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.)
I had not imagined a strict barter system or scaling of paid content; the objective in both cases is only to make up the difference between the value content producers want versus the value they expect for the first wave.
The point of diminishing returns would be hard to judge for paid content, but perhaps the two strategies could work together: survey prospective content producers for the content they want to see, and then pay for the most popular subjects to draw the rest. Once you have enough content established to draw the first wave of voluntary conten...
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.