"You must be new around here."
Guilty as charged. But the financial model is usually one of my first areas of meta-interest when I start looking (or relooking) at a website. What are the motivations? "Follow the money," said the detective. But in the worst cases, unsustainable financial models usually disappear.
It always seems to me that the money matters and that systems (including websites and companies) adjust their various behaviors to reflect where the money is coming from and how it is flowing through the system. LessWrong clearly has ongoing costs for servers and support (and I hope the helpful person in the Intercom chat room was duly compensated for the time). I also read about the big karma project in the last quarter of 2019. Nothing there about the development and evaluation costs, but it sure sounded like a lot of work was done. Somewhere in the FAQ it said that LessWrong doesn't make money, which is fine, but it did mention donations. (My observations indicate that big donors usually like to call the shots and small donors generally don't get to (which bothers me (but that might be simple projection since I'm strictly a small donor)).)
My own preference would be cost recovery, but mostly based on benefits received. Would you believe "Basically anything that people are willing to pay for should be allowed to happen?" My fantasy funding mechanism usually flies under the handle of CSB (for Charity Share Brokerage), but before speculating farther I'd like to understand more about how things work now on LessWrong. (Even more than this financial question, my primary confusion right now is how to detect the current flow of activity. But maybe I should be most focused on figuring out which parts of the old activity are most worth reading? That side seems overwhelming.)
Better clarify that I don't think that everything should be reduced to monetary values, but money is a helpful metric. Even sustainable. I actually think economics is mostly bogus because time is not equal to money, even approximately. The proper relationship is time >> money. (But ekronomics is another one of my favorite cans for worms.)
Again, thanks for your replies, though I'm still not sure what to make of them.
On the one hand, I agree that independence is a good thing (even though I may sometimes disagree with some people's independent decisions). On the other hand, I have deep reservations about charities that in a sense allow governments to evade their appropriate responsibilities to the citizens of their nations. Especially in the case of serious problems, it shouldn't be a matter of luck (if the victim stumbles across a helpful charity) or willingness and ability to actively beg for help. (Food as an obvious example. Some people prefer to starve to death before begging.) On the third hand, I think there are multiple constituencies here (within LW) and each person and each group of people have different priorities and objectives, etc.
Several more hands, but let me try a few exploratory questions instead. Which "constituency" do I belong to (from your LW team perspective)? How should I properly express support for or concern about "developments" (on LW)?
BtW, I think I like the leisurely atmosphere of LW. However I may be projecting due to my recent externally forced shifts of priorities (which are also obliging me to give LW a relatively low priority). But on the fourth hand I am also having trouble figuring out what material on LW is still relevant even though it is old. LW kind of feels like a virtual book in the process of formation, with various chapters in various states of completion... (The longest chunk of my career was technical editing for a TLC, but the research lab didn't publish many books. Some chapters and dissertations came across my desk from time to time, but mostly just conference papers and HR stuff.)