What do you want to see from the Forum team this year?
Last year, we ran a bunch of events on the Forum — including Ways the world is getting better banner, two Draft Amnesty Weeks, Existential Choices Debate Week, DIY Debate Week, Career Conversations Week, the Essays on Longtermism Essay Competition, and Giving Season 2025.
We also introduced new features such as debate-slider polls and draft comments[1].
As we are shoring up our plans for the year, it’d be great to know: what would you like to see us (the Forum team) do in 2026?
We’d love to see:
Content suggestions: i.e. a Forum event you’d like to take part in, a topic you’d like to see people write about, an AMA you’d like us to host, etc…
Feature suggestions: Changes to existing features, ideas for new features.
Meta: How would you like us to moderate content this year? Do you think we should grow the Forum? How?
Problems and needs: Sometimes it’s really valuable to hear user problems or needs rather than suggestions. Is there something that frustrates you when you interact with the Forum? Is there anything you find yourself looking for or wanting when you’re using the Forum?
Note that we can’t promise to act on all or any of these, but your ideas will be discussed by the team as we decide on our plans for the year.
I’d like to see more outreach to intellectual experts outside of the typical EA community. I think there are lots of people with knowledge and expertise that could be relevant to EA causes, but who barely know that it exists, or have disagreements with fundamental aspects of the movement. Finding ways to engage with these people could be very valuable to get fresh perspectives and it could help grow the community.
I don’t know how exactly to do this, but maybe something like soliciting guest posts from professors or industry experts, or AMA style things or dialogues.
I like this idea. Might be especially good in the context of symposia (like this one). Last year I found it fairly tricky to get enough questions on AMAs to make them worthwhile.
Any particular people/ viewpoints you’d like to see on the Forum?
Personally during the recent donation discussions, I experienced it as a notable surge in the Forum feeling like a warm, nice place to be. Like a temporary surge in the Forum strongly reflecting the extent to which EA is a community full of caring, dedicated people; and letting you see them as people or something. I think it’d be nice if some of that energy continued somehow.
Throwaway idea: a monthly question-post/prompt from the Forum team, pinned for a while, that people can answer in the comments, or if they feel like it use as a prompt for writing full posts. And the questions are not so much aimed at like “answers will be novel intellectual contributions”, but more like that the answers will make it visible how individual people are thinking about common questions, putting ideas into practice in their life/career/donations etc?
(Am not attempting to address tradeoffs etc.)
Yes, humanity in EA is always good. The monthly (perhaps even weekly) question idea sounds brilliant, and a great way to get people easily engaged; especially the nonprofessionals like me, swinging by the forum on my short downtime, not feeling up to reading entire long posts, but happy to pass the time with prompted comments.
At school we hold two-hour unstructured group discussions that always spark from one-sentence questions, and they go well, usually with plenty of engagement. I could see great things coming out of a version of that for EA, however its done.
I’d be interested in something like “Here is where I donated” but for epistemics: “Here is where I have changed my mind”. This could be a post under which anyone can comment or a series of guest posts from thought leaders from different cause areas giving their recent (or older) updates.
Why?
I think this could be a good incentive for people to ask themselves that question and simultaneously a good way to celebrate and positively reinforce the virtue of changing one’s mind in the face of new evidence.
Personally, I have often found discussions are much less likely to become hostile or otherwise unproductive if they begin with this as the starting point, as people are given the chance to show vulnerability, explain their opinion as the result of an unfinished trajectory, etc.
In some cases, this could even be a good preventive measure to something that definitely happened to me when I first got involved: you read some old post from someone senior or respected and—because you haven’t been around for long and so you (rightly) defer a lot—you take this as gospel, only to later find out that that person doesn’t endorse that particular viewpoint anymore.
One use case for the forum is as a curated database of relevant writings, allowing for discussion and discovery, and perhaps useful for AI models. Perhaps it will be good to spam the forum with much more cross-posted content from blogs of relevant people and organizations.
If this is done on old posts, they shouldn’t appear on the frontpage, and automatically cross-posting should be possible and simple in current tech.
We did a bit of ad hoc cross-posting last year and it was fairly successful (one of the ‘top 10 most valuable’ posts was cross-posted by our team—thanks @Dane Valerie).
I’d be careful with cross-post spamming, since we should only crosspost with consent from the author. But if you want to crosspost a lot of content at once to the Forum for reasons of curation, you might want to untick the frontpage checkbox (i.e. personal blog the posts), and put them in a sequence.
