I see finding high-quality content producers was a problem; you reference math explanations specifically.
I notice that people are usually good at providing thorough and comprehensible explanations in only their chosen domains. That being said, people are interested in subjects beyond those they have mastered.
I wonder if it is possible to approach quality content producers with the question of what content they would like to passively consume, and then try and approach networks of content producers at once. For example: find a game theory explainer who wants to read about complex analysis; a complex analysis explainer who wants to read about music theory; a music theory explainer who wants to read about game theory.
Then you can approach all three at once with the premise that if they explain the thing they are good at, they will also be able to read the thing they want to be explained well to them, on the same platform. There's a similar trick being explored for networks of organ donations.
Also, was there any consideration given to the simple mechanism of paying people for quality explanations? I expect a reasonable core of value could be had for low cost.
Hmm, I'm skeptical a barter system would work. I don't think I've seen a successful implementation of it anywhere, though I do hear about people trying.
Yes, we've considered paying people, but that's not scalable. (A good 3-5 page explanation might take 10 hours to write.)
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.