Yeah. I feel like the EA community already has a discussion platform with very granular topic divisions in Facebook, and yet here were are. I’m not exactly sure why the EA forum seems to me like it’s working better than Facebook, but I figure if it’s not broken don’t fix it. Also, I think something like the EA Forum is inherently a bit more fragile than Facebook… any Facebook group is going to benefit from Facebook’s ubiquity as a communication tool/online distraction.
You made a list of posts that we’re missing out on now… those kinda seem like the sort of posts I see on EA facebook groups, but maybe you disagree?
Could you give a few reasons why you the EA Forum seems to works better than the Facebook groups in your view?
The example posts I gave are on the extreme end of the kind of granularity I’d personally like to see more of (I deliberately made them extra specific to make a clear case). I agree those kinds of posts tend to show up more in the Facebook groups (though the writing tends to be short there). Then there seems to be stuff in the middle that might not fit well anywhere.
I feel now that the sub-forum approach should be explored much more carefully than I did when I wrote the comment at the top. In my opinion, we (or rather, Marek :-) should definitely still run contained experiments on this because on our current platform it’s too hard to gather around topics narrower than being generally interested in EA work (maybe even test a hybrid model that allows for crossover between the forum and the Facebook groups).
So I’ve changed my mind from a naive ‘we should overhaul the entire system’ view to ‘we should tinker with it in ways we expect would facilitate better interactions, and then see if they actually do’ view.
Could you give a few reasons why you the EA Forum seems to works better than the Facebook groups in your view?
Lol, like I said, I’m not completely sure. Posts & comments seem to go into greater depth, posts sometimes get referenced long after they are written?
I’m not certain subfora are a terrible idea, I just wanted this risk to be on peoples’ radar. One possible compromise is to let people tag their posts (perhaps restricted to a set of tags chosen by moderators) and allow users to subscribe to RSS feeds associated with particular tags.
Yeah. I feel like the EA community already has a discussion platform with very granular topic divisions in Facebook, and yet here were are. I’m not exactly sure why the EA forum seems to me like it’s working better than Facebook, but I figure if it’s not broken don’t fix it. Also, I think something like the EA Forum is inherently a bit more fragile than Facebook… any Facebook group is going to benefit from Facebook’s ubiquity as a communication tool/online distraction.
You made a list of posts that we’re missing out on now… those kinda seem like the sort of posts I see on EA facebook groups, but maybe you disagree?
Could you give a few reasons why you the EA Forum seems to works better than the Facebook groups in your view?
The example posts I gave are on the extreme end of the kind of granularity I’d personally like to see more of (I deliberately made them extra specific to make a clear case). I agree those kinds of posts tend to show up more in the Facebook groups (though the writing tends to be short there). Then there seems to be stuff in the middle that might not fit well anywhere.
I feel now that the sub-forum approach should be explored much more carefully than I did when I wrote the comment at the top. In my opinion, we (or rather, Marek :-) should definitely still run contained experiments on this because on our current platform it’s too hard to gather around topics narrower than being generally interested in EA work (maybe even test a hybrid model that allows for crossover between the forum and the Facebook groups).
So I’ve changed my mind from a naive ‘we should overhaul the entire system’ view to ‘we should tinker with it in ways we expect would facilitate better interactions, and then see if they actually do’ view.
Thanks for your points!
Lol, like I said, I’m not completely sure. Posts & comments seem to go into greater depth, posts sometimes get referenced long after they are written?
I’m not certain subfora are a terrible idea, I just wanted this risk to be on peoples’ radar. One possible compromise is to let people tag their posts (perhaps restricted to a set of tags chosen by moderators) and allow users to subscribe to RSS feeds associated with particular tags.