How do I know this? I got a copy of the website analytics.
The bounce rate for LessWrong's home page is 60%!
To be clear: Over half the people who visit LessWrong are going away without even clicking anything.
Yet how many NEW visitors are there? Almost half of the visitors are new!
Granted, new visitor statistics aren't perfect, but that's a LOT of people.
Simple math should tell us this:
If we got the bounce rate down around 30% (a reasonable rate for a good site) by making sure every visitor sees something awesome immediately, AND make sure that each visitor can quickly gauge how much they're going to relate to the community (assuming the new users are the right target audience), it would theoretically double the rate of growth, or more. There's a multiplier effect if the bounce rate is improved: you get better placement in search engines. Search engines get more users if they feel that the engine finds interesting content, not just relevant content.
It's been argued that it's possible that most of the bounces are returning visitors checking for new content. Well if half the visitors to the site each month are new, and we did a wonderful job of showing them that LessWrong is awesome, then the amount of returning visitors could double each month. We're getting a tiny, tiny fraction of that growth:
http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s18lesswrong&r=36
Why did I write you guys so much in the home page rewrites thread? Because I am a web professional who works with web marketing professionals at my job and to me it was blatantly obvious that there's that much room for improvement in the growth of LessWrong. Doing changes like the ones I suggested wouldn't even take long. Because I like this site, and I knew it had potential to grow by leaps and bounds if somebody just paid a little bit of attention to real web marketing. Because I was confused when I first found this site - I had no idea what it's about, or why it's awesome. I closed the home page, myself. Another friend mentioned LessWrong. Curiosity perked up again. I came back and read the about page. That didn't make things clearer either. I left again without going further. Friends kept telling me it was awesome. I came back one day and finally found an awesome article! It took me three tries to figure out why you guys are awesome because the web marketing is so bad. The new proposals, although they are well-meaning and it's obvious that John_Maxwell_IV cares about the site, are more of the same bad marketing.
I've been interested in web marketing for ten years. It's a topic I've accumulated a lot of information about. As I see it, the way these guys are going about this is totally counter-intuitive to web basic marketing principles. They don't even seem to know how harsh users are the first time they see a new website. They tend to just go away if it doesn't grab them in a few seconds. They're like "well we will put interesting links in" but that's not how it works! The links don't make the site interesting - the site has got to be interesting enough for users to click the links. Thinking the links will make the site interesting is backward. If you want to improve your bounce rate, your goal is to be awesome immediately in order to get the user to stay on the page long enough to want to click your link. If it wasn't usually hard to get users to click links, we wouldn't track bounce rates. These guys know this particular group of users better than I do, but I know web marketing principles that they're not even seeing when pointed out. To me, they seem to be totally unaware of the field of web marketing. The numbers don't lie and they're saying there's huge room for improvement.
If you want to grow, it's time to try something different.
Here's a thought: There is a lot awesome content that's on this website. We need to take what's awesome and make it in-your-face obvious. I wrote a plan for how to quickly find the most effective awesome content (the website statistics will tell you which pages keep new visitors on them the longest), and how to use them to effectively get the attention of new users - copy the first paragraph from one of those pages, which was most likely constructed by a competent writer in a way that hooks people (if it's keeping them on the page then it's essentially proven to!) and place that as bait right on the front page. (There is also a wrong way to do this.) Then of course, the user needs to find out why the LessWrong community might be a place where they belong. I shared ideas for that in "About us - Building Interest".
Don't let's assume that growth is going to be good. You're going to get more internet trolls, more spam, (there's a way to control spam which I would be happy to share) and more newbies who don't know what they're doing (I provided some suggestions to help get them on track quickly, preventing annoyance for both you and them). There will be people with new ideas, but if the wrong audience is targeted... well. We'd better choose what audience to target. I saw an internet forum take off once - it seemed to be growing slowly, until we looked at the curve and saw that it was exponential. That of course quickly turned to a dazzling exponential curve. Suddenly the new users outnumbered the old ones. That could happen here -- even if we do nothing. YOU can get involved. YOU can influence who to target. They're taking suggestions on rewrites right now. Go to the thread. I invite brutal honesty on everything I wrote there. Or pick my brain, if you'd prefer.
What do you want, LessWrong? Do you want to grow optimally? Who do you want to see showing up?
(I think you may have a wrong idea of what "pontificate" means. Either that or you're being gratuitously rude, which I'm going to assume you aren't.)
The following two propositions are different. (1) Growth is not always 100% good. (2) Growth is not always good. #1 is what you stated. #2 is what I'm saying. #2 goes much further than #1 does. The obvious inference from #1 is "make sure you grow, but take some measures to mitigate the possible downsides"; the obvious inference from #2 is "consider carefully whether growth is what you want".
I don't know whether I want LW to grow, or how fast, or when (which is why I said that optimal growth for LW could be any of several things, including "grow very rapidly") so I can't really give you "[my] reasons for not wanting it to grow". What I can do is to give some possible reasons why growth -- especially rapid growth, especially especially rapid growth by the mechanism you're implicitly proposing -- might be the Wrong Thing.
The main reason is this: It may not be possible to grow rapidly by the sort of means you describe without changing the demographics of LW in a way that would lower its quality. I don't just mean "LW might start to attract trolls and spammers and idiots". I mean that maybe only a small fraction of new visitors to LW are people whose presence would enhance LW, and that if that's so then anything we do to encourage a lot more new visitors to stay will make LW worse.
There've been a couple of surveys of LW participants. They suggest that the userbase of LW is very unusual. So, for that matter, does a casual look at the discussions here. LW participants are unusually interested in rationality (of course, since that's the central topic of the site), something like three standard deviations above average in measured intelligence (according to self-reports, so take that with a pinch of salt, but I don't find it hard to believe that something of the kind is true), and willing to read and in many cases write long, well researched, sometimes highly technical material. This combination of characteristics is rare. It's surely a large part of what gives LW the distinctive character it has. I am not optimistic about the prospects of keeping it if LW grows rapidly by keeping a much larger fraction of its new visitors.
(I am aware that the foregoing paragraph sounds as if I'm saying "look at us, we're superior to everyone else". That is not, even slightly, the point. LW regulars, as a population, are unusually good at some things, unusually bad at others, and very average at others, and treating one group of people as "superior" to others is a road to ruin for all sorts of reasons. All I'm saying is that a community with the particular strengths LW has is a very unusual thing, and I think a lot of LW's distinctive merits derive from those strengths.)
Now, I know that you said things like "We'd better choose what audience to target". But I think you underestimate what an ... odd ... audience it is that LW might need to target, and the general shape of your proposals -- make it so people are immediately grabbed without having to read all that text; base the design on general "web marketing" principles -- seems like it's implicitly aimed at exactly the people who don't have the peculiar characteristics that make LW what it currently is.
I think this lies behind your perception that people here "seem to be totally unaware of the field of web marketing". Probably many are, but please consider the possibility that in some cases the issue isn't others' obtuseness but that they simply aren't interested in the "web marketing" goals you have in mind, and for a possibly-good reason.
A large increase in LW's audience could have big benefits; I'm not denying that. They might outweigh the likely loss in quality of discussion that (I think) would go along with it. Or maybe there's a way to increase the audience a lot without a big growth in the population of active participants. Or maybe "basic web marketing principles" can in fact be applied in a way that pulls in a huge new population of people with the extremely unusual characteristics LW's current regulars have. So I'm not (to repeat myself) saying that LW should not aim to grow a lot. I don't know whether it should. It just makes me really uneasy to see growth being treated as axiomatically good and important (which, repeating myself again, is not the same as saying that it has no downsides, and which I know you weren't saying).
You had a good point in your suggestion so I changed my "100% good" statement.
I also responded (different comment).