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.
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.