Thanks Alexandros, this was well articulated.

Beyond PageRank, I feel this pattern has applicability in many areas of everyday life, especially those related to large organizations, such as employers judging potential employees by the name of the university they attended...

So a person who goes to a prestigious school and games the system in order to graduate [without actually getting smarter] is something of a "spam worker." The OBP process is incentivizing earning a degree from a good school, and taking the emphasis off of getting smart.

I'd spent plenty of time thinking about SEO, and plenty of time thinking about people seeking prestige via academic institutions, but has never noticed the parallel.

...I have more written material on this subject, especially on possible methods of counteracting this effect...

I would be interested in hearing about those methods. I'm in the business of producing legitimate news (feel funny calling it "content"), and am unhappy with the amount of time I must spend making sure my website stays out of the false negative space.

Also, I wonder if the methods you have thought of would also apply to these parallel situations in society.

Just out of curiosity, are there a lot of people at the SIAI house who confine their participation on LW to lurking?

Yup, that's me, resident deontologist. The other day, during a conversation between me and some other house residents on ethics, someone said "She doesn't push people in front of trolleys!" and everyone was outraged at me.

The map-territory metaphor is pretty central to what goes on here, so I kind of like it. I don't really know if it is a deterrent. Any alternatives in mind?

I do think the logo could be a map of somewhere more interesting than Candlestick Park! And maybe a cooler place would keep googler's around. Or make it look a dojo.

The map image in the masthead confused me when I found LW, and might reduce the probability that casual Web-browsing would-be-rationalists would take the time to understand what LW actually is before moving on.

I'm new to the community; this post may not be structured like the ones you're used to. Bear with me.

If LW is anything like the few sites whose analytics numbers I've seen, a significant portion of traffic comes from Web searches (I would wildly guess 10-30% of their pageviews). According to the analytics I've seen on my own site, out of those landings from Google et. al., many are likely to stay only for a few seconds, presumably trying to see if they've found what they're looking for.

[In my opinion] the name, small grey welcome box for new readers, and the tagline under the logo collectively do a good job of explaining what LW is, even for people who aren't familiar with any related terminology or concepts. The image of a map in the background, [in my opinion], does not. When I first arrived I thought for a few moments it was a site about maps. I ended up reading enough to stick around, but I wonder if some don't.

I would like to ask people who didn't understand what the site was about and didn't return to LW if the image was the reason... but we'll never hear from them. So instead, I invite people here to chime in about whether or not the image deterred them at first, and whether it is something worth re-thinking.

[Whether this potential deterrent is bad is a separate question; I'm just curious about whether it even is a deterrent. I can see arguments for trying to deter people (or certain types of people) intentionally, but I suppose that's irrelevant if the image doesn't affect the probability that first-time readers will return.]