It could be cool if the EA Forum allowed for boxes of text that start off collapsed but can be expanded, in the way that e.g. Gwernās site does (hereās a random example). This could be used for long sections that the author wants to signal (a) are sort-of digressions and/āor (b) may be worth skipping for some people.
There are a few things authors can already do that serve a similar purpose:
Have a section that explicitly says at the top āI think this section will be of interest to far fewer people than the rest of this post, so feel free to skip it.ā
Move a section to the end and call it an appendix
Just link to a google doc that sort of serves as the expandable box/āappendix
Move the section into a footnote
But the first two of those options seem to less clearly signal āWe really think fewer people should read this than should read the rest of this postā, compared to having a collapsed but expandable box of text.
And the third option might sometimes signal that too strongly, and also doesnāt allow things to show up when you use the Forumās search function.
And the fourth option doesnāt seem to work well for fairly long sections of text; more than a few paragraphs in a single footnote would be unusual and might be a little annoying (due to the small text). Also, that would remove the option of the author including footnotes within that section of text.
(I originally raised this idea here, in the context of whether itād be best to include full transcripts from 80k podcast episodes when link posting them to the EA Forum. I think it could make sense to include the transcripts as collapsed but expandable boxes of text, so that terms from the transcript will appear when doing searches on the Forumāwhich wouldnāt happen if the transcript wasnāt included at allābut people donāt feel like they have to read the whole transcript before they comment on the post.)
Yeah, I generally want to have a bunch more interactive elements in posts. This was historically blocked by a bunch of improvements we were making to our editor, but that is now done, and I hope that soon we can make a bunch of improvements in this space.
It could be cool if the EA Forum allowed for boxes of text that start off collapsed but can be expanded, in the way that e.g. Gwernās site does (hereās a random example). This could be used for long sections that the author wants to signal (a) are sort-of digressions and/āor (b) may be worth skipping for some people.
There are a few things authors can already do that serve a similar purpose:
Have a section that explicitly says at the top āI think this section will be of interest to far fewer people than the rest of this post, so feel free to skip it.ā
Move a section to the end and call it an appendix
Just link to a google doc that sort of serves as the expandable box/āappendix
Move the section into a footnote
But the first two of those options seem to less clearly signal āWe really think fewer people should read this than should read the rest of this postā, compared to having a collapsed but expandable box of text.
And the third option might sometimes signal that too strongly, and also doesnāt allow things to show up when you use the Forumās search function.
And the fourth option doesnāt seem to work well for fairly long sections of text; more than a few paragraphs in a single footnote would be unusual and might be a little annoying (due to the small text). Also, that would remove the option of the author including footnotes within that section of text.
(I originally raised this idea here, in the context of whether itād be best to include full transcripts from 80k podcast episodes when link posting them to the EA Forum. I think it could make sense to include the transcripts as collapsed but expandable boxes of text, so that terms from the transcript will appear when doing searches on the Forumāwhich wouldnāt happen if the transcript wasnāt included at allābut people donāt feel like they have to read the whole transcript before they comment on the post.)
Yeah, I generally want to have a bunch more interactive elements in posts. This was historically blocked by a bunch of improvements we were making to our editor, but that is now done, and I hope that soon we can make a bunch of improvements in this space.