Responding to the bottom part of your second footnote:
To me, it seems pretty important for Forum Team members (especially the interim lead!) to be communicating with Forum users. I therefore think it’s a mistake for you to assign zero value to your posts and comments, relative to your other work.
How much value to assign to one of your posts or comments? I would crudely model this as:
(Size of your post’s or comment’s contribution)/(Size of all Forum contributions in a year) x (Forum’s total value per year)
You’ll have better-informed figures/estimates than I do, but I’d guess that the size of all Forum contributions, measured in karma,[1] in a year, is around 100,000, and that the value of the Forum per year is around $10M.[2] A thoughtful comment might get 10 karma, on average, and a thoughtful post might get 50.
I’d therefore roughly value a comment from you at (10 karma)/(100,000 karma) x $10M = $1000, and a post from you at $5000.
(My model may well be off in some way; I invite readers to improve on it.)
I don’t take karma to be a perfect measure of value by any means—see, e.g., ‘Karma overrates some topics’—but I think it’s a reasonable-enough measure for carrying out this BOTEC.
Thanks Will! I really appreciate this comment, and I think this is a great suggestion. I buy something in this general direction (the Forum produces a certain amount of value per year, and so contributing on the Forum is worth some value relative to the total). I think my Forum-related posts/comments tend not to be very actionable — like, I would guess a post from me is actually worth less (in value to the world) than a post about a new job opening, and probably worth less than an object-level post with the same amount of karma. But I also think that coordination/information-sharing is a key source of value for the Forum, so I’m convinced enough to dig into this further and value my comms at more than $0. (The value per hour is likely going to look less promising though, since I am pretty slow at writing...)
As a bonus, I think this is a good general pitch for everyone to write more on the Forum! ^^
Another (complementary) framing here is that I assume your “day job” is mostly improving the Forum. So you can ~directly compare how much an additional hour of commenting or post on the Forum is worth in terms of total value add to the Forum, relative to the expected marginal impact of improving the codebase by an hour of coding or other work you do[1].
This a) sidesteps the absolute value of Forum work, which is potentially more contentious, and b) gives you a direct way to assess how valuable things are relative to the opportunity cost.
Interesting — I feel like I don’t have good intuitions for how to compare an hour of coding with an hour of writing. But I believe you’re suggesting something like, convert both of these into “hours of Forum engagement” per hour of my work (like, comparing how much engagement my post gets, divided by the hours I spent writing it, to the hours of engagement I add to the Forum for adding a feature, divided by the hours I spent building it).
If I were to do that comparison, I’m guessing that coding looks way better. My best post got ~23 hours of engagement total, and I don’t expect to get significantly more than that. One of our best features wrt engagement is adding AI-narrated audio for posts. This gets us very approximately 8 hours of engagement per day, was relatively quick to do, and we expect it will last for years. If it lasts 5 years that would be 14,600 hours of engagement. Even if it took 10x as long to build as the post did to write, building the feature seems clearly better.
Perhaps this is some evidence that I should not spend more time writing on the Forum, though I think there’s some value from posting that is not captured by this, so maybe converting everything into dollars is still better if it allows me to account for more factors.
Responding to the bottom part of your second footnote:
To me, it seems pretty important for Forum Team members (especially the interim lead!) to be communicating with Forum users. I therefore think it’s a mistake for you to assign zero value to your posts and comments, relative to your other work.
How much value to assign to one of your posts or comments? I would crudely model this as:
(Size of your post’s or comment’s contribution)/(Size of all Forum contributions in a year) x (Forum’s total value per year)
You’ll have better-informed figures/estimates than I do, but I’d guess that the size of all Forum contributions, measured in karma,[1] in a year, is around 100,000, and that the value of the Forum per year is around $10M.[2] A thoughtful comment might get 10 karma, on average, and a thoughtful post might get 50.
I’d therefore roughly value a comment from you at (10 karma)/(100,000 karma) x $10M = $1000, and a post from you at $5000.
(My model may well be off in some way; I invite readers to improve on it.)
I don’t take karma to be a perfect measure of value by any means—see, e.g., ‘Karma overrates some topics’—but I think it’s a reasonable-enough measure for carrying out this BOTEC.
Why $10M? Mostly I’m working off the value of an ‘EA project’ as estimated in cell C4 of this spreadsheet by Nuño. (This was the accompanying post.)
Thanks Will! I really appreciate this comment, and I think this is a great suggestion. I buy something in this general direction (the Forum produces a certain amount of value per year, and so contributing on the Forum is worth some value relative to the total). I think my Forum-related posts/comments tend not to be very actionable — like, I would guess a post from me is actually worth less (in value to the world) than a post about a new job opening, and probably worth less than an object-level post with the same amount of karma. But I also think that coordination/information-sharing is a key source of value for the Forum, so I’m convinced enough to dig into this further and value my comms at more than $0. (The value per hour is likely going to look less promising though, since I am pretty slow at writing...)
As a bonus, I think this is a good general pitch for everyone to write more on the Forum! ^^
Another (complementary) framing here is that I assume your “day job” is mostly improving the Forum. So you can ~directly compare how much an additional hour of commenting or post on the Forum is worth in terms of total value add to the Forum, relative to the expected marginal impact of improving the codebase by an hour of coding or other work you do[1].
This a) sidesteps the absolute value of Forum work, which is potentially more contentious, and b) gives you a direct way to assess how valuable things are relative to the opportunity cost.
(assuming your direct counterfactual with writing comments is writing code or otherwise improving the forum)
Interesting — I feel like I don’t have good intuitions for how to compare an hour of coding with an hour of writing. But I believe you’re suggesting something like, convert both of these into “hours of Forum engagement” per hour of my work (like, comparing how much engagement my post gets, divided by the hours I spent writing it, to the hours of engagement I add to the Forum for adding a feature, divided by the hours I spent building it).
If I were to do that comparison, I’m guessing that coding looks way better. My best post got ~23 hours of engagement total, and I don’t expect to get significantly more than that. One of our best features wrt engagement is adding AI-narrated audio for posts. This gets us very approximately 8 hours of engagement per day, was relatively quick to do, and we expect it will last for years. If it lasts 5 years that would be 14,600 hours of engagement. Even if it took 10x as long to build as the post did to write, building the feature seems clearly better.
Perhaps this is some evidence that I should not spend more time writing on the Forum, though I think there’s some value from posting that is not captured by this, so maybe converting everything into dollars is still better if it allows me to account for more factors.