THOUGHT ONE: I think this introductory sequence could be cleaned up by combining some of these posts. This post was a great elaboration on this topic for me and is well written, but I think also could have been better included in a larger single post amalgamating some of the information in this sequence (i.e. this might be better placed within the Forum User Manual). I think this sequence could be easily edited into a 3 post series that would be a bit conceptually clearer and less redundant. This could look like:
Introduction (“Table of Contents” “New? Start here!” “Guide to norms on the forum” and “You Should Write a Forum Bio” as these seemed aimed at the same audience and would seem ideally engaged with at similar times)
User Manual (“Forum User Manual” “Follow and Filter Topics” “Linkposting is an act of community service” “Forum Digest” and “EA Forum Suggestion Thread” as these are all concerned with orienting users to the technical experience and options of the forum)
Guide to Writing (“You Should Write on the EA Forum” “You Don’t Have to Respond to Every Comment” and “A Forum Post Can Be Short” as these are all concerned with helping someone ready to write and engage in that way complete this task)
I think the User Manual one may be broad enough that you could split it into two separate posts, but it seems connected enough to combine it into one for me. But I think this could be useful in the sense of helping people already familiar clarify what to skip over (I wasted a good 5 minutes going through stuff from the Introduction section that I should have just skipped entirely). I also think this is largely borne out of my inclination to organize things and have fewer documents with organized headers than multiple documents, so if you have different intuitions (i.e. making a separate post may be beneficial to re raise awareness on a topic as seems to have been a goal with the “Forum Digest” post) you may not wish to do this.
THOUGHT TWO: I assume a descent amount of thought has gone into the downranking of community stuff, so I’m inclined to think I may just be missing further information here, but this move doesn’t really make sense to me, let me explain why. When I went through the introductory program, I certainly read some posts from the forum, but when I did, I rarely stuck around to explore, instead just reading and closing out as I would any linked article. By the time I came to interact with the Front Page, I was already fairly involved with EA, and think I honestly might have been more attracted to engaging with it more had I seen more posts of the EA Community Building sort of variety. This could just be me, and it could be that a lot of people do come to the frontpage before familiarity, but I just wanted to voice that I seemed to have the opposite experience of this assumption.
Thanks for the posts though! I thought this one was particularly clear and technically helpful, and am now heading on to chew through the rest of the series.
Two random thoughts.
THOUGHT ONE: I think this introductory sequence could be cleaned up by combining some of these posts. This post was a great elaboration on this topic for me and is well written, but I think also could have been better included in a larger single post amalgamating some of the information in this sequence (i.e. this might be better placed within the Forum User Manual). I think this sequence could be easily edited into a 3 post series that would be a bit conceptually clearer and less redundant. This could look like:
Introduction (“Table of Contents” “New? Start here!” “Guide to norms on the forum” and “You Should Write a Forum Bio” as these seemed aimed at the same audience and would seem ideally engaged with at similar times)
User Manual (“Forum User Manual” “Follow and Filter Topics” “Linkposting is an act of community service” “Forum Digest” and “EA Forum Suggestion Thread” as these are all concerned with orienting users to the technical experience and options of the forum)
Guide to Writing (“You Should Write on the EA Forum” “You Don’t Have to Respond to Every Comment” and “A Forum Post Can Be Short” as these are all concerned with helping someone ready to write and engage in that way complete this task)
I think the User Manual one may be broad enough that you could split it into two separate posts, but it seems connected enough to combine it into one for me. But I think this could be useful in the sense of helping people already familiar clarify what to skip over (I wasted a good 5 minutes going through stuff from the Introduction section that I should have just skipped entirely). I also think this is largely borne out of my inclination to organize things and have fewer documents with organized headers than multiple documents, so if you have different intuitions (i.e. making a separate post may be beneficial to re raise awareness on a topic as seems to have been a goal with the “Forum Digest” post) you may not wish to do this.
THOUGHT TWO: I assume a descent amount of thought has gone into the downranking of community stuff, so I’m inclined to think I may just be missing further information here, but this move doesn’t really make sense to me, let me explain why. When I went through the introductory program, I certainly read some posts from the forum, but when I did, I rarely stuck around to explore, instead just reading and closing out as I would any linked article. By the time I came to interact with the Front Page, I was already fairly involved with EA, and think I honestly might have been more attracted to engaging with it more had I seen more posts of the EA Community Building sort of variety. This could just be me, and it could be that a lot of people do come to the frontpage before familiarity, but I just wanted to voice that I seemed to have the opposite experience of this assumption.
Thanks for the posts though! I thought this one was particularly clear and technically helpful, and am now heading on to chew through the rest of the series.