I think the more relevant order of magnitude reference class would be the amount per user Facebook spent on core platform maintenance and moderation (and Facebook has a lot more scaling challenges to solve as well as users to spread costs over, so a better comparator would be the running expenses of a small professional forum)
I don’t think FB revenues are remotely relevant to how much value the forum creates, which may be significantly more per user than Facebook if it positively influences decisions people make about employment, founding charities and allocating large chunks of money to effective causes. But the effectiveness of the use of the forum budget isn’t whether the total value created is more than the total costs of running, it’s decided at the margin by whether going the extra mile with the software and curation actually adds more value.
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?
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.
I think the more relevant order of magnitude reference class would be the amount per user Facebook spent on core platform maintenance and moderation (and Facebook has a lot more scaling challenges to solve as well as users to spread costs over, so a better comparator would be the running expenses of a small professional forum)
I don’t think FB revenues are remotely relevant to how much value the forum creates, which may be significantly more per user than Facebook if it positively influences decisions people make about employment, founding charities and allocating large chunks of money to effective causes. But the effectiveness of the use of the forum budget isn’t whether the total value created is more than the total costs of running, it’s decided at the margin by whether going the extra mile with the software and curation actually adds more value.
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.