Suppose these three conditions are met:
In a video, Rational Animations invites viewers to read a LessWrong article or sequence. It's an explicit invitation made in the narration of the video rather than e.g. only as in-video text.
The article/sequence is linked in three places: at the end of the video (e.g. in place or near the Patreon link), at the top of the video description, and in the pinned comment.
The video accrues 1 million views.
How many new users will join LessWrong as a result?
The number of new users can be measured in these ways:
-> Links tracking how many new users join.
-> LessWrong stats that make the LessWrong moderators confident enough in an approximate number that they believe this market can be resolved.
Does this market resolve N/A if RA doesn't invite viewers to read LessWrong by the end of the year, or will the close date be extended?
@JosephNoonan Just extended the close date to 2026. If by then the conditions aren't met it will resolve N/A
I assume "join LessWrong" means to actually create an account, not just to visit the site, right? Presumably, the majority of people who read an article on LessWrong as a result of the video wouldn't make an account, since they were just there to read that article.
@JosephNoonan That's right, in this scenario Rational Animations only invites people to read, not make an account. This market tries to forecast how many new accounts inviting people to read stuff results in.
Great job with the YouTube channel, this is very good.
I think 1 million views is too much for this market, it would still be informative with 100k, and it would be a lot less probable that it resolves N/A.
I think a market about the proportion of new Lesswrong users per viewer, would be even better. (with maybe some minimum of viewers, so it means something).
Also we probably don’t have to wait 2024 to have significant statistic about that.
Just trying to
Just some thoughts:
This market will resolve based on the assessment of the Lesswrong-mods?
Also, this market is conditional on Ration Animations accumulating one million views on one of their videos. Shouldn't there be a restriction to the timeframe these views occur? Surely one of their years-old videos slowly passing the threshold would pull as many users as one thing that went viral overnight.
Also in the case of a slow takeoff video the correlated increase in lesswrong users count would be way harder to assess.
