Thanks for sharing your reasoning, openly acknowledging a mistake and explaining how it happened.
Note: the below is an observation of a structural problem, rather than any individual. person Moderation is not an easy job and I do believe that the Forum mods are doing their best.
Overall it sounds like the Forum team may not have enough capacity to adequately deal with issues like this (according to your description it sounds like despite traveling and being busy, you were ultimately the person responsible for this).
This could result in a sub-optimal situation that decisions like this are either delayed, or made quickly (with a higher chance of mistakes). I think this is bad because the Forum is actively used by hundreds of community members, and time spent critiquing mod decisions is valuable time that isn’t being spent on object-level issues.
In my opinion, it seems like it should be higher priority for the Forum team to expand the number of dedicated moderators who are “on call” to prevent situations like this in the future.
Some notes on mod capacity:
From my understanding the forum has hired some paid moderators in the past year or two, but it seems like it may not be sufficient (possibly because of a increase in forum usage over the same time period)
Moderation issues are annoying (and I agree they are too quick to go after disagreeable-but-insightful people) but adding new dedicated paid moderators seems quite expensive. Most of the time there isn’t a huge issue so their time would be wasted, and even when there was an issue you don’t get certainty of improved performance—the new people might sometimes have worse ideas than the old guard. My guess (?) is the EA forum is already an outlier on the admin-hours / user-hours ratio.
RE outlier—Do you mean an outlier in that there are more admin hours put in than other places?
I don’t think that is true, at least from my impression of a couple other places, but this is a weak impression.
I would make the case that we probably don’t want to compare the Forum to most other online communities, because unlike in other places, people are writing & sharing substantive research and trying to, in some sense, do work. Of course, there is a community / social element to it as well, but I think there is a case to see the Forum as more than just that. As a result, I think it’s okay for the mod team to be an outlier.
I’ll also say that in general, I believe CEA as an organization undervalues / underinvests in infrastructural investments for the EA movement and community (e.g. the Groups team, Events team and Community health had been chronically understaffed until early 2022. The Forum only had ~3 FTE until 2021 and only had capacity to maintain rather than build new features. I’d argue the Community Health team is still very understaffed relative to their remit.)
Clarification: I think they underinvest in staff specifically, and sometimes overinvest in specific programs (e.g. conference spend in 2022, maybe the university groups program from 2021-2022). But overall I think they just underinvest in these things across the board, despite having had the capacity to raise more funds / hire more.
If they were unable to raise more funds (which I’m very skeptical of since it appears they haven’t actively fundraised non-OP funders), then I’d have wanted them to scale down to have fewer projects, and put more resources into fewer programs.
I think having adding something like 1 FTE or 2 x 0.5 FTE moderators wouldn’t be that expensive—would add ~5% to the Forums’ overall budget (currently $2M per year per a recent comment). Onboarding and recruiting would take some time, but the process for hiring moderators (AFAIK) is less time-consuming if they are in a contract role.
It’s true that new moderators could make worse decisions, but they could also be trained by existing moderators, read up on past instances of moderation that worked / didn’t, and initially run decisions by more experienced mods to reduce the chance of decreasing quality. It seems like moderators who joined in 2022 did a pretty good job, at least Forum leadership’s standards.
Writing only my personal perspective. I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors.
adding something like 1 FTE or 2 x 0.5 FTE moderators wouldn’t be that expensive
I think an important cost would be the opportunity cost for what those moderators could be doing.
For me personally, the theory of change for spending more time on moderation is often not that clear. My personal theory of change is that the main value I provide via moderation is to save time/energy for Lizka and JP to focus a bit more on projects that I think are extremely valuable. (Edit: This is just my personal view! I don’t work for CEA, and I think they disagree with this!)
seems like moderators who joined in 2022 did a pretty good job
As one of these mods, I think I also made some prettyclearmistakes[1], even one year into this, that I think more experienced mods wouldn’t have made. I think the new mods went through a better selection process, though, so I’m optimistic that it will take less time for them to make better decisions.
Tangentially related to this point, I think 99% of the moderation action on this forum comes from users (via voting, commenting, and reporting posts). I think that’s how it should be, and I’m really impressed by how well users of this forum moderate discussions, compared to e.g. serious subreddits, Twitter spheres, or Hacker News.
I was also the moderator who pushed the most to move this to personal blog, as I (wrongly) didn’t see a strong connection between this post and doing good better.
Writing only my personal perspective. I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors.
Overall it sounds like the Forum team may not have enough capacity to adequately deal with issues like this (according to your description it sounds like despite traveling and being busy, you were ultimately the person responsible for this). [...] In my opinion, it seems like it should be higher priority for the Forum team to expand the number of dedicated moderators who are “on call” to prevent situations like this in the future.
You might be happy to hear that this already happened to a significant amount!
There are now six active moderators, plus advisors, which is ~2x as many as there were at some points. Three of the active moderators joined in August, I think ~three weeks before this post, and the content specialist role you linked to starts with “to work with me (Lizka)”, so I don’t think that she’s looking for a replacement.[1]
Thanks for sharing your reasoning, openly acknowledging a mistake and explaining how it happened.
