Interesting idea but maybe you should ask a question on the April Fool’s Day about what new cause areas there should be and other people would write their pitches as answers to that question. I think this would be better for multiple reasons than making many top-level posts because:
I’d find it much less scary to post a funny answer or a comment, rather than a top-level post because it feels like taking less space. And my intuition is that you’d get more answers this way.
If a newcomer comes to the forum and see the title of one of these posts, they would probably not think much about the EA movement. The moment they see a title like “New Top EA Cause: fair rides for chickens”, they might close the page and not come back to the EA forum. Note that they could see one of these posts on google searches or by going to a user profile. I’d not make such a post because I’d be afraid that someone might not take me seriously after seeing the title of such post after visiting my profile.
All answers would be in one place and easier to find. Otherwise posts about new cause areas would probably not be promoted to be neither community or frontpage posts, so few people would notice them.
It would be easier to navigate the forum to find new information because the forum wouldn’t be full of these posts
I’m now thinking that the EA forum is a strange place. It’s literally my day job to spend months writing these long articles with hundreds of references. These articles are then reviewed by multiple people and I spend days copy-editing them. But at the same time we do want people to spontaneously post their ideas without spending days researching them in the very same place where me and my colleagues post these long and serious research articles. Maybe this forum is trying to be too many things at once. Or maybe we should post our research articles elsewhere so that people would feel more free to play with new ideas here. The existence of shortform does help to alleviate this problem though.
Please continue to post research articles here! There are plenty of subreddits that contain both deep analysis of quantitative topics and silly memes, and I’d hate for us to limit our ambition for something that Reddit can manage. If people feel intimidated to post, that’s the job of our moderation team to help with :-)
Interesting idea but maybe you should ask a question on the April Fool’s Day about what new cause areas there should be and other people would write their pitches as answers to that question. I think this would be better for multiple reasons than making many top-level posts because:
I’d find it much less scary to post a funny answer or a comment, rather than a top-level post because it feels like taking less space. And my intuition is that you’d get more answers this way.
If a newcomer comes to the forum and see the title of one of these posts, they would probably not think much about the EA movement. The moment they see a title like “New Top EA Cause: fair rides for chickens”, they might close the page and not come back to the EA forum. Note that they could see one of these posts on google searches or by going to a user profile. I’d not make such a post because I’d be afraid that someone might not take me seriously after seeing the title of such post after visiting my profile.
All answers would be in one place and easier to find. Otherwise posts about new cause areas would probably not be promoted to be neither community or frontpage posts, so few people would notice them.
It would be easier to navigate the forum to find new information because the forum wouldn’t be full of these posts
I’m now thinking that the EA forum is a strange place. It’s literally my day job to spend months writing these long articles with hundreds of references. These articles are then reviewed by multiple people and I spend days copy-editing them. But at the same time we do want people to spontaneously post their ideas without spending days researching them in the very same place where me and my colleagues post these long and serious research articles. Maybe this forum is trying to be too many things at once. Or maybe we should post our research articles elsewhere so that people would feel more free to play with new ideas here. The existence of shortform does help to alleviate this problem though.
Please continue to post research articles here! There are plenty of subreddits that contain both deep analysis of quantitative topics and silly memes, and I’d hate for us to limit our ambition for something that Reddit can manage. If people feel intimidated to post, that’s the job of our moderation team to help with :-)
Makes sense, I’ll do that.
I like having it be an answer to a question. If you’d like to write a top-level post, you can always link to it from your answer.