I find it hard to understand the meaning of the ‘Community’ category. The description says that it consists of “posts with topical content or which relate to the EA community itself”. But that description also draws a contrast to “Frontpage posts, which are selected by moderators as especially interesting or useful to people with interest in doing good effectively.” This contrast suggests that ‘community’ posts are simply posts that haven’t been curated, as opposed to posts with a focus on the EA community.
I agree that these descriptions aren’t very clear. Here are replacement descriptions that will go up in a future update (date still uncertain):
Frontpage: “Posts relevant to promising cause areas or cause prioritization, which may be useful even to people who aren’t involved with the EA community”
Community: “Posts about the EA community (including jobs, events, and announcements)”
These descriptions aren’t perfectly mutually exclusive, because I’m not sure how to simplify the standards of the explanatory post to that extent, but we’ll continue to apply those standards as best we can for close calls.
To make things even more confusing, the ‘Community Favorites’ section doesn’t appear to employ the term ‘Community’ in either of those senses; indeed, the term seems to be used with the opposite meaning of “non-curated”, since the “Community Favorites” consists of a list of “all-time greatest posts”.
We considered many titles for the “Community Favorites” section, including “Recommended”, “From the Archives”, “Vintage”, and “Posts you may have missed”. However, all of the titles had various issues:
Because we didn’t personally select which posts appear here (it’s just unread, high-karma posts), “Recommended” is inaccurate (no one is doing any recommending other than an algorithm)
“From the Archives” and “Vintage” imply that the posts are fairly old, even though a high-karma new post could easily appear in the list.
“Posts you may have missed” is too long to work on mobile
Even though “Community Favorites” overlaps with the “Community” category, we chose it because it accurately expressed that these posts were highly upvoted by the Forum’s community, and because it was the only option approved by all moderators.
After more thought, we’ve decided that we will change the name to “Forum Favorites” (this change won’t be visible immediately, but will be part of a future update).
Thank you for all of these suggestions, Pablo!
I agree that these descriptions aren’t very clear. Here are replacement descriptions that will go up in a future update (date still uncertain):
Frontpage: “Posts relevant to promising cause areas or cause prioritization, which may be useful even to people who aren’t involved with the EA community”
Community: “Posts about the EA community (including jobs, events, and announcements)”
These descriptions aren’t perfectly mutually exclusive, because I’m not sure how to simplify the standards of the explanatory post to that extent, but we’ll continue to apply those standards as best we can for close calls.
We considered many titles for the “Community Favorites” section, including “Recommended”, “From the Archives”, “Vintage”, and “Posts you may have missed”. However, all of the titles had various issues:
Because we didn’t personally select which posts appear here (it’s just unread, high-karma posts), “Recommended” is inaccurate (no one is doing any recommending other than an algorithm)
“From the Archives” and “Vintage” imply that the posts are fairly old, even though a high-karma new post could easily appear in the list.
“Posts you may have missed” is too long to work on mobile
Even though “Community Favorites” overlaps with the “Community” category, we chose it because it accurately expressed that these posts were highly upvoted by the Forum’s community, and because it was the only option approved by all moderators.
After more thought, we’ve decided that we will change the name to “Forum Favorites” (this change won’t be visible immediately, but will be part of a future update).
Great, thank you!