The Online team overall spends ~$2M per year. 75% of that is on âpeople costsâ for our 8 full-time employees, all-in.[1] Is that all on the Forum? Kinda. Our main focus right now, and for the past 6 months, has been the core Forum product, due to, basically, the community spike here. However, during normal times, including starting ~now, we spend 30-60% of our effort on expansionary projects, such as this major project from last year. I would model us like a tech startup, where most of our money is going to âR&Dâ that should pay off in future impact.
Which then nicely answers part of Jasonâs question. If we had less money, then, given that our costs are so staff-driven, we would need to have fewer staff, and then we would be investing less in future impact. As for what we would do if we had double the funding, we are currently more bottlenecked by trying to remain a two-pizza team. Itâs possible that we would make a hire on the margin, but we wouldnât accept double the funding.
It seems that weâre spending 2 million a year on a glorified subreddit. Whatâs the donors case for this being a good use of funds? Isnât the forum good enough as is? Some reddit mods handle ~100x the content, with 100x more traffic, for 0% of the cost.
What have you accomplished that justifies the spend on the forum to date? Couldnât 99% of this have been accomplished by forking lesswrong and making minor tweaks?
Itâs worth clarifying that the Online teamâs budget was much less than $2M budget before 2022, and a lot of the development of the Forum happened between 2018 and 2021 with one developer (JP). The budget and team grew in the last 12 months with FTX funding and significant growth in the EA movement, and now weâre evaluating what portion of the $2M budget to put towards continuing to develop the Forum versus new projects weâre exploring. Itâs also worth noting that a portion of the $2M budget goes towards the content team (Lizka), and moderation and support contractors, who I think are super valuable but not the bulk of our budget, so Iâll instead focus on the product/âengineering team and the platform in the next part of my response.
When I think of how the Forum compares to other platforms, I see some major tradeoffs. Compared to social media sites like reddit, twitter, and facebook groups, the EA Forum encourages long form content and high quality discussion much better, is a more focused space (with no ads or non-EA content), and indexes and organizes content better. Compared to individual or group blogs, the Forum is much more open (anyone can post), and prioritizes discussion better (commenting features are more hidden on many blogs).
Put together, I think these mean that the EA Forum is a more attractive space for EAs, and ultimately the network of users is a key factor in determining the value of the site.
This isnât to say that the Forum can claim 100% counterfactual value for every interaction that happens in this space (compared to a world where it didnât exist and we had a subreddit), but I do think the Forum has been valuable. I wish we could measure this value in a really clean way without too much effort (and we have near term plans to do more work here), but on the other hand I think itâs important we avoid the trap of focusing too much on measurement and evaluation for a public good that has fairly diffuse impact.
While Iâm sympathetic to the view that ~$2M is too much to spend, the quality of moderation here is much higher than in any open-access, high-volume space I am aware of on Reddit.[1] So I donât think it is helpful to compare the mod workload here with what âreddit mods handleâ (usually large mod teams on the major subreddits).
Curating higher-quality content by moderating with an iron fist is easier, but would destroy a significant portion of the Forumâs value in my opinion.
I think some subreddits do a good job of moderating to create a culture which is different from the default reddit culture, e.g. /âr/âaskhistorians. See this post for an example, where there are a bunch of comments deleted, including one answer which didnât cite enough sources. Maybe this is what you have in mind when you refer to âmoderating with an iron fistâ though, which you mention might be destructive!
Seems like the challenge with reddit moderation is that users are travelling between subreddits all the time, and most have low quality/âeffort discussion norms. Whereas on the Forum, the userbase is more siloed, which I guess would make good quality moderation easier.
I think benchmarking at reddit moderation is probably the wrong benchmark. Firstly, because the tail risk of unpaid moderation is really bad (e.g. the base rate of moderator driven meltdowns in big subreddits is really high). Secondly, I just donât think we should underpay people in EA because (a) it creates financial barriers to entry to EA that have long-term effects (e.g. publishing unpaid internships have made the wider labour market for journalism terrible) (b) itâll create huge amounts of more informal barriers that mean we lean on more informal relationships in EA even more.
~$120,000 (sans benefits). It varies greatly by role and location. You can get a sense for roughly what a given role might pay by looking at ourjobpostings. As mentioned elsethread, these salaries are aimed at not being huge sacrifices for tech workers living in expensive american cities, while also not being egregiously luxurious in lower salary places like Oxford. I imagine some engineers might look at that number and think itâs low compared to their expectations, and some non-engineer Brits might think itâs quite high. I encourage you to look at the job postings for the ranges.
It sounds like the 1.5 million does not include $ on the forum team or facilitatorsâwhat does the total spending/âaverage salary look like if you include these groups?
Ah, thanks for finding that, I posted my reply before seeing this comment.
By Forum team do you mean non-CEA moderators? We have volunteers on our team, which throws off our actual spend, but Iâve budgeted as if we have to pay for all of our moderation contracting, and have budgeted $20,000/âyr. We pay moderators $40/âhr, and facilitators $30/âhr.
The Online team overall spends ~$2M per year. 75% of that is on âpeople costsâ for our 8 full-time employees, all-in.[1] Is that all on the Forum? Kinda. Our main focus right now, and for the past 6 months, has been the core Forum product, due to, basically, the community spike here. However, during normal times, including starting ~now, we spend 30-60% of our effort on expansionary projects, such as this major project from last year. I would model us like a tech startup, where most of our money is going to âR&Dâ that should pay off in future impact.
Which then nicely answers part of Jasonâs question. If we had less money, then, given that our costs are so staff-driven, we would need to have fewer staff, and then we would be investing less in future impact. As for what we would do if we had double the funding, we are currently more bottlenecked by trying to remain a two-pizza team. Itâs possible that we would make a hire on the margin, but we wouldnât accept double the funding.
Including taxes, travel, team retreats, professional development budgets, etc.
It seems that weâre spending 2 million a year on a glorified subreddit. Whatâs the donors case for this being a good use of funds? Isnât the forum good enough as is? Some reddit mods handle ~100x the content, with 100x more traffic, for 0% of the cost.
What have you accomplished that justifies the spend on the forum to date? Couldnât 99% of this have been accomplished by forking lesswrong and making minor tweaks?
Itâs worth clarifying that the Online teamâs budget was much less than $2M budget before 2022, and a lot of the development of the Forum happened between 2018 and 2021 with one developer (JP). The budget and team grew in the last 12 months with FTX funding and significant growth in the EA movement, and now weâre evaluating what portion of the $2M budget to put towards continuing to develop the Forum versus new projects weâre exploring. Itâs also worth noting that a portion of the $2M budget goes towards the content team (Lizka), and moderation and support contractors, who I think are super valuable but not the bulk of our budget, so Iâll instead focus on the product/âengineering team and the platform in the next part of my response.
When I think of how the Forum compares to other platforms, I see some major tradeoffs. Compared to social media sites like reddit, twitter, and facebook groups, the EA Forum encourages long form content and high quality discussion much better, is a more focused space (with no ads or non-EA content), and indexes and organizes content better. Compared to individual or group blogs, the Forum is much more open (anyone can post), and prioritizes discussion better (commenting features are more hidden on many blogs).
Put together, I think these mean that the EA Forum is a more attractive space for EAs, and ultimately the network of users is a key factor in determining the value of the site.
This isnât to say that the Forum can claim 100% counterfactual value for every interaction that happens in this space (compared to a world where it didnât exist and we had a subreddit), but I do think the Forum has been valuable. I wish we could measure this value in a really clean way without too much effort (and we have near term plans to do more work here), but on the other hand I think itâs important we avoid the trap of focusing too much on measurement and evaluation for a public good that has fairly diffuse impact.
Hope that was helpful.
This isnât a convincing less of analysis to me, as these two things can both be true at the same time:
The EA Forum as a whole is very valuable
The marginal $1.8M spent on it isnât that valuable
i.e., you donât seem to be thinking on the margin.
While Iâm sympathetic to the view that ~$2M is too much to spend, the quality of moderation here is much higher than in any open-access, high-volume space I am aware of on Reddit.[1] So I donât think it is helpful to compare the mod workload here with what âreddit mods handleâ (usually large mod teams on the major subreddits).
Curating higher-quality content by moderating with an iron fist is easier, but would destroy a significant portion of the Forumâs value in my opinion.
I think some subreddits do a good job of moderating to create a culture which is different from the default reddit culture, e.g. /âr/âaskhistorians. See this post for an example, where there are a bunch of comments deleted, including one answer which didnât cite enough sources. Maybe this is what you have in mind when you refer to âmoderating with an iron fistâ though, which you mention might be destructive!
Seems like the challenge with reddit moderation is that users are travelling between subreddits all the time, and most have low quality/âeffort discussion norms. Whereas on the Forum, the userbase is more siloed, which I guess would make good quality moderation easier.
I think benchmarking at reddit moderation is probably the wrong benchmark. Firstly, because the tail risk of unpaid moderation is really bad (e.g. the base rate of moderator driven meltdowns in big subreddits is really high). Secondly, I just donât think we should underpay people in EA because (a) it creates financial barriers to entry to EA that have long-term effects (e.g. publishing unpaid internships have made the wider labour market for journalism terrible) (b) itâll create huge amounts of more informal barriers that mean we lean on more informal relationships in EA even more.
There is already an effective altruism subreddit. I think we should post in both places and see if the difference is worth the cost
What is the average salary of the forum team?
~$120,000 (sans benefits). It varies greatly by role and location. You can get a sense for roughly what a given role might pay by looking at our job postings. As mentioned elsethread, these salaries are aimed at not being huge sacrifices for tech workers living in expensive american cities, while also not being egregiously luxurious in lower salary places like Oxford. I imagine some engineers might look at that number and think itâs low compared to their expectations, and some non-engineer Brits might think itâs quite high. I encourage you to look at the job postings for the ranges.
The salary of the content specialist is here.
It sounds like the 1.5 million does not include $ on the forum team or facilitatorsâwhat does the total spending/âaverage salary look like if you include these groups?
Ah, thanks for finding that, I posted my reply before seeing this comment.
By Forum team do you mean non-CEA moderators? We have volunteers on our team, which throws off our actual spend, but Iâve budgeted as if we have to pay for all of our moderation contracting, and have budgeted $20,000/âyr. We pay moderators $40/âhr, and facilitators $30/âhr.