This is why people are reluctant to write on the EA Forum
Four days ago I posted a question Why are you reluctant to write on the EA Forum?, with a link to Google Form. I received 20 responses.
This post is in three parts:
Summary of reasons people are reluctant to write on the EA Forum
Suggestions for making it easier
Positive feedback for the EA Forum
Replies in full
Summary of reasons people are reluctant to write on the EA Forum
The form received 20 responses over four days.
All replies included a reason for being reluctant or unable to write on the EA Forum. Only a minority of replies included a concrete suggestion for improvement.
I have attempted to tally how many times each reason appeared across the 20 responses[2]:
Suggestions for making it easier to contribute
I give all concrete suggestions for helping people be less reluctant to contribute to the forum, in chronological order in which they were received:
More discourse on increasing participation: “more posts like these which are aimed at trying to get more people contributing”
Give everyone equal Karma power: “If the amount of upvotes and downvotes you got didn’t influence your voting power (and was made less prominent), we would have less groupthink and (pertaining to your question) I would be reading and writing on the EA-forum often and happily, instead of seldom and begrudgingly.”
Provide extra incentives for posting: “Perhaps small cash or other incentives given each month for best posts in certain categories, or do competitions, or some such measure? That added boost of incentive and the chance that the hours spent on a post may be reimbursed somehow.”
“Discussions that are less tied to specific identities and less time-consuming to process—more Polis like discussions that allow participants to maintain anonymity, while also being able to understand the shape of arguments.”
Lower the stakes for commenting: “I’m not sure if comment section can include “I’ve read x% of the article before this comment”?”
Positive feedback for the EA Forum
The question invited criticism of the Forum, but it did nevertheless garner some positive feedback.
For an internet forum it’s pretty good. But it’s still an internet forum. Not many good discussions happen on the internet.
Forum team do a great job :)
Responses in full
All responses can be found here.
- ^
You can judge for yourself here whether I correctly classified the responses.
I considered lumping “too time-consuming” and “lack of time” together, but decided against this because the former seems to imply “bar is very high”, while the latter is merely a statement on how busy the respondent’s life is.
The form collected two responses:
Why are you reluctant to write on the EA Forum? What would make it easier?
Is there anything else you would like to share?
I’d be interested to see you weigh the pros and cons of making it easier to contribute—you don’t explicitly say it in the post, but you imply that this would be a good thing by default. The forum is the way it is for a reason, and there are mechanisms put in place both by the forum team and by the community in order to try to keep the quality of the discussion high.
For example, I would argue that having a high bar for posting isn’t a bad thing, and the sliding-scale karma system that helps regulate that is, in extension, valuable. If writing a full post of sufficient quality is time consuming, then there is the quick takes section.
The Alignment Forum has a significantly higher barrier to entry than this one does, but I think that is fairly universally regarded as an important factor in facilitating a certain kind of discussion either. I can see a lot of value in the EA forum trying to maintain it’s current norms in order to mean it still has the potential for productive discussion between people who are sufficiently well-researched. I think meaningfully lowering the bar for participation would mean that the forum would lose some of its ability to generate anything especially novel or useful to the community and I think the quote you included:
Somewhat points to that too. I think there should be other forums for people less familiar with EA to participate in discussions, and I think whether or not those currently exist is an interesting discussion.
Having said all that, I do wonder if that leaves the current forum community particularly vulnerable to groupthink. I’m not really sure what the solution to that is though.
Pseudonymity should work in most cases to address the risk of reputational damage, albeit at the cost of the potential reputational upsides for posting.
This makes me sad because I think EAF in 2015 or 2016 had much better discussions, and shortform still does.
If you or someone else wants to expand on this point, I’d be interested in understanding whether that’s really the case or in which ways it got better or worse
This is great!