Anecdotal perspective here: I rarely post here, but I enjoy lurking and did the same on the Actuarial Outpost. I just turned 30 and got my FCAS about 2 years ago and I found the forums on the AO and here to be really valuable preparing for exams in a way that’s not replicated at all on Reddit. I have a lot of coworkers I’m close with who are currently or were studying for exams when I was taking them, but I personally don’t do well with in-office study groups and the AO forums were great at helping me gauge whether I was making average study progress without having to go through the tedium of spending half an hour over lunch comparing solutions to a practice problem with an overachieving coworker.
Now that I’m done with exams, I enjoy browsing the career topics and sandbox threads here for unique perspectives from anonymous but oddly familiar voices.
I used the old AO a lot when i was trying to learn how to do something new. Although I’ve been at companies with other actuaries, i was rarely in the same office and mostly doing non-traditional work that had never been done by anyone in the company before me so nothing to review or copy.
I’d occasionally ask a question publicly but mainly, I’d pay attention when posters posted about their work or experience and then PM them when I needed help. That was invaluable to me.
Luckily, I’m in a position now where I know enough industry experts to ask those types of questions AND I answer them for newer analysts but dont really get them from online forums much anymore.
But I have come to realize that frivolity is a good thing and time should be set aside for it!
I would concede the political discussions here are anything but frivolous and, since they are primarily focused on US issues, the discussions have been enlightening for me as a foreigner as to how Americans view these issues.
Some info/data that’s somewhat? relevant.
The site’s traffic and metrics are incredibly stable, day to day, week to week, and month to month. And the volume is ‘pretty decent’. My internet marketing guy said when we hit a certain level of traffic, it makes sense to run advertising. We’re at 3.5 times that level. So we’re not growing, but neither are we declining. And there’s enough traffic that the site is long term viable IMO. And there are roughly 30 new signups every month, so it’s not declining really in any fashion. I guess remove the spammers from that number, but still, there’s new people signing up and I assume, reading.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a website’s traffic so stable. It’s been rock solid level for over a year, maybe two (I only have numbers going back a year).
I’m no space lobster but I think anonymous users are simply people who visit w/o being logged in. Crawlers are from site like google that “crawls” though website to index them in its search results. There are many companies that have such crawlers. @SpaceLobster Please correct me if I am wrong.
And US politicians create no end of problems for you to deal with!
One of the big differences between the US and the rest of the world is that things that are non-issues in most other countries are politicized in the US and become issues. The US is truly exceptional in this regard. No need to list sample issues here as threads already exist on most of them on this forum.
