The ten most-viewed posts of 2020

Now that the year is over, I wanted to share a bit of fun trivia from our Google Analytics account: the ten posts with the most views in 2020.

  1. Growth and the case against randomista development (10,666 views)

  2. Are we living at the most influential time in history? (7,710 views)

  3. How long does it take to research and develop a new vaccine? (7,665 views)

  4. COVID-19 brief for friends and family (6,472 views)

  5. Concerning the Recent 2019-Novel Coronavirus Outbreak (5,772 views)

  6. Problem areas beyond 80,000 Hours’ current priorities (5,538 views)

  7. Will Three Gorges Dam collapse and kill millions? (5,527 views)

  8. Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors (5,421 views)

  9. Should you donate to the Wikimedia foundation? (4,540 views)

  10. UK Income Tax & Donations (4,389 views)

Honorable mention: The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle (4,283 views)

I chose an honorable mention because it was nice to see how many people we’ve helped to reach Singer’s work.


Notes on this list:

  • People were very interested in COVID this year. Go figure.

  • For context, all Forum posts combined got 745,614 total views in 2020.

  • The Forum’s content has a surprisingly long tail. Here are some graphs showing daily views for the posts not published in 2020:

“Are we living at the most influential time in history?” You can really see the BBC spike here.
”How long does it take to research and develop a new vaccine?”
″Should you donate to the Wikimedia Foundation?” The 923 spike seems to have come from a Hacker News share. Without the spike, the post would still have been in the top 20 most-viewed posts of the year.
”UK Income Tax & Donations” is a post I’d never even heard of. Seems useful! Thanks, Harald.
”The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle”