Annecdotally, a lot of busy people report visiting the Forum many times per week. Some report habitually over-consuming it. One of the biggest costs of the EA Forum might be that it reduces focussed work hours of the most talented people in the community.
Block schedule: block forum from loading during a period you schedule.
Hide the post list on homepage by default. You have to press “Show posts” to see them. (You can still search or browse subpages, just not see the homepage list).
Time limit: you can spend X mins per day on Forum, after that it is blocked.
HackerNews famously has a similar feature called “no procrast(inate)” mode.
Annecdotally, a lot of busy people report visiting the Forum many times per week. Some report habitually over-consuming it. One of the biggest costs of the EA Forum might be that it reduces focussed work hours of the most talented people in the community.
So, I propose “EA Forum When Ready”.
Features would be something like:
Block schedule: block forum from loading during a period you schedule.
Hide the post list on homepage by default. You have to press “Show posts” to see them. (You can still search or browse subpages, just not see the homepage list).
Time limit: you can spend X mins per day on Forum, after that it is blocked.
HackerNews famously has a similar feature called “no procrast(inate)” mode.
Haha, I just suggested this to the forum team today
You can do this easily enough with external tools. I use the stayfocused plugin on Chrome for this.
Very few people will actually do this unless prompted, and it can be setup in 1-3 clicks.
I’d guess less than 10% of those who should.
I have to admit I’m also addicted in this way, though I’m not sure I’d enjoy any of these features.
Lizka mentioned she goes to https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/search by default which does some of this, which I’m going to try to start doing