Three lower-cost options for running the EA Forum

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

During our recent team retreat, the CEA Online Team discussed the state of our various projects, what potential new projects we could spend our capacity on, and what data and M&E we could use to determine how to prioritize our time.

As part of our discussion about the state of the EA Forum, we considered a few ways we could run it at a lower cost. I thought others might be interested so I’m sharing a version here. I’d be curious to hear where people agree or disagree.

Note that this was primarily an exercise, and did not lead to us deciding to change our Forum strategy. However, we are currently evaluating how the Online Team will fit into CEA in the longer term, which may result in us prioritizing other projects over the EA Forum. I think “no new engineering work” is plausible given our small capacity, and the other two options are very unlikely.

No new engineering work

There are various ways that the EA Forum falls short of other sites that better engage users, like Substack, Reddit, and Twitter. I think we have a reasonable list of engineering work that we could do to support our Forum community building efforts and bring the site up-to-speed with user expectations from other platforms, such as emailing users more (for example, we only recently updated our default notification settings so that you get emailed when someone directly mentions you).

However, it’s true that the EA Forum is broadly functional and usable as a site already. One option is to only put engineering capacity toward maintaining the site (like fixing issues that arise).

I think it’s possible for us to make good progress on Forum community building just from the content side, although it will be harder to know what is cost-effective there for various reasons. On the other hand, I don’t think we can accomplish our community building goals via engineering work alone.

My take

Since I’ve started leading the team, I think we’ve been overall better at prioritizing Forum engineering work that directly addresses our goals. Many Forum metrics have stabilized since Oct 2024. We’ve put in less overall FTE towards the Forum than in the past. My guess is that the right answer is not “no new engineering work”, but rather that we should stay focused on our goals.

I do think we need to be careful and keep up with other platforms and changing user expectations, so as to prevent losing our Forum community. For example, Substack is a bigger deal now than a few years ago, and if the Forum becomes a much worse platform for authors by comparison, losing strong writers to Substack is a risk to the Forum community.

A bulletin board

I mean this sort of thing:

Currently our team is viewing the EA Forum as a community, and so our goals tend to be around increasing discussion (ex. we track comments and commenters) and making people want to be here (trying to get good content and active strong contributors).

You could imagine that we stop doing this. We stop running Forum events, we stop doing product/​design/​development for work that is intended to encourage users to comment/​engage more, we stop investing in improving moderation or managing user-generated content in other ways (like maintaining the distinction between personal blog, frontpage, and community), we stop engaging with users on the site and talking with authors elsewhere, we stop responding to customer service requests.

We could intentionally position the EA Forum as a community bulletin board, and lean into an aspect that I think naturally emerges: it could be more like a news feed where orgs post updates, and we don’t expect there to be much discussion. We don’t expect new people to really post anything. We don’t try to influence or steer EA with the Forum. I expect it will slowly turn into the rest of the internet, in terms of culture, because there’s just not a lot of value in moderating when there are very few comments. Maybe we kill voting if the Forum is more of a news feed.

This could mean it looks like the FAST Forum, though hopefully it could be somewhat more active because we are starting with more users (although it’s possible we lose them quite quickly).

(Note that I think it’s possible for the Forum to be fine without our active work. For example, if EA independently became cool again, we might get a natural influx of users and good content. But without our active work, we do risk losing the network.)

What value might this still have?

1. It could still be a schelling point for common knowledge, though I expect less so because there will be less users.

   1. For example, orgs like CEA could still spread the information that we’ve merged with EA Funds

   2. However, I expect other ideas like “we should consider advocating for an AI pause” to no longer appear on the Forum

2. It could still be useful for people who are new to EA, to see things like new job postings and new updates from organizations.

3. It could still make visitors more likely to stay engaged with EA if it still has a bit of showing visitors that EA is an active community (even if they only hear from orgs).

What might we lose?

1. It will no longer be the “glue that holds the EA community together”, because people will perceive the site to be more like a news feed or a job board.

2. It will no longer help to enforce important EA cultural norms.

   1. We could still moderate it, but it will be harder to justify the cost-effectiveness of moderation in this case than currently, due to the reduced activity.

   2. Also a lot of “enforcement of cultural norms” comes from users commenting and discussing things, which we expect to no longer happen much.

3. I think it would be much harder to hold people and organizations accountable in the EA community.

4. We would lose the Forum as an accessible and safe space to “practice doing EA”.

   1. People could still post, but without feedback they would not learn anything and would probably churn more easily.

5. We lose providing a space where people can feel like they belong.

6. We’d lose connections between people, like a person DMing an author about their post.

   1. This is because the strong contributors will have left. There would be little to no reason for people to put effort into writing on the Forum.

7. Without comments and votes, people will probably perceive the Forum as a place where no one visits anymore and will churn more often, so I expect things like job placements to be reduced, even if there are more job postings.

My take

I would find this very sad. To me this feels like a potentially huge loss of value in exchange for ~3 FTE of salaries per year. I think it would be difficult to rebuild the Forum community again if it was lost.

Shut down the EA Forum and use the r/​EffectiveAltruism subreddit

This is potentially the lowest-cost option, since we wouldn’t even have to pay for any infrastructure (AWS) or for engineering capacity to maintain it.

Culturally I think the EA subreddit is pretty far from where we’d want it to be, but it’s probably possible to moderate it very heavily if we wanted to.

The subreddit has some features that exist on the Forum:

1. Support for posting longform and shortform content, which is discoverable via search engines and easy to link to

2. Voting and discussion features (although no reacts, including agree/​disagree)

3. Ability for mods to pin posts to highlight them

4. Ability to run AMAs

5. Ability to send a welcome message to people who join the sub

6. Bonus: Reddit is likely less buggy than the EA Forum

Some things we’d sacrifice are:

1. Improved reading and writing experiences

2. Agree/​disagree being separate from karma voting

3. Sequences

4. Recommendations for other good EA-related content on post pages

5. Audio versions of posts (although we could probably make this happen separately)

6. Flexibility to make changes to the site

   1. For example, we could no longer implement conference or job recommendations

7. Control over the future of the site (we’d be at the whims of Reddit)

8. User data, for example to help us estimate the size of the EA community over time

9. Ad-free experience

10. Secondary features like the topics wiki, groups directory, events, and people directory

    1. Though some of these could still exist elsewhere, like on effectivealtruism.org

11. Ability to enforce certain norms, like making sure people don’t vote multiple times on the same content using different accounts (this is very easy to do on Reddit)

12. Ability to make custom events, like the Donation Election

There’s also an interesting set of tradeoffs due to being part of a larger platform:

1. On the one hand, maybe EA content will get in front of more people and we will grow the community via Reddit’s recommendation engine.

2. On the other hand, I think that having to engage with EA content in the context of an app that has a lot of other distracting content means that, most of the time, the EA subreddit will just lose the attention battle more than the EA Forum does. Personally, when I scroll Reddit, I’m just there for the memes and drama, and I rarely read serious posts.

My take

This option was especially interesting to discuss, because it seems so wild and yet it’s not impossible that it would work. I think this runs into the same issue as the bulletin board option, which is that you’re potentially losing a lot of value for a relatively small gain (~3 FTE salaries).

In general, I think it’s difficult to migrate users to a new platform without losing a lot of them, so just the migration would risk losing the whole community.

Appendix: What does the Online Team do?

I figured some readers would appreciate additional context on our work. Currently, the team is made up of:

• 1 team lead (@Sarah Cheng)

• 1 product designer (@Agnes Stenlund)

• 1 content strategist (@Toby Tremlett🔹)

• 2 software engineers (@Will Howard🔹 and @Ollie Etherington)

Our capacity is broadly split like so:

Project	FTE	Notes
EA Forum	3	A bit more than half of our ongoing staff capacity goes towards the EA Forum.
EA Newsletter	0.25	This takes Toby approximately 1 week per month.
EA Opportunities	0	We picked up this project and have so far run it as low-cost as possible (by using contractor time). It’s likely that we will put more capacity towards this later in the year.
Other (recently, effectivealtruism.org)	1.75	This represents one-off projects, like redesigning CEA.org and building Forethought’s website.

[Seth Ariel Green 🔸]

👋 thanks for all you do!

Regarding “There are various ways that the EA Forum falls short of other sites that better engage users, like Substack, Reddit, and Twitter” — I for one much prefer the forum to any of those platforms, and when you say “engage,” I hear “try to elicit compulsive behavior from.” I know that’s not what you mean, but for twitter and Reddit in particular, engagement looks like addiction for a lot of folks, as well as a profit model driven by outrage & slop. I would not like to see the forum imitate them.

Put differently, a lot of platforms are designed at the outset for specialists & connoisseurs, and when they get (pressured to become) big, they lose what’s special about them and just end up shoving short-form video content in an endless scroll in front of an undifferentiated mass of users. I don’t think folks generally want this when they start platforms, but it seems to happen when they heed the siren’s call of engagement. I like that the forum is still for a small, specialized group. (Likewise I hope the forum doesn’t move to Reddit.)

[Manuel Allgaier]

Agree!

To add to your point: Some EAs have told me in private that they struggle with various forms of online addiction (mostly Youtube, Facebook, but also Reddit, Linkedin etc), and it’s hard for them to find a balance between getting the content they want but not spending too much time on it.

