Or put another way, would people engage differently if the forum was run on stock software by a single sysadmin and some regular posters granted volunteer mod privileges?
Well, I mean it isn’t a perfect comparison, but we know roughly what that world looks like because we have both the LessWrong and OG EA Forum datapoints, and both point towards “the Forum gets on the order of 1/5th the usage” and in the case of LessWrong to “the Forum dies completely”.
I do think it goes better if you have at least one well-paid sysadmin, though I definitely wouldn’t remotely be able to do the job on my own.
Well, I mean it isn’t a perfect comparison, but we know roughly what that world looks like because we have both the LessWrong and OG EA Forum datapoints, and both point towards “the Forum gets on the order of 1/5th the usage” and in the case of LessWrong to “the Forum dies completely”.
I do think it goes better if you have at least one well-paid sysadmin, though I definitely wouldn’t remotely be able to do the job on my own.