Re: web traffic and Google trends â I think Peter Wildeford (nĂŠe Hurford) is working on an update to his previous post on this. Iâll be interested to see what the trends look like over the past two years given all the growth on other fronts. I would see continued decline/âstagnation of Google/âWikipedia interest as solid evidence for movement shrinkage/âstagnation.
attendance at many non-student group meetups
Do you have data on this across many meetups (or even just a couple of meetups in the Bay)?
I could easily believe this is happening, but Iâm not aware of whatever source the claim comes from. (Also reasonable if it comes from e.g. conversations youâve had with a bunch of organizers â just curious how you came to think this.)
total attendance at major EA conferences
This seems like much more a function of âhow conferences are planned and marketedâ than âhow many people in the world would want to attendâ.
In my experience (though I havenât checked this with CEAâs events team, so take it with a grain of salt), EA Global conferences have typically targeted certain numbers of attendees rather than aiming for as many people as possible. This breaks down a bit with virtual conferences, since itâs easier to âfitâ a very large number of people, but I still think the marketing for EAG Virtual 2020 was much less aggressive than the marketing for some of the earliest EAG conferences (and Iâd guess that the standards for admission were higher).
If CEA wanted to break the attendance record for EA Global with the SF 2022 conference, I suspect they could do so, but there would be substantial tradeoffs involved (e.g. between size and average conversation quality, or size and the need for more aggressivemarketing).
It seems very clear to me that growth is much slower than it was in 2015-2017, based on basically all available metrics. The obvious explanation of âsometime around late 2016 lots of people decided that we should stop pursuing super aggressive growthâ seems like a relatively straightforward explanation and explains the data.
I think we basically agree on this â I donât know that Iâd say âmuchâ, but certainly âslowerâ, and the explanation checks out. But I do think that growth is positive , based on the metrics Iâve mentioned, and that EA Survey response counts donât mirror that overall trend.
(None of this means that EA is doing anywhere near as well as it could/âshould be â I donât mean to convey that I think current trends are especially good, or that I agree with any particular decision of the âreduce focus on growthâ variety. I think Iâm quite a bit more pro-growth than the average person working full-time in âmeta-EAâ, though I havenât surveyed everyone about their opinions and canât say for sure.)
Re: web traffic and Google trends â I think Peter Wildeford (nĂŠe Hurford) is working on an update to his previous post on this. Iâll be interested to see what the trends look like over the past two years given all the growth on other fronts. I would see continued decline/âstagnation of Google/âWikipedia interest as solid evidence for movement shrinkage/âstagnation.
Do you have data on this across many meetups (or even just a couple of meetups in the Bay)?
I could easily believe this is happening, but Iâm not aware of whatever source the claim comes from. (Also reasonable if it comes from e.g. conversations youâve had with a bunch of organizers â just curious how you came to think this.)
This seems like much more a function of âhow conferences are planned and marketedâ than âhow many people in the world would want to attendâ.
In my experience (though I havenât checked this with CEAâs events team, so take it with a grain of salt), EA Global conferences have typically targeted certain numbers of attendees rather than aiming for as many people as possible. This breaks down a bit with virtual conferences, since itâs easier to âfitâ a very large number of people, but I still think the marketing for EAG Virtual 2020 was much less aggressive than the marketing for some of the earliest EAG conferences (and Iâd guess that the standards for admission were higher).
If CEA wanted to break the attendance record for EA Global with the SF 2022 conference, I suspect they could do so, but there would be substantial tradeoffs involved (e.g. between size and average conversation quality, or size and the need for more aggressive marketing).
I think we basically agree on this â I donât know that Iâd say âmuchâ, but certainly âslowerâ, and the explanation checks out. But I do think that growth is positive , based on the metrics Iâve mentioned, and that EA Survey response counts donât mirror that overall trend.
(None of this means that EA is doing anywhere near as well as it could/âshould be â I donât mean to convey that I think current trends are especially good, or that I agree with any particular decision of the âreduce focus on growthâ variety. I think Iâm quite a bit more pro-growth than the average person working full-time in âmeta-EAâ, though I havenât surveyed everyone about their opinions and canât say for sure.)
I am also definitely interested in Peter Wildefordâs new update on that post, and been awaiting it with great anticipation.