It could be useful if someone ran a copyediting service

As a reminder in case people were unaware, we provide free editing services on LessWrong for anyone above 100 karma on the site: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nsCwdYJEpmW5Hw5Xm/lesswrong-is-providing-feedback-and-proofreading-on-drafts 

Just click the "Request Feedback" button when you are writing a new post, and a chat window will pop up asking you what kind of feedback you want, and within 24 hours someone will have left comments and suggestions on your post.

I've found the LessWrong editing service to be a pretty exciting way to provide copyediting, proofreading, feedback etc. to lots and lots of individuals over the last several months. Perhaps an expansion of that model could be valuable? This month there were 32 posts I did copyediting for through the service, which is more than usual but not by too much. That's way more than I would have even actively trying to promote myself, and I haven't had to do the promoting (or handle billing with a whole bunch of individuals). If there's more money for centralized-funding-of-edits, I at least continue to have excess capacity there and find it a lot of fun!

Thanks for this post!

Here's a related thing I wrote recently, with a slightly different framing and some additional details, in case this is useful to someone. Though Habryka's comment makes me think perhaps LessWrong already have this mostly covered, so I guess a first step would be to check that out.

"Mesa-project* idea: Centralised & scalable proofreading, copyediting, and formatting assistance for EA-aligned people

Maybe someone should find decent/good copyeditors/proofreaders/formatters and advertise their services to EA community members who are willing & able to pay, either for their Forum posts or for other things they're working on? (By "formatters", I personally just have in mind people who can take a Google Doc with lots of tables and footnotes and format it for the EA Forum, but maybe there'd be other use cases as well, such as LaTeX.) 

Ofc people can also sort this out themselves, but then there's the search and vetting and set-up costs. Seems more efficient for some actor to set it up in a centralised/scalable way. E.g., Rethink Priorities has a person to do this for our work, and that seems much better than us each finding a person ourselves. I'd like various other orgs and individuals to also have this.

Potential benefits: 

• Save authors a small/moderate amount of time
• Save other community members a small/moderate amount of time helping with copyediting, proofreading, etc.
• Somewhat/notably improve the clarity of posts
• Somewhat/notably increase how many things are posted, if there are some people feeling blocked by time constraints or by worries about clarity or whatever

(But maybe a Fermi estimate would suggest that the benefits are actually really small and not worth thinking about? Seems worth at least checking, though?)

Potential downsides:

• Takes some attention and time from whoever sets it up
• Costs a little money
• Maybe gives the vibe that things should only be posted if they meet a certain writing quality standard? Probably not though?"

*Not quite a megaproject, but more than a microproject :D"

I plan to start offering this – among other things – for free through the Altruistic Agency later this year.

@Amber Dawn does this. Conflict of interest - she's my partner. https://amber-dawn-ace.com/

Another type of service that would be useful is accessibility services, such as writing transcripts/timed text for audio and video (e.g. podcasts) and alt text for images.