Below are some statistics about the 11th year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here.
| 2020 | Page views | Posts | Comments |
| Jan | 3,223 | 7 | 28 |
| Feb | 3,008 | 6 | 21 |
| Mar | 3,562 | 8 | 41 |
| Apr | 4,368 | 10 | 106 |
| May | 4,507 | 7 | 156 |
| June | 3,481 | 13 | 67 |
| July | 3,828 | 11 | 100 |
| Aug | 3,898 | 12 | 123 |
| Sept | 4,773 | 21 | 201 |
| Oct | 4,733 | 16 | 106 |
| Nov | 4,005 | 15 | 165 |
| Dec (to 26th) | 1,989 | 10 | 54 |
| Total | 45,375 | 135 | 1,168 |
Note that page views do not include visits by logged-in contributors – the wordpress system does not count those visits.
Posts were made by 15 authors during 2020. (There were, of course, many other authors quoted and linked to.)
There are currently 449 email and WordPress followers of this blog. In addition there are 483 Twitter followers (@Klerotarian) and 67 Facebook followers.
Searching for “distribution by lot” (with quotes) using Google returns Equality-by-Lot as the 2nd result (out of “about 307,000 results”). Searching for “sortition” does not show Equality-by-Lot until the 6th results page (out of “about 253,000 results”) – a dramatic demotion compared to previous years.
Happy holidays and a happy new year to Equality-by-Lot readers, commenters and posters. Keep up the good fight for democracy!
Filed under: Distribution by lot, meta, Sortition |
Adam Cronkright
Ali
Ahmed R. Teleb
avanderven
avergne
Alex Kovner
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
Simon Threlkeld
Nick Coccoma
codyhipskind
Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
constitutionalism
davidschecter
graytmatter
gtridimas
H.J. Hofkirchner
John Burnheim
jgarry20151
johnedwardtaylor
johnhuang865
Jonathan Crock
keithsutherland
Jacob Richter
lukewhito
SimonPek
Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
paulnollen
peterstone
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
pronfeld
qcollective
rcaze
richwbrown
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Ted Wachtel
Joshua Laferriere
Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
Equality by lot 
The increase in the number of visitors is encouraging but, given that the overwhelming majority of posts are on the political potential of sortition (as opposed to distribution by lot), I think there is a good case to re-branding the forum. Demotion to the sixth page of google is primarily an indication of the increased interest in sortition in mainstream media, but we should take whatever action is necessary to get back where we belong. How about changing the subtitle to “the political potential of sortition”? Google returns only 2,390 searches for Kleroterians (366,000 for Mysterions), so the sub-title is clearly a missed opportunity. Retaining the main title as Equality by Lot will ensure continuity with Conall Boyle’s original vision but changing the subtitle can only improve our online profile and give browsers a more accurate indication of what to expect.
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I’m delighted that ‘distribution by lot’ ranks so highly, and I hold firm to the belief that this is the obvious democratic mechanism to combat, for example, the Woke generation. Sigh! But so many of you think that randomly selecting ordinary citizens to replace elected politicians is going to transform something? everything? How? Why? By what means?
But then I’m just a mechanic, not a highly credentialed philosopher!
Well done Yoram for keeping the show on the road. The visitor numbers are amazing and a credit to you.
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Equality by lot: The political potential of sortition would cover the full democratic potential of lot (and improve our google search ranking), whereas Equality by lot: The blog of the Kleroterians makes us sound like a weird cult from Planet Zog.
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Thank you very much, Conall.
I’d be happy to have a sustained discussion with a skeptic such as you regarding the potential of sortition for democratization of government. If you are interested, I suggest these posts as a starting point for my thinking.
(It is not clear to me BTW what combat needs to be waged against the “Woke generation” [presumably what is usually called millenials?].)
Regarding the title of this blog – I seem to recall we had this discussion before. I have no particular attachment to the “blog of klerotarians” label (although it is by not means clear to me that this has anything to do with EbL’s Google ranking). I’d be happy to have a discussion and a decision regarding an alternative. Maybe something like “Sortition as a democratic tool”?
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Yoram:> Maybe something like “Sortition as a democratic tool”?
That sounds like an ideal subtitle.
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So, if there are no objections, I would suggest Yoram change the subtitle of this forum as he suggests. I doubt if anyone (other than Google) will even notice. Yoram: are there any other SEO tweaks that would up our ranking for people searching for “sortition”? EbL should be on page one of Google, rather than 5 or 6 (my own little conference paper [which I doubt if anyone has read] on an obscure Australian site is on page 2). EbL should be ranked with Wikipedia on sortition searches, given the number of visitors and page views.
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As a subtitle, instead of “Sortition as a democratic tool”, I’d rather suggest the following: “Without sortition, there is no democracy” or “You can’t have democracy without sortition”. A native speaker may give the best rendition of the idea (which, by the way, is not mine but Tomás Mancebo’s: sin sorteo no hay democracia).
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Maybe something like “you can’t have democracy if you don’t have sortition”?
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The value of Yoram’s original suggestion is that it better includes both Conall’s perspective (democracy as the impartial distribution of goods and opportunities) and those who believe sortition is an essential component of democratic governance. If you want to be inclusive, you need to be a little vague.
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In full, this could be as follows:
Equality by lot
Because you can’t have democracy when you don’t have sortition
But, again, I’d rather leave the choice of words to a native speaker…
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Arturo,
A common phrasing would be “no democracy without sortition“, I think. This riffs off of the well known American revolutionary slogan “no taxation without representation”.
I am not that happy with this direction, however, because due to its slogan-like nature, it is rather vague. It seems to imply (even if unintentionally) that adding some sortition-based mechanism to the electoralist system would somehow transform it into a democracy.
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Vagueness is essential in order to include people like Conall (who think there is no obvious connection between sortition and democratic representation) and myself (who do believe that adding sortition could help democratise sortition). The only way to keep everyone happy is simply to indicate the subject matter of the blog, namely sortition as a democratic tool. But I agree there must be no sloganising.
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“Equality by lot: The political potential of sortition ” seems like an appropriate, snappy title. ‘Sortition’ now seems to be the settled descriptor for what is mainly discussed here — and it seems, blogged ever more enthusiastically elsewhere.
OK my ‘distribution by lot’ is a bit of a one-trick pony, but it could be included in key-words for the website?
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Yoram,
Can you create a poll in WordPress (I know it is a dangerous precedent, but just for once)? I simply fail to see any problem with sloganeering. You know, it is called “meme creation”, and it is a very powerful tool in these times we are living.
The poll could offer as possible choices:
a) Equality by lot – sortition as a democratic tool
b) Equality by lot – no democracy without sortition
c) Equality by lot – because you can’t have democracy when you don’t have sortition
I would be happy with the votes being weighted by the frequency of contributions — that should give both you and Keith a commensurate authority which, in my view, is fairly deserved.
A two-rounds sequence in the style of the French presidential elections could be well suited in this case.
Needless to say that any other original suggestion is more than welcome.
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I think Conall’s latest suggestion works very well, as it’s non-committal.
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I think having “democracy” as part of the subtitle is important (and potentially useful for public interest). If we want to go with the “potential” direction, we could have “the democratic potential of sortition”.
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I’ll set up a new post requesting people to offer suggestions and a week later another one requesting people to express preferences.
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Sounds ideal to me Yoram — it contains all the necessary keywords, doesn’t commit to any particular approach and is not a slogan. Unless anyone has any objections I would go ahead and change the graphic.
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[…] Below are some statistics about the 12th year of Equality-by-Lot. Comparable numbers for last year can be found here. […]
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