Re: web traffic and Google trends — I think Peter Wildeford (née Hurford) is working on an update to his previous post on this. I’ll 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/stagnation of Google/Wikipedia interest as solid evidence for movement shrinkage/stagnation.
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 I’m not aware of whatever source the claim comes from. (Also reasonable if it comes from e.g. conversations you’ve had with a bunch of organizers — just curious how you came to think this.)
total attendance at major EA conferences
This seems like much more a function of “how conferences are planned and marketed” than “how many people in the world would want to attend”.
In my experience (though I haven’t checked this with CEA’s 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 it’s easier to “fit” 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 I’d 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 “sometime around late 2016 lots of people decided that we should stop pursuing super aggressive growth” seems like a relatively straightforward explanation and explains the data.
I think we basically agree on this — I don’t know that I’d say “much”, but certainly “slower”, and the explanation checks out. But I do think that growth is positive , based on the metrics I’ve mentioned, and that EA Survey response counts don’t mirror that overall trend.
(None of this means that EA is doing anywhere near as well as it could/should be — I don’t mean to convey that I think current trends are especially good, or that I agree with any particular decision of the “reduce focus on growth” variety. I think I’m quite a bit more pro-growth than the average person working full-time in “meta-EA”, though I haven’t surveyed everyone about their opinions and can’t say for sure.)
Re: web traffic and Google trends — I think Peter Wildeford (née Hurford) is working on an update to his previous post on this. I’ll 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/stagnation of Google/Wikipedia interest as solid evidence for movement shrinkage/stagnation.
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 I’m not aware of whatever source the claim comes from. (Also reasonable if it comes from e.g. conversations you’ve had with a bunch of organizers — just curious how you came to think this.)
This seems like much more a function of “how conferences are planned and marketed” than “how many people in the world would want to attend”.
In my experience (though I haven’t checked this with CEA’s 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 it’s easier to “fit” 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 I’d 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 — I don’t know that I’d say “much”, but certainly “slower”, and the explanation checks out. But I do think that growth is positive , based on the metrics I’ve mentioned, and that EA Survey response counts don’t mirror that overall trend.
(None of this means that EA is doing anywhere near as well as it could/should be — I don’t mean to convey that I think current trends are especially good, or that I agree with any particular decision of the “reduce focus on growth” variety. I think I’m quite a bit more pro-growth than the average person working full-time in “meta-EA”, though I haven’t surveyed everyone about their opinions and can’t say for sure.)
I am also definitely interested in Peter Wildeford’s new update on that post, and been awaiting it with great anticipation.