Note: the below is an observation of a structural problem, rather than any individual. person Moderation is not an easy job and I do believe that the Forum mods are doing their best.
Overall it sounds like the Forum team may not have enough capacity to adequately deal with issues like this (according to your description it sounds like despite traveling and being busy, you were ultimately the person responsible for this).
This could result in a sub-optimal situation that decisions like this are either delayed, or made quickly (with a higher chance of mistakes). I think this is bad because the Forum is actively used by hundreds of community members, and time spent critiquing mod decisions is valuable time that isn’t being spent on object-level issues.
In my opinion, it seems like it should be higher priority for the Forum team to expand the number of dedicated moderators who are “on call” to prevent situations like this in the future.
Some notes on mod capacity:
From my understanding the forum has hired some paid moderators in the past year or two, but it seems like it may not be sufficient (possibly because of a increase in forum usage over the same time period)
I am also aware that the Forum is trying to hire another Content Specialist, although it is unclear whether they are replacing Lizka or adding more capacity.
Moderation issues are annoying (and I agree they are too quick to go after disagreeable-but-insightful people) but adding new dedicated paid moderators seems quite expensive. Most of the time there isn’t a huge issue so their time would be wasted, and even when there was an issue you don’t get certainty of improved performance—the new people might sometimes have worse ideas than the old guard. My guess (?) is the EA forum is already an outlier on the admin-hours / user-hours ratio.
RE outlier—Do you mean an outlier in that there are more admin hours put in than other places?
I don’t think that is true, at least from my impression of a couple other places, but this is a weak impression.
I would make the case that we probably don’t want to compare the Forum to most other online communities, because unlike in other places, people are writing & sharing substantive research and trying to, in some sense, do work. Of course, there is a community / social element to it as well, but I think there is a case to see the Forum as more than just that. As a result, I think it’s okay for the mod team to be an outlier.
I’ll also say that in general, I believe CEA as an organization undervalues / underinvests in infrastructural investments for the EA movement and community (e.g. the Groups team, Events team and Community health had been chronically understaffed until early 2022. The Forum only had ~3 FTE until 2021 and only had capacity to maintain rather than build new features. I’d argue the Community Health team is still very understaffed relative to their remit.)
What do you think CEA over-invests in? If you take away Online, Groups, Events and CH as all undervalued there’s not much of CEA left.
Clarification: I think they underinvest in staff specifically, and sometimes overinvest in specific programs (e.g. conference spend in 2022, maybe the university groups program from 2021-2022). But overall I think they just underinvest in these things across the board, despite having had the capacity to raise more funds / hire more.
If they were unable to raise more funds (which I’m very skeptical of since it appears they haven’t actively fundraised non-OP funders), then I’d have wanted them to scale down to have fewer projects, and put more resources into fewer programs.
I think having adding something like 1 FTE or 2 x 0.5 FTE moderators wouldn’t be that expensive—would add ~5% to the Forums’ overall budget (currently $2M per year per a recent comment). Onboarding and recruiting would take some time, but the process for hiring moderators (AFAIK) is less time-consuming if they are in a contract role.
It’s true that new moderators could make worse decisions, but they could also be trained by existing moderators, read up on past instances of moderation that worked / didn’t, and initially run decisions by more experienced mods to reduce the chance of decreasing quality. It seems like moderators who joined in 2022 did a pretty good job, at least Forum leadership’s standards.
Writing only my personal perspective. I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors.
I think an important cost would be the opportunity cost for what those moderators could be doing.
For me personally, the theory of change for spending more time on moderation is often not that clear. My personal theory of change is that the main value I provide via moderation is to save time/energy for Lizka and JP to focus a bit more on projects that I think are extremely valuable. (Edit: This is just my personal view! I don’t work for CEA, and I think they disagree with this!)
As one of these mods, I think I also made some pretty clear mistakes[1], even one year into this, that I think more experienced mods wouldn’t have made. I think the new mods went through a better selection process, though, so I’m optimistic that it will take less time for them to make better decisions.
Tangentially related to this point, I think 99% of the moderation action on this forum comes from users (via voting, commenting, and reporting posts). I think that’s how it should be, and I’m really impressed by how well users of this forum moderate discussions, compared to e.g. serious subreddits, Twitter spheres, or Hacker News.
I was also the moderator who pushed the most to move this to personal blog, as I (wrongly) didn’t see a strong connection between this post and doing good better.
Writing only my personal perspective. I haven’t checked this with other moderators or advisors.
You might be happy to hear that this already happened to a significant amount!
There are now six active moderators, plus advisors, which is ~2x as many as there were at some points. Three of the active moderators joined in August, I think ~three weeks before this post, and the content specialist role you linked to starts with “to work with me (Lizka)”, so I don’t think that she’s looking for a replacement.[1]
I have no insider info, just going by public posts.