Have you considered linking users with tags on the Forum? For each tag, you could have two categories of linked users:
1) experts/librarians - users who are willing to spend time answering questions and directing people to further resources. There could be a button for any user to sign up as an expert for a particular tag, pending approval by a Forum admin.
2) followers - a list of users who share an interest in that tag.
I expect the use case would be the same as someone who attends an EA Global conference seeking advice from relevant people. If those experts are available on the Forum all year round, then it lowers the barrier to contacting them outside of the conference setting.
Yeah, reddit ends up getting a really huge quantity of useful information about its users this way.
I wouldn’t expect LW/EA to reliably get that info with the tag subscription feature as it currently stands: I’m probably not going to subscribe to most of the tags I’m interested in, because receiving a notification for every single post to a tag isn’t generally desirable. The only tags for which that sort of subscription is the right thing are the tags that get too little activity to be useful for matchmaking.
Have you considered linking users with tags on the Forum? For each tag, you could have two categories of linked users:
1) experts/librarians - users who are willing to spend time answering questions and directing people to further resources. There could be a button for any user to sign up as an expert for a particular tag, pending approval by a Forum admin.
2) followers - a list of users who share an interest in that tag.
Thanks Barry! Could you say more about the use case here? E.g. why is it that someone would want to ask an expert a question?
(To answer your direct question: we have considered it, but I’m still trying to figure out what the exact use case is.)
I expect the use case would be the same as someone who attends an EA Global conference seeking advice from relevant people. If those experts are available on the Forum all year round, then it lowers the barrier to contacting them outside of the conference setting.
Yeah, reddit ends up getting a really huge quantity of useful information about its users this way.
I wouldn’t expect LW/EA to reliably get that info with the tag subscription feature as it currently stands: I’m probably not going to subscribe to most of the tags I’m interested in, because receiving a notification for every single post to a tag isn’t generally desirable. The only tags for which that sort of subscription is the right thing are the tags that get too little activity to be useful for matchmaking.