There's also a ton of academic lurkers -- I've always though that this due to the facts that 1) the border between academia and industry is pretty porous in tec

There's also a ton of academic lurkers -- I've always though that this due to the facts that 1) the border between academia and industry is pretty porous in technical fields (super obvious in ML research, but I think holds more generally) 2) academics borrow---and contribute to---the same set of methods and technologies 3) most individuals have an interest in complex systems (and their hilarious, tragic faults) such that they find articles like this one interesting. I think it's also useful to look at preceding communities like Slashdot — in that case it started out pretty tightly scoped for Linux enthusiasts, gaming, programming, and the then-nascent social internet but then the cohort of regular readers and contributors got older and they found themselves in policy, academia, and managerial business roles; as long as people remained involved in the community, the content of the site expanded to reflect the (extremely rapidly increasing) role of tech in these domains. (Obviously, Slashdot suffered from several ownership changes, a lame commenting system, and most everyone moved on to other venues).