Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Hide table of contents
Comment Permalink
Jross2
0
0

That would be pretty convenient for those in a similar position as myself!

Reply
See in context
by Jross
3 min read 6

6

Frontpage

The recent update to the EA Forum prompted me to look at the value of having my own separate blog.

In this post I'll provide basic metrics from my site and talk about whether I think having a separate blog makes sense or if it's redundant with the new EA Forum.

I started Veg-EA in early 2016 to combine my interests in animal welfare, veganism, and effective altruism.

The first posts looked at the value of donating to your local animal sanctuary or wearing more durable leather shoes. As I learned more I shifted into environmental ethics, consideration of insects, and wild animal suffering.

Metrics and Popular Content

From the start of my blog in February 2016 to the current date (November 24, 2018), the Veg-EA blog received 8,788 page views with 5,450 unique visitors. The bulk of my visitors were from the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. (32%, 20%, and 11%, respectively).

Social media made up the bulk of trackable traffic sources, accounting for 40% of visits. Of that, Facebook was the top referral source with reddit playing a substantial but more minor role. (46% of traffic was classified as 'direct').

Popular content connected to veganism, with the top performing post titled "Four arguments against veganism that are actually worth considering" receiving ~2,000 page views.

Other popular content was a post examining vegan advertisements in Times Square (~1k page views) as well as a post exploring how Antinatalism and Negative-learning Utilitarianism are relevant to both veganism and wild animal suffering (~675 page views).

The most recent blog post was in June 2017. This is mostly due to pivoting to more creative projects and local engagement (I had recently moved to a new city).

Value

I am not able to make a strong value judgement of having my own blog. I used a higher priced website/hosting service (Squarespace) which pushes the annual dollar cost of the blog higher. Though there definitely are other ways to have a similar quality blog with standalone domain (Wordpress, etc).

The more expensive blog option (around $110/year), and the relatively low number of page views means that I was paying around four cents per page view. That seems very high to me, though the cost would likely be a lot lower if regular posting was maintained as opposed to leaving the blog inactive since summer 2017.

I did successfully secure a spring communications internship at Animal Charity Evaluators. My blog was mentioned in the interview process and ACE's Facebook Page had previously shared two of my blog posts. Those two points seem like strong evidence that my blog was a relevant factor in obtaining the internship opportunity.

Is there a value in having a .com domain for a blog? This is more at the root of the question and I do not have strong beliefs or evidence either way. The 'personal branding' aspect of your own site, domain, imagery, design seems very positive.

For my audience (mostly vegans), "Veg-EA" sounds inherently appealing, even if they do not know what the "EA" stands for.

Conclusion

I am strongly considering deactivating my blog and moving the content to the EA Forum. This is largely driven by the blog's inactive state and that the current traffic is not enough to justify the service and hosting expense.

I do believe that depending on the nature of your writing or audience (more broad, outreach oriented or more niche, inwards oriented) a blog with its own domain and branding could have advantages one would not get from the EA Forum.

I would also make sure not to discount the career benefit of having a separate blog. The .com domain combined with professional looking design and branding may be helpful when applying for certain roles and in certain areas.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this topic as I suspect many of you have your own blogs. What do you use to manage and host your sites? Do you feel good about your site metrics? Has your blog helped you out in your career or in any other way? Are you considering exporting your posts to the EA-Forum, why or why not?

6

0
0

Reactions

0
0

More posts like this

Comments6


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
Peter Wildeford6
0
0

I moved my blog over to the EA Forum a long time ago and I'm pretty glad I did. I think it's nice to have more EA content in one place.

http://veg-ea.com/blog/2016/vegan-advertisements-arrive-in-times-square-but-are-they-effective looks to be pretty useful to me.

Reply
Jross1
0
0

Thanks, I agree more centralized is probably good. (providing the search and organizational features are reliable).

Reply
Habryka [Deactivated]5
0
0

As a side note: For LessWrong we built some scripts to automatically import old posts from someones RSS feed directly to their blog on LessWrong. We can probably slightly adjust those scripts to work with the EA forum, in which case moving over would be even easier.