“Automatically cross-posting should be possible and simple in current tech”—I think this has unfortunately not proved true for us, but maybe tech is just better this year.
I would like to be able to see all posts and I’m currently confused about the user interface. I click “Advanced filters and sorting”, then I choose “New”, “All posts” and “Show low Karma” and I can see “Frontpage posts” above all lists. The word “frontpage” suggests that those are the most upvoted posts. And almost all of them have many upvotes (which suggests that those are not all posts). I want to see all posts.
You will see all posts if you click “Load more” on this page. ‘Frontpage’ is just everything that isn’t a ‘Personal blogpost’.
I’d like to see more lists curated by the forum team, similar to those on the best of page, and on a wider variety of topics and subtopics. I didn’t like going off of karma in 2025 and would have preferred more individuals with some kind of track records, with identity and some amount of reputation pegged to a set of posts (which I understand might be unexpectedly costly). I also found the newsletter emails pretty helpful for this, and there might be ways to get forum events from this but I’m less confident about that.
Maybe we could encourage people to make more sequences, and make them easier to share? I do think there’s a general issue where evergreen content on the Forum can be hard to surface—perhaps something along these lines could help.
Edit: I was writing the comment when I was a little frustrated, and I think my post was not very logical. I still think that there is too much authority bias, but I think a feature like curation can potentially help with that, if implemented properly.
Personally, I’m against curating and track records. I asked Gemini to generate a report on “Is there too much authority bias in the world?” (some authority bias is rational, but the question is it too much) with a neutral prompt and the result which was based on empirical evidence was there is too much authority bias. I would like to see more posts from people who don’t get a lot of attention.
I know from experience that when I want to communicate something to people, it’s very hard to do that because people seem to have short attention span when you don’t have credibility and it’s very hard to strike a balance between conciseness and clarity in the post, when people are not willing to give a lot of attention.
Content:
More visibility for non-English-speaking EA communities and their challenges
Discussions on alternative career paths in EA beyond traditional org roles
Conversations about building EA capacity in underserved regions/languages
Features:
Better ways to connect people working on similar regional/language-specific projects
Space for collaborative project development, not just finished work
Meta:
Highlight work from EA communities outside UK/US, there’s great work happening globally that deserves more visibility
Sounds great, is there anything you are thinking of writing?
Hello @Toby Tremlett I’m planning to write about building AI Safety education infrastructure for Spanish-speaking communities.
The post would cover: why the current English-only ecosystem creates real talent bottlenecks, what’s needed beyond just running study groups (facilitator training, community infrastructure, sustainable funding models), and what I’m learning as I start coordinating EA Madrid and exploring these questions with the community.
Would this be valuable for the Forum?
That would be fantastic! Let me know if you’d like any tips or feedback.
“Problems and needs: Sometimes it’s really valuable to hear user problems or needs rather than suggestions. Is there something that frustrates you when you interact with the Forum? Is there anything you find yourself looking for or wanting when you’re using the Forum?”
My biggest problem/frustration is when I write a post that I think is very important and has a lot of value, but I don’t get any reaction (or close to 0) - no upvotes and no critique/feedback.
I have some idea how to solve that, but for now I just share a problem.
I would like to see more low quality / unserious content. Mainly, to lower the barrier to entry for newcomers and make it more welcoming.
Very unsure if this is actually a good idea.
I’d like to see an event on the Forum dedicated to finding other possible EA cause areas and interventions. It seems like EA has some calcification in terms of mainly focusing on global health, factory farming, pandemics, and AI. It would be interesting to hear other important topics that aren’t as commonly discussed.
I would like to be able to select multiple tags when searching the forum (such as “animal welfare” and “collections/resources”). I would also like to be able to get the top posts for different tags from different years. (For example, I would like to be able to find the top posts on “existential risks” from 2025.)
I would really like to see AI text banned from the forum. Many posters use AI tools to help organize, edit or generate parts of their writing. As a result of this, it’s difficult to assess which ideas are originally from the author or merely generated by AI. Overall, I think that AI generated text tends to have a much lower quality because its tends be very vague, general, and repetitive. It also tends to use the exact same structures over and over again, which can be very boring to read. Lastly, by requiring posters to write out their own thoughts, it will create a higher barrier of entry to posting on the forum, which will improve the forum’s content overall.