The data here only reflects posting activity on LessWrong itself.
In 2021, the admins of LessWrong had the idea that we'd pay people to write book reviews. In 2025, we had a much better idea: people would pay us to write all kinds of posts!
I think this went pretty well, final determination pending, but in the meantime I can say the numbers have been impacted. That'll be no surprise to those regularly checking the site.
The number of posts increased by 57% (477 → 749) and number of words by 45% (1.0M → 1.46M). The increases were driven by 21 people officially involved in Inkhaven (residents, coaches, contributing writers) and 3 copycats[1] I identified by the numbers and their written intention to participate.
Curiously, the large boost to LessWrong was affected with only a handful of writers posting ~daily posts to the site. Per the Inkhaven blogroll, most writers published on Substack.
I believe beyond the three copycats on LessWrong, others expressed an intention to blog daily but did so on blogs elsewhere. Lorxus participated in Halfhaven and posted weekly roundups of their posts on LessWrong, but those don't count towards the totals here.
21% of the Inkhaven wordcount on LessWrong came from the LessWrong team. 79% came from others!
Ok, but what of quality? Karma ("baseScore") is the perfect measure of that. The good news is non-Inkhaven participant karma only declined 16 → 13 at the median.
There's more interpretation to be done here but I'm out of time. Such is the Inkhaven way. (This post began as an attempt from me to submit another Inkhaven post myself, but also, it's all graphs and not words!)
- ^
I use the term affectionately.