This is really sad. I'm sorry to hear things didn't work out, but I'm still left wondering why not.

I guess I was really hoping for a couple thousand+ word post-mortem, describing the history of the project, and which hypotheses you tested, with a thorough explanation of the results.

If you weren't getting enough math input, why do you think that throwing more people at the problem wouldn't generate better content? Just having a bunch of links to the most intuitive and elegant explanations, gathered in one place, would be a huge help to both readers and writers. Students trying to learn are already doing this through blind googling, so the marginal work to drop the links is low.

Pulling all the info together into a good explanation still requires one dedicated person, but perhaps that task can be broken down into chunks too. Like, once one version is written, translating it for non-mathy people should be relatively easy. Same for condensing things for mathy people.

But, why wouldn't adding more mathematicians mean a few would be good at and interested in writing new articles? Where did you do outreach? What did you do? There are entire communities, scattered across the web, who exist to try and learn and teach math. Have you tried partnering with any of them, or recruiting members?

If not, why do you think it won't work? Do you see promising alternative approaches, or are good explanations impossible even in principle?

Sorry for the flood of questions. I've just been waiting with baited breath for Arbital to stop pushing me away and start pulling people in. I even linked some people, but felt guilty about it for putting a strain on your overloaded servers before you were ready for the general public.

I feel sad that the project is gone before I even understood how it was supposed to work.

I was like: "I have absolutely no idea what this is supposed to be or to do, but smart people seem enthusiastic about it, so it's probably a smart thing, and maybe later when I have more time, I will examine it more closely."

Now, my question is... how much should I use this as an outside view for other activities of MIRI?

That sure was an expensive way to test demand for Arbital 1.0. Have you thought about cheaper ways to test demand for Arbital 2.0?

Debates didn't work because... well, it's a very complicated problem.

I'd love to hear about this in more detail. What have you learned about the problem? Do you know what good solutions would look like, but they're too hard or expensive to implement? Or have you learned that it isn't feasible?

It seems disingenuous to call this new project Arbital.

As a software engineer, it seems strange to me that Arbital is trying to be an encyclopedia, debate system, and blogging site at the same time. What made you decide to put those features together in one piece of software?

Will this "Arbital 2.0" be an entirely unrelated microblogging platform, or are you simply re-branding Arbital 1.0 to focus on the microblogging features?

Is there a description anywhere of the history of Arbital development?

Specifically I once heard a 4th-hand description of Arbital as "the Stacks Project, but for everything." It seemed to me at the time that a good step would be to 'simply' extend the Stacks project until it encompasses all of math[*]. I'd like to know which of Arbital's difficulties would still apply there.

I see finding high-quality content producers was a problem; you reference math explanations specifically.

I notice that people are usually good at providing thorough and comprehensible explanations in only their chosen domains. That being said, people are interested in subjects beyond those they have mastered.

I wonder if it is possible to approach quality content producers with the question of what content they would like to passively consume, and then try and approach networks of content producers at once. For example: find a game theory explainer who wants to read about complex analysis; a complex analysis explainer who wants to read about music theory; a music theory explainer who wants to read about game theory.

Then you can approach all three at once with the premise that if they explain the thing they are good at, they will also be able to read the thing they want to be explained well to them, on the same platform. There's a similar trick being explored for networks of organ donations.

Also, was there any consideration given to the simple mechanism of paying people for quality explanations? I expect a reasonable core of value could be had for low cost.

I expect that micro-blogging will be an excellent combination with the arbital-style of voting on things. I especially think that you could get very good results from voting on per-post 'related links' submitted by users. Tumblr has reblogs for responding to things, but those naturally become mediated by viralness instead of internal coherence.

I can imagine a neural-activation-like effect coming out of that, where frequently co-active posts naturally rise to the top of each other's links and become threads or topics.

Are you planning anything like that?

Thank you for the summary of the state of Arbital!

It seems that while you haven't achieved your full goals, you have created a system that Eliezer is happy with, which is of non-zero value in itself (or, depending on what you think of MIRI, the AI alignment problem etc., of very large value).

It'd be interesting to work out why projects like Wikipedia and StackOveflow succeeded, while Arbital didn't, to such an extent. Unfortunately, I don't really have much of an idea how to answer my own question, so I'll be among those who want all the answers, but don't want to write them... (Too niche a target? Luck? Lack of openness to contributors???)

Finally — this is obviously a huge request considering the amount of work you must have put into Arbital — if you're not planning to re-use much of the existing code and if you don't think that it would harm the new "Arbital 2.0", would you consider open-sourcing the existing platform? (This is distinct from the content being under CC BY-SA, though kudos to whoever made that decision!)

What were some specific ideas you had for "solving debates"? I was hoping Arbital would take the debate around a given topic and organize it into a tree. You start with an assertion that branches into supporting and opposing arguments, then those branch into rebuttals, then those branch into counter-rebuttals, etc.