Thanks for the fast reply!
The founders were also really well known so it was easy for them to seed the platform.
OTOH Eliezer is also quite well-known, at least in the relevant circles. For example, at my non-American university, almost everyone doing a technical subject, that I know, has heard of and usually read HPMoR (I didn't introduce them to it). Most don't agree with the MIRI view on AI risk (or don't care about it...), but are broadly on board with rationalist principles and definitely do agree that science needs fixing, which is all that you need to think that something like Arbital is a Good Idea. It's a bit of a shame that HPMoR was finished before Arbital was ready.
I'm also not entirely sure about the comparison with Wikipedia, regarding ease of creating entries vs. writing explanations — in some cases, writing a logical explanation, deriving things from first (relevant) principles is easier than writing an encyclopaedic entry, having the appropriate citations (with Wikipedia policy encouraging secondary over primary sources). Writing things well is another challenge, but that's the case for both.
The remaining arguments are probably sufficient, in themselves, though.
I can't open-source the platform as long as I'm doing the for-profit venture, since the platforms are too similar. However, if at some point I have to stop, then I'll be happy to open source everything at that point.
That makes sense!
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.