Reply
Jross2
0
0

That would be pretty convenient for those in a similar position as myself!

Reply
Ula Zarosa2
0
0

I agree with part of the comment above. I think moving to EA forum can be very beneficial but it will definitely make us more conscious about posting - so we'll be afraid to publish anything unpolished and rigorously double-checked. Maybe this is good, because we shall publish mostly high-quality stuff but for newbies like myself I think the bar (at least from what I heard) is so high that I'd probably start my own thing on side.

Interestingly, I don't believe re-posting stuff here as link-posts will work well. I can already see the differences in traction with link-posts and standard posts. So I think what one can do is actually to publish more professional things here (things that one really needs to discuss) but leave simpler blogs for Medium/ their own blog.

Reply
Amrit Sidhu-Brar 🔸2
0
0

Thanks for posting this, this is really helpful to me!

I don’t currently have a blog (well, I do, but not at all related to EA), so unfortunately I can’t answer your first three closing questions. However I’ve been planning on starting an EA blog for the last month or so and have been thinking about some of this stuff – particularly about just having my own blog vs. just posting to the forum vs. occasional cross-posting – so reading your thoughts from your place of much more experience was useful, thank you.

Are you considering exporting your posts to the EA Forum, why or why not?

Here goes in the hope of any slight value my answer might have, and because I’d be interested to know what others think, although it’s probably only relevant for those like me who are just starting out producing online content.

My current plan is to go ahead with making a personal blog, and then, if I feel up to it, cross-post things that I feel are particularly suitable. Your considerations about the career/image benefit, and being able to have a unified theme and all of my ideas in one place with its own identity, are definitely important reasons why I think this.

Another reason, though, and I’m not sure how much I feel like this is legitimate, is that a blog will have a lot less of a personal barrier to posting. Like I know that the Forum definitely encourages people to post relevant content however unpolished it is, but I also know that if I try to do forum posts only, then I will post a whole lot less frequently because, even though I know I shouldn’t be, I’ll be worrying about it not being good enough. And although one of the purposes of starting to write is for the results of others reading it (i.e. being able to discuss my ideas, present them more widely, if they end up being valuable then influence the thinking of others etc.), another purpose is for me to be able to practice writing and thinking and researching – so anything that makes me do that less will be less productive? And having a blog helps me produce content, I can always post it or a derivative to the Forum later once I feel more confident about it. But yes, I’m very uncertain on whether that is at all a good reason.

--

On a separate thing, when you are considering exporting your posts, you mean moving your previous posts to the Forum, yes? I'd be interested to know, do you think that the arguments in favour of (or against) that are in any way different compared to when people are considering where to post new content? Just thinking that I've seen in several places that people are in favour of cross-posting content to the Forum from blogs, and linking to interesting content elsewhere, but I've not seen discussion of whether it might be valuable for existing content producers to post their previous content on the Forum, although some of the same arguments in favour might apply. I suppose if people started doing that too frequently, then new content might get lost among it all?

