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.
Thank you for the summary of the state of Arbital!
It seems that while you haven't achieved your full goals, you have created a system that Eliezer is happy with, which is of non-zero value in itself (or, depending on what you think of MIRI, the AI alignment problem etc., of very large value).
It'd be interesting to work out why projects like Wikipedia and StackOveflow succeeded, while Arbital didn't, to such an extent. Unfortunately, I don't really have much of an idea how to answer my own question, so I'll be among those who want all the answers, but don't want to write them... (Too niche a target? Luck? Lack of openness to contributors???)
Finally — this is obviously a huge request considering the amount of work you must have put into Arbital — if you're not planning to re-use much of the existing code and if you don't think that it would harm the new "Arbital 2.0", would you consider open-sourcing the existing platform? (This is distinct from the content being under CC BY-SA, though kudos to whoever made that decision!)
I had some experience being involved in Citizendium which failed. To me it feels like the key difference is openness to contribution.
Both Wikipedia and StackOverflow make it easy for anybody to get involved.
Eric recently shared a link to a post he wrote on Arbital on Facebook. I could either answer on Facebook or an Arbital. Given that Arbital didn't gave me a text field in which I could write my comment it was easier to ans... (read more)