Thanks Luke! We appreciate the kind words.

Thanks Nuno!

 What is the cumulative number of hours for 2021 so far? 

CEA uses a goal year which starts October 1, i.e. we have just started our 2022 year. The above post was about our prior goal year October 1, 2020-October 1, 2021, which is roughly YTD Calendar year 2021.

We have had 12,000 hours of engagement so far in goal year 2022:

 Do you have the figures spent in the EA Wiki specifically? 

Between October 1, 2020 and October 1, 2021, these pages received 65,000 views and 1,800 hrs.

I imagine that there is some way to know when someone is just leaving a tab open for a while, but can you elaborate on how you deal with that?

We use document.hidden and document.visibilityState to determine if the tab is open but not visible, and use mouse move, keypress, and scroll events to determine if the tab is open but idle. Relevant code is here.

Relatedly, what is engagement driven by? By a few users who use it a lot, or by very many users who use it a little?

Relative to most online content platforms, I think we have a small but dedicated audience. (E.g. because many platforms rely on their posts randomly going viral on social media, whereas this does not tend to be the source of very much engagement for us.) So I think the direct answer to your question is “a few users who use it a lot”, at least relative to something like BuzzFeed.

Here’s the PDF of how much time users spent engaging over the past month:

This would look like a negative sloping line for most sites, but you can see it’s relatively flat for us.

Thanks Sophia! I really appreciate you sharing this – it’s helpful for us to get a sense of which aspects of our work are motivating to people – and I agree that Aaron is great!

Hey Ramiro, it does seem likely to me that part of the growth is exogenous. EA is growing rapidly as a community, and COVID also probably resulted in people spending more time online.

Some evidence that growth is at least partially endogenous to the Forum though includes that LessWrong and 80000hours.org didn’t grow very much over the past year, whereas we doubled.

Would be useful to see the number of unique users over time, rather than just engagement hours.

Among respondents to the EA Survey, in 2020, 38% of respondents were EA Forum members. In 2019 it was 30%. In 2018 it was 20%. 

Those numbers are doubtless inflated though, because EA Forum members (a very disproportionately highly engaged group: >80% are levels 4-5 out of 5 in self-reported engagement) are more likely to take the survey. The question is how many less engaged (who are less likely to be on the Forum) there are, which is  less easy to estimate, although there is a model in this post.

A couple of people have already posted some data sources, but I will add one more: my attempt to identify the percentage of people who engaged with one CEA program that went on to use the Forum in the next year. This relied on naïve matching of email addresses, so it’s probably a substantial underestimate, but found 25-40% of event attendees read a Forum post within 2021.

I also track a data set of people who are in leadership positions at EA organizations, and this group averages reading 0.7 posts/day (i.e. they are super engaged on the Forum).

Penetration is substantially lower among people who are newer to EA. Over the next year, we are considering focusing more of our attention on them.