First, I want to say thanks for this explanation. It was both timely and insightful (I had no idea about the LLM screening, for instance). So wanted to give that a big 👍
I think something Jan is pointing to (and correct me if I’m wrong @Jan_Kulveit) is that because the default Community tag does downweight the visibility and coverage of a post, it could be implicitly used to deter engagement from certain posts. Indeed, my understanding was that this was pretty much exactly the case, and was driven by a desire to reduce Forum engagement on ‘Community’ issues in the wake of FTX. See for example:
Now, it is also true that I think the Forum was broadly supportive about this at the time. People were exhausted by FTX, and there seemed like there was a new devasting EA scandal every week, and being able to downweight these discussions and focus on ‘real’ EA causes was understandably very popular.[1] So it wasn’t even necessarily a nefarious change, it was responding to user demand.
Nevertheless I think, especially since criticisms of EA also come with the ‘Community’ tag attached,[2] it has also had the effect of somewhat reducing criticism and community sense-making. In retrospect, I still feel like the damage wrought by FTX hasn’t had a full accounting, and the change to down-weight Community posts was trying to solve the ‘symptoms’ rather than the underling issues.
since criticisms of EA also come with the ‘Community’ tag attached
This seems not straightforwardly true to me—or at least it shouldn’t be? Criticisms of the EA community should be community-tagged, but criticisms of EA ideas should not be.
Yeah I could have worded this better. What I mean to say is that I expect that the tags ‘Criticism of EA’ and ‘Community’ probably co-occur in posts a lot more than two randomly drawn tags, and probably rank quite high on the pairwise ranking. I don’t mean to say that it’s a necessary connection or should always be the case, but it does mean that downweighting Community posts will disproportionately downweight Criticism posts.
If I’m right, that is! I can probably scrape the data from 23-24 on the Forum to actually answer this question.
Interesting- for what it’s worth, I often make frontpage vs community decisions and I don’t think of community as relegating content. Often, there is less community content each day, so community posts stick around for longer than frontpage posts. In some cases, I’d assume it would be better for engagement to be tagged community. I haven’t looked at the stats on this, so I don’t know for sure if my impression is correct.
I agree that I don’t think it’s in-practice relegating content. Many of the highest karma posts are still “Community” posts. I’ve heard a user tell me that they just scroll down to the “Community” section when they come to the Forum (possibly a joke but this feels like a joke that has some truth to it). I think it does mean that newcomers to the site will be less likely to see those posts, but that is intentional (we think those posts are less relevant to newcomers).
I also agree that the intention was to essentially “correct” how much attention these kinds of posts were getting, because using only karma (plus recency) for sorting meant that they were overweighted. I believe the “Community” section is still valuable for essentially the same reasons as before (for example, I think it would be a mistake to assume that there will not be major drama/scandals discussed here in the future, and I think that would be worse without a “Community” section).
However, I don’t have a strong opinion about the definition of “Community”, nor even if this section should remain “Community” or if it should have some totally different criteria. I’m quite supportive of criticism so I could see the case for updating this system to put more criticism of EA in the Frontpage. It’s likely our team will revisit this in the next few months.
First, I want to say thanks for this explanation. It was both timely and insightful (I had no idea about the LLM screening, for instance). So wanted to give that a big 👍
I think something Jan is pointing to (and correct me if I’m wrong @Jan_Kulveit) is that because the default Community tag does downweight the visibility and coverage of a post, it could be implicitly used to deter engagement from certain posts. Indeed, my understanding was that this was pretty much exactly the case, and was driven by a desire to reduce Forum engagement on ‘Community’ issues in the wake of FTX. See for example:
“Karma overrates some topics; resulting issues and potential solutions” from Lizka and Ben in January 2023
My comment and Lizka’s response in the comments to that post
The reasoning given in the change announcement post which confirms it was for the ‘other motives’ that Jan mentions. That’s at least how I read it.
Now, it is also true that I think the Forum was broadly supportive about this at the time. People were exhausted by FTX, and there seemed like there was a new devasting EA scandal every week, and being able to downweight these discussions and focus on ‘real’ EA causes was understandably very popular.[1] So it wasn’t even necessarily a nefarious change, it was responding to user demand.
Nevertheless I think, especially since criticisms of EA also come with the ‘Community’ tag attached,[2] it has also had the effect of somewhat reducing criticism and community sense-making. In retrospect, I still feel like the damage wrought by FTX hasn’t had a full accounting, and the change to down-weight Community posts was trying to solve the ‘symptoms’ rather than the underling issues.
I think reading the most popular comments on the linked posts supports this.
Willing to change my mind on this is there’s much less of an overlap between the two than other major categories, for instance
This seems not straightforwardly true to me—or at least it shouldn’t be? Criticisms of the EA community should be community-tagged, but criticisms of EA ideas should not be.
Yeah I could have worded this better. What I mean to say is that I expect that the tags ‘Criticism of EA’ and ‘Community’ probably co-occur in posts a lot more than two randomly drawn tags, and probably rank quite high on the pairwise ranking. I don’t mean to say that it’s a necessary connection or should always be the case, but it does mean that downweighting Community posts will disproportionately downweight Criticism posts.
If I’m right, that is! I can probably scrape the data from 23-24 on the Forum to actually answer this question.
Interesting- for what it’s worth, I often make frontpage vs community decisions and I don’t think of community as relegating content. Often, there is less community content each day, so community posts stick around for longer than frontpage posts. In some cases, I’d assume it would be better for engagement to be tagged community. I haven’t looked at the stats on this, so I don’t know for sure if my impression is correct.
I agree that I don’t think it’s in-practice relegating content. Many of the highest karma posts are still “Community” posts. I’ve heard a user tell me that they just scroll down to the “Community” section when they come to the Forum (possibly a joke but this feels like a joke that has some truth to it). I think it does mean that newcomers to the site will be less likely to see those posts, but that is intentional (we think those posts are less relevant to newcomers).
I also agree that the intention was to essentially “correct” how much attention these kinds of posts were getting, because using only karma (plus recency) for sorting meant that they were overweighted. I believe the “Community” section is still valuable for essentially the same reasons as before (for example, I think it would be a mistake to assume that there will not be major drama/scandals discussed here in the future, and I think that would be worse without a “Community” section).
However, I don’t have a strong opinion about the definition of “Community”, nor even if this section should remain “Community” or if it should have some totally different criteria. I’m quite supportive of criticism so I could see the case for updating this system to put more criticism of EA in the Frontpage. It’s likely our team will revisit this in the next few months.