / Tumblr user, let me know; I'd love to ask you some questions!) I'm not trying to solve online debates, build LW 2.0, or cure cancer. It's just going to be a damn good blogging platform. If it goes well, then at some point I'd love to revisit the Arbital dream.
I'm happy to answer any and all questions in the comments.