Reply
Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
This work has come out of my Undergraduate dissertation. I haven't shared or discussed these results much before putting this up.  Message me if you'd like the code :) Edit: 16th April. After helpful comments, especially from Geoffrey, I now believe this method only identifies shifts in the happiness scale (not stretches). Have edited to make this clearer. TLDR * Life satisfaction (LS) appears flat over time, despite massive economic growth — the “Easterlin Paradox.” * Some argue that happiness is rising, but we’re reporting it more conservatively — a phenomenon called rescaling. * I test rescaling using long-run German panel data, looking at whether the association between reported happiness and three “get-me-out-of-here” actions (divorce, job resignation, and hospitalisation) changes over time. * If people are getting happier (and rescaling is occuring) the probability of these actions should become less linked to reported LS — but they don’t. * I find little evidence of rescaling. We should probably take self-reported happiness scores at face value. 1. Background: The Happiness Paradox Humans today live longer, richer, and healthier lives in history — yet we seem no seem for it. Self-reported life satisfaction (LS), usually measured on a 0–10 scale, has remained remarkably flatover the last few decades, even in countries like Germany, the UK, China, and India that have experienced huge GDP growth. As Michael Plant has written, the empirical evidence for this is fairly strong. This is the Easterlin Paradox. It is a paradox, because at a point in time, income is strongly linked to happiness, as I've written on the forum before. This should feel uncomfortable for anyone who believes that economic progress should make lives better — including (me) and others in the EA/Progress Studies worlds. Assuming agree on the empirical facts (i.e., self-reported happiness isn't increasing), there are a few potential explanations: * Hedonic adaptation: as life gets
 ·  · 38m read
 · 
In recent months, the CEOs of leading AI companies have grown increasingly confident about rapid progress: * OpenAI's Sam Altman: Shifted from saying in November "the rate of progress continues" to declaring in January "we are now confident we know how to build AGI" * Anthropic's Dario Amodei: Stated in January "I'm more confident than I've ever been that we're close to powerful capabilities... in the next 2-3 years" * Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis: Changed from "as soon as 10 years" in autumn to "probably three to five years away" by January. What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)[1] by 2028? In this article, I look at what's driven recent progress, estimate how far those drivers can continue, and explain why they're likely to continue for at least four more years. In particular, while in 2024 progress in LLM chatbots seemed to slow, a new approach started to work: teaching the models to reason using reinforcement learning. In just a year, this let them surpass human PhDs at answering difficult scientific reasoning questions, and achieve expert-level performance on one-hour coding tasks. We don't know how capable AGI will become, but extrapolating the recent rate of progress suggests that, by 2028, we could reach AI models with beyond-human reasoning abilities, expert-level knowledge in every domain, and that can autonomously complete multi-week projects, and progress would likely continue from there.  On this set of software engineering & computer use tasks, in 2020 AI was only able to do tasks that would typically take a human expert a couple of seconds. By 2024, that had risen to almost an hour. If the trend continues, by 2028 it'll reach several weeks.  No longer mere chatbots, these 'agent' models might soon satisfy many people's definitions of AGI — roughly, AI systems that match human performance at most knowledge work (see definition in footnote). This means that, while the compa
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
SUMMARY:  ALLFED is launching an emergency appeal on the EA Forum due to a serious funding shortfall. Without new support, ALLFED will be forced to cut half our budget in the coming months, drastically reducing our capacity to help build global food system resilience for catastrophic scenarios like nuclear winter, a severe pandemic, or infrastructure breakdown. ALLFED is seeking $800,000 over the course of 2025 to sustain its team, continue policy-relevant research, and move forward with pilot projects that could save lives in a catastrophe. As funding priorities shift toward AI safety, we believe resilient food solutions remain a highly cost-effective way to protect the future. If you’re able to support or share this appeal, please visit allfed.info/donate. Donate to ALLFED FULL ARTICLE: I (David Denkenberger) am writing alongside two of my team-mates, as ALLFED’s co-founder, to ask for your support. This is the first time in Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disaster’s (ALLFED’s) 8 year existence that we have reached out on the EA Forum with a direct funding appeal outside of Marginal Funding Week/our annual updates. I am doing so because ALLFED’s funding situation is serious, and because so much of ALLFED’s progress to date has been made possible through the support, feedback, and collaboration of the EA community.  Read our funding appeal At ALLFED, we are deeply grateful to all our supporters, including the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which has provided the majority of our funding for years. At the end of 2024, we learned we would be receiving far less support than expected due to a shift in SFF’s strategic priorities toward AI safety. Without additional funding, ALLFED will need to shrink. I believe the marginal cost effectiveness for improving the future and saving lives of resilience is competitive with AI Safety, even if timelines are short, because of potential AI-induced catastrophes. That is why we are asking people to donate to this emergency appeal
Relevant opportunities
26
Open Phil's Farm Animal Welfare team is hiring a Program Assistant!
LewisBollard
· · 2m read
0
0
15
AE Studio is hiring!
AE Studio
·
0
0
11
Manifund 2025 Regrants
Austin
·
0
0
View more