When I was a moderator, my understanding was that the community tag was more about separating posts related to EA as in “doing good” from posts related to EA as in “a specific community of people”. E.g. People uninterested in the community but still interested in AI Safety would still be the target audience of a post on “AI safety talent development”
That said, there were plenty of ambiguous cases, and users can tag any of their own posts as community when posting, so I agree that it’s somewhat inconsistently applied.
These were all (with the exception of 3) written in the six months following FTX, when it was still being actively discussed, and at least three other EA-relateed controversies had come out in succession. So I probably misremembered FTX specifically (thinking again, IIRC there was an FTX tag that was the original ‘autodeprioritised’ tag, whose logic maybe got reverted when the community separation logic was introduced). But I think it’s fair to say that these were a de facto controversy-deprioritisation strategy (as the fourth post suggests) rather than a measured strategy that could be expected to stay equally relevant in calmer times.
I don’t think that’s true, based on what CEA staff were posting publicly and some conversations I had at the time.
Some relevant posts and comment threads:
1. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wvBfYnNeRvfEXvezP/moving-community-discussion-to-a-separate-tab-a-test-we#Why_consider_doing_this_at_all_
2. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dDudLPHv7AgPLrzef/karma-overrates-some-topics-resulting-issues-and-potential
3. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2jYDXwqSj87ZjLtwy/follow-and-filter-topics-and-an-update-to-the-community#3__The__Community__tag_and_topic
4. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/irhgjSgvocfrwnzRz/should-the-forum-be-structured-such-that-the-drama-of-the#GNLKxKvcijjcxSiRG
When I was a moderator, my understanding was that the community tag was more about separating posts related to EA as in “doing good” from posts related to EA as in “a specific community of people”. E.g. People uninterested in the community but still interested in AI Safety would still be the target audience of a post on “AI safety talent development”
That said, there were plenty of ambiguous cases, and users can tag any of their own posts as community when posting, so I agree that it’s somewhat inconsistently applied.
These were all (with the exception of 3) written in the six months following FTX, when it was still being actively discussed, and at least three other EA-relateed controversies had come out in succession. So I probably misremembered FTX specifically (thinking again, IIRC there was an FTX tag that was the original ‘autodeprioritised’ tag, whose logic maybe got reverted when the community separation logic was introduced). But I think it’s fair to say that these were a de facto controversy-deprioritisation strategy (as the fourth post suggests) rather than a measured strategy that could be expected to stay equally relevant in calmer times.