I feel like the EA forum makes it a lot easier for users to find that balance compared to reddit etc, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that counterfactually leads to many more hours spent on important EA work.

It’s hard to measure that as most people are hesitant to comment about this publicly or don’t have a good sense of how much time they ‘waste’ on Reddit etc. If anyone here wants more data, an anonymous poll or mini survey could help.

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

Thanks for sharing! That’s helpful to hear. :) This broadly matches my understanding, based on the data from our 2024 EA Forum user survey^[1]. A majority of respondents said that little to none of their Forum time would otherwise have been spent on work, but our site usage increases during work hours — that tells me that a lot of people are using the Forum in place of other media they would procrastinate take a break with during work or school hours. I guess it’s good if people are replacing more addictive distractions with the Forum, since you can only really scroll the Forum so much. 😅

1. ^

   I’d like to write something publicly about the results, just haven’t prioritized it yet.

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

when you say “engage,” I hear “try to elicit compulsive behavior from.”

Yeah this is a bit tricky. Historically, the EA Forum and LW have been far on the side “respect users’ time”. For example, the default setting for karma notifications on LW is to be batched daily, so that you only see that star once per day rather than right after you’ve gotten an upvote. This was also the case on the EA Forum until earlier this year, when we decided to change a bunch of our default notification settings, and specifically we changed the default karma notifications to be realtime. This moves our site more towards “try to elicit compulsive behavior”, but I still think it’s within reason to do this, because we’re making changes that better align our defaults to what new users expect for a website, and also users can still customize their notifications to be less attention-grabbing.

A response we’ve heard multiple times from churned Forum users is that they just forgot the Forum exists, and we should email them more often. I think it’s easy for a new user to write a good comment and not know that they got any upvotes, because they expected to be notified that they got upvotes (and they were not), and then get discouraged and quickly forget to come back to the Forum.

for twitter and Reddit in particular, engagement looks like addiction for a lot of folks

Yeah I am worried about the addiction/​compulsive usage, and I really appreciate how much LW was designed to respect users’ time. I think right now we are too far on the “people forget we exist” side. But I do think it’s important that we respect our users’ time as well, so we make sure to include ways to opt out of most features (like the ability to individually customize the frequency of every type of email notification).

In general, I still think it’s valuable to try to understand why people like these other sites and whether there are bits we should be stealing.

Put differently, a lot of platforms are designed at the outset for specialists & connoisseurs, and when they get (pressured to become) big, they lose what’s special about them and just end up shoving short-form video content in an endless scroll in front of an undifferentiated mass of users. I don’t think folks generally want this when they start platforms, but it seems to happen when they heed the siren’s call of engagement. I like that the forum is still for a small, specialized group.

Yeah this seems right to me, I guess this is what’s happening with the Substack app. I’d say that we’re only really focused on engagement now because we think there is a risk of losing the Forum community, and if the community were in a healthier place then we wouldn’t necessarily care about engagement. Ultimately we are trying to have a positive impact, so we tend to approach “engagement” by trying to get valuable content on the site and by making people more aware of that content.

[Seth Ariel Green 🔸]

Hi Sarah,

In general I’m grateful that you’ve put a lot of thought into this, I think it shows in a high-quality forum experience. A few observations:

1. I agree that changing the default Karma settings is fine, in part because it’s easy for users to revert.^[1]

2. As to churned forum users who forget the forum exists—EA is not for everyone. It’s ultimately some pretty serious questions and it attracts serious people. I know it’s your job to worry about this, but for my money, I do not think that such folks were likely to have generated the kind of content we’re looking for.

   1. We face an unavoidable sensitivity/​specificity tradeoff in terms of attracting users. Right now things are slanted towards specificity rather than sensitivity. I like that because I am unapologetically picky about how I spend my time. I’d be less likely to contribute to a forum with a wider reach but a lower average quality of conversation.

1. ^

   Also I unironically like that you’ve changed the default but preserved the “Warning: Immediate karma updates may lead to over-updating on tiny amounts of feedback, and to checking the site frequently when you’d rather be doing something else.”

[David T]

I’m particularly not sure I understand the concern that people might switch to other platforms with completely different audiences and feature sets.

Substack’s value is that it is a place to sell subscriptions to content, not that it has particularly innovative or well-designed features. It seems that if writers wished to make money from their content they would switch to Substack regardless of the quality of EA forum software, whereas if their priority was engaging with EAs, there would be little incentive to switch to a service with a different audience and a monetisation-focused ethos even if its editing tools were top notch

[NunoSempere]

Substack’s value (or a blog + newsletter mailchimp/​listmonk/​buttondown/​etc.) is also that the writer owns the mailing list, and so it’s easy to disