Iâd be interested in any feedback people have about the analytics page we added recently. You can get to it via âPost statsâ in the user menu.
Specific areas of feedback that would be helpful:
Are the stats displayed useful to you and easy to understand, are there other stats that you think would be more useful?
Feedback on the design/âlayout
Do you endorse it as a concept (i.e. you might think this incentivises engagement bait or something, if you notice that motivation in yourself that would be useful to know)?
Is it broken in any way? Is it annoyingly slow?
We also updated the analytics page for individual posts at the same time so feedback on that would be helpful as well (you can get to this via the three dot menu on posts you have published, or via the âPost statsâ page).
Thanks for doing this, Will (and EA Forum team), and for asking for feedback!
Are the stats displayed useful to you and easy to understand, are there other stats that you think would be more useful?
Yes, I think the displayed stats are useful. I would also be happy to see:
The bounce rate and mean reading time in the general analytics page too, as opposed to just in the analytics page of each post.
Some metrics related to the distribution of the reading time. For example, the 10th and 90th percentile reading time. It would also be good to have these in the general page, and that of each post.
Feedback on the design/âlayout
I like it.
Do you endorse it as a concept (i.e. you might think this incentivises engagement bait or something, if you notice that motivation in yourself that would be useful to know)?
I endorse it, but I think it would be worth adding a warning about people being mindful about what they are optimising for. Something like the following. âNote karma and reads may not correlate well with impact, and maximising the impact of your EA Forum posts may not be your best strategy to maximise the overall impact of your life/âcareerâ. Alternatively, you can publish a post on the dangers of non-ideal incentives in the context of EA Forum engagement, and then just link to it in the analytics page.
I would like to see how many people read to the end. I have an 18 min read post, and I can see that many people read for 1m 30s so probably read the tl;dr or summary, but it does tell me that a number of people did read for much longer. Iâd like to know how many read it to the end so I can tell if maybe posts need to be much shorter.
May not be possible, but wishlist idea would be to know a bit more about who these users are in terms of interest demographic. If my post is AI Safety but most of those who click away fast have animal welfare listed as their primary interest then thatâs not an issue. But if my post is AI Safety and lots of AI Safety people didnât read or engage, then thatâs an issue I need to fix. This may not be feasible to implement however.
All in all I like it, and it feels like it gives insight into developing better engagement habits rather than encouraging clickbait.
wishlist idea would be to know a bit more about who these users are in terms of interest demographic
Interesting, I hadnât thought of that. It would be possible to implement something like this, one issue would be that a lot of people donât fill out the topics they are interested in, but it could be possible to get round this by basing it on the other posts they read rather than their stated interests.
The thing about reading to the end is something I was planning to add, I have been envisioning a graph like this on the post analytics page (see below, random example from google), would that fit what youâre looking for?
Perhaps having a forum option to add tags to your profile, if youâre interested in this data being collected?
For the reading to end, yes that would be fantastic. Obviously it canât tell what people were looking at when they left, but based on average reading time it would help pinpoint just how long certain topics should be.
Great to see the stuff you guys are up to with the forum though!
Iâd be interested in any feedback people have about the analytics page we added recently. You can get to it via âPost statsâ in the user menu.
Specific areas of feedback that would be helpful:
Are the stats displayed useful to you and easy to understand, are there other stats that you think would be more useful?
Feedback on the design/âlayout
Do you endorse it as a concept (i.e. you might think this incentivises engagement bait or something, if you notice that motivation in yourself that would be useful to know)?
Is it broken in any way? Is it annoyingly slow?
We also updated the analytics page for individual posts at the same time so feedback on that would be helpful as well (you can get to this via the three dot menu on posts you have published, or via the âPost statsâ page).
Thanks for doing this, Will (and EA Forum team), and for asking for feedback!
Yes, I think the displayed stats are useful. I would also be happy to see:
The bounce rate and mean reading time in the general analytics page too, as opposed to just in the analytics page of each post.
Some metrics related to the distribution of the reading time. For example, the 10th and 90th percentile reading time. It would also be good to have these in the general page, and that of each post.
I like it.
I endorse it, but I think it would be worth adding a warning about people being mindful about what they are optimising for. Something like the following. âNote karma and reads may not correlate well with impact, and maximising the impact of your EA Forum posts may not be your best strategy to maximise the overall impact of your life/âcareerâ. Alternatively, you can publish a post on the dangers of non-ideal incentives in the context of EA Forum engagement, and then just link to it in the analytics page.
It looks good to me.
I would like to see how many people read to the end. I have an 18 min read post, and I can see that many people read for 1m 30s so probably read the tl;dr or summary, but it does tell me that a number of people did read for much longer. Iâd like to know how many read it to the end so I can tell if maybe posts need to be much shorter.
May not be possible, but wishlist idea would be to know a bit more about who these users are in terms of interest demographic. If my post is AI Safety but most of those who click away fast have animal welfare listed as their primary interest then thatâs not an issue. But if my post is AI Safety and lots of AI Safety people didnât read or engage, then thatâs an issue I need to fix. This may not be feasible to implement however.
All in all I like it, and it feels like it gives insight into developing better engagement habits rather than encouraging clickbait.
Interesting, I hadnât thought of that. It would be possible to implement something like this, one issue would be that a lot of people donât fill out the topics they are interested in, but it could be possible to get round this by basing it on the other posts they read rather than their stated interests.
The thing about reading to the end is something I was planning to add, I have been envisioning a graph like this on the post analytics page (see below, random example from google), would that fit what youâre looking for?
Perhaps having a forum option to add tags to your profile, if youâre interested in this data being collected?
For the reading to end, yes that would be fantastic. Obviously it canât tell what people were looking at when they left, but based on average reading time it would help pinpoint just how long certain topics should be.
Great to see the stuff you guys are up to with the forum though!