I empathise with that a post like mine could trigger a series of other people basically posting open requests for jobs. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, I get where the Forum’s moderators are coming from – drawing the line before it becomes a slippery slope.
Note that this post does not seem to be a job listing (edit: I misread that – I’m confused what you actually mean with posts of this type), unless you really stretch the meaning of that category.
I’m not soliciting for a job (i.e. a paid position of regular employment).
The I’m an entrepreneur framing could be changed into a Proposal-for-a-small-incubator-of-new-EA-services framing while changing very little of the content (I’d have just added in the name of my sole proprietorship). I chose not to do that because I don’t like hiding behind an official entity to get paid when it convolutes what’s actually going on, gives off an impression that I have less conflict of interest, and reduces my skin in the game.
I would appreciate if Forum moderators work out specifically how to deal with edge cases like this one. It would set a bad precedent if your decision convinces readers more that for their future write-up they should come up with a snazzy new project name and sprinkle in opaque orgspeak.
Note: Rupert is a friend of mine, but I wasn’t aware that he had read this post before he posted his.
The type of post you described in your second bullet point would also likely be marked as “Personal Blog” if it was mostly describing past actions of the incubator and soliciting grants. If the post was mostly about various types of services needed by the community, and general thoughts on how to fund such services, it would be marked as “Frontpage”.
In some cases, it might be hard to tell which topics take up “most” of a post, but this post leaned much more toward the “Personal Blog” side.
*****
If you want to invite wider discussion about EA services/entrepreneurial funding, you could try splitting this post into two posts; leave the personal content here, and move the general content (ideally with more detail/specific examples of services the community needs, etc.) into a new post.
I’d be happy to move the new post to Frontpage, and you’d be welcome to link to yours and Rupert’s posts from the new post. That lets you advertise your services without bending Frontpage standards.
Ian David Moss did exactly this recently. He wrote a post on EA political activism against Trump’s re-election, then split it into one post about EA political engagement in general and a second post about specific election recommendations (the latter isn’t allowed on Frontpage due to our rules on political posts). He then linked the posts together. I thought the setup worked well.
Hence, posts like this should be “Personal Blog” unless they involve discussion of other topics as well.
Most of the introductory paragraphs of this post were pointing to more general gaps in entrepreneurial support (i.e. other topics).
To be clear, I think the decision you made may have been reasonable. However, this post doesn’t match the criteria you stated for setting posts as Personal Blog. I think for moderation to be credible here, the criteria and underlying reasons must be clear to readers.
Two paragraphs at the beginning briefly mention the general idea that donors should consider funding entrepreneurs, but that subject is left behind for the rest of the post (until the very last line, I suppose). The post didn’t feel to me like it was really inviting much discussion of entrepreneurship in general.
I won’t set a hard number for what “percentage” of a post’s content has to be something other than a personal funding request for it to be on the front page (that would be impossible to measure), but it felt to me like the general content was a brief addendum to the detailed personal request, rather than vice-versa. In my view (from the inherently subjective position of “Forum moderator”), that balance equates to a post being a better fit for the “Personal Blog” category.
It’s absolutely within your rights to disagree, of course! The boundaries of these categories are fuzzy.
This sounds reasonable to me actually. The rest of the post was about making a specific case for funding my entrepreneurial work, rather than expounding on widespread bottlenecks entrepreneurs seem to face to get funded for doing good work and developing it further.
I started writing a 10-page draft to try to more detachedly analyse work by and interactions between entrepreneurs and funders.
The Forum’s moderators have had some discussion in the past on whether job listings should ever appear on Frontpage; it was a close call, but we think a few such posts once in a while is okay. However, I expect that there are many more potential job applicants than potential grantmakers on the Forum, so posts like this are less likely to be relevant to a random reader than a job listing.
Could you disambiguate some terms here? I see I misread this paragraph before. I’m more confused now about what you’re specifically saying.
E.g. - were you trying to say that there are ‘many more potential grantees than grantmakers’ (clearly true though this post was more aimed at smaller funders looking for an argued case)
- or were you implying I was posting as a job applicant (that doesn’t seem right, as explained two comments above)
I would like to step in here and say that I did not communicate with Remmelt before uploading my own post, and my own post may be less well-prepared than Remmelt’s and I am totally happy to remove it. I would not like the idea of being responsible for having Remmelt’s post removed from the Frontpage, and Remmelt has put a lot more work into his proposal than I have.
I wasn’t trying to say either of those things. What I meant was:
Job posts appeal to a specific audience (people looking for jobs)
Posts by potential grantees appeal to a specific audience (people looking to make grant-sized donations)
I believe that the first audience is larger than the second audience, which means that presenting the former type of post on the frontpage is somewhat more reasonable. However, it’s possible that neither type of post should ever be frontpage/that we should amend our categorization system in various other ways.
Thank you for sharing your reasoning.
I empathise with that a post like mine could trigger a series of other people basically posting open requests for jobs. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, I get where the Forum’s moderators are coming from – drawing the line before it becomes a slippery slope.
Note that this post does not seem to be a job listing (edit: I misread that – I’m confused what you actually mean with posts of this type), unless you really stretch the meaning of that category.
I’m not soliciting for a job (i.e. a paid position of regular employment).
The I’m an entrepreneur framing could be changed into a Proposal-for-a-small-incubator-of-new-EA-services framing while changing very little of the content (I’d have just added in the name of my sole proprietorship). I chose not to do that because I don’t like hiding behind an official entity to get paid when it convolutes what’s actually going on, gives off an impression that I have less conflict of interest, and reduces my skin in the game.
I would appreciate if Forum moderators work out specifically how to deal with edge cases like this one. It would set a bad precedent if your decision convinces readers more that for their future write-up they should come up with a snazzy new project name and sprinkle in opaque orgspeak.
Note: Rupert is a friend of mine, but I wasn’t aware that he had read this post before he posted his.
The type of post you described in your second bullet point would also likely be marked as “Personal Blog” if it was mostly describing past actions of the incubator and soliciting grants. If the post was mostly about various types of services needed by the community, and general thoughts on how to fund such services, it would be marked as “Frontpage”.
In some cases, it might be hard to tell which topics take up “most” of a post, but this post leaned much more toward the “Personal Blog” side.
*****
If you want to invite wider discussion about EA services/entrepreneurial funding, you could try splitting this post into two posts; leave the personal content here, and move the general content (ideally with more detail/specific examples of services the community needs, etc.) into a new post.
I’d be happy to move the new post to Frontpage, and you’d be welcome to link to yours and Rupert’s posts from the new post. That lets you advertise your services without bending Frontpage standards.
Ian David Moss did exactly this recently. He wrote a post on EA political activism against Trump’s re-election, then split it into one post about EA political engagement in general and a second post about specific election recommendations (the latter isn’t allowed on Frontpage due to our rules on political posts). He then linked the posts together. I thought the setup worked well.
Thank you for the clarification! This makes a lot of sense.
Most of the introductory paragraphs of this post were pointing to more general gaps in entrepreneurial support (i.e. other topics).
To be clear, I think the decision you made may have been reasonable. However, this post doesn’t match the criteria you stated for setting posts as Personal Blog. I think for moderation to be credible here, the criteria and underlying reasons must be clear to readers.
Two paragraphs at the beginning briefly mention the general idea that donors should consider funding entrepreneurs, but that subject is left behind for the rest of the post (until the very last line, I suppose). The post didn’t feel to me like it was really inviting much discussion of entrepreneurship in general.
I won’t set a hard number for what “percentage” of a post’s content has to be something other than a personal funding request for it to be on the front page (that would be impossible to measure), but it felt to me like the general content was a brief addendum to the detailed personal request, rather than vice-versa. In my view (from the inherently subjective position of “Forum moderator”), that balance equates to a post being a better fit for the “Personal Blog” category.
It’s absolutely within your rights to disagree, of course! The boundaries of these categories are fuzzy.
This sounds reasonable to me actually. The rest of the post was about making a specific case for funding my entrepreneurial work, rather than expounding on widespread bottlenecks entrepreneurs seem to face to get funded for doing good work and developing it further.
I started writing a 10-page draft to try to more detachedly analyse work by and interactions between entrepreneurs and funders.
Could you disambiguate some terms here? I see I misread this paragraph before. I’m more confused now about what you’re specifically saying.
E.g.
- were you trying to say that there are ‘many more potential grantees than grantmakers’ (clearly true though this post was more aimed at smaller funders looking for an argued case)
- or were you implying I was posting as a job applicant (that doesn’t seem right, as explained two comments above)
I would like to step in here and say that I did not communicate with Remmelt before uploading my own post, and my own post may be less well-prepared than Remmelt’s and I am totally happy to remove it. I would not like the idea of being responsible for having Remmelt’s post removed from the Frontpage, and Remmelt has put a lot more work into his proposal than I have.
I wasn’t trying to say either of those things. What I meant was:
Job posts appeal to a specific audience (people looking for jobs)
Posts by potential grantees appeal to a specific audience (people looking to make grant-sized donations)
I believe that the first audience is larger than the second audience, which means that presenting the former type of post on the frontpage is somewhat more reasonable. However, it’s possible that neither type of post should ever be frontpage/that we should amend our categorization system in various other ways.
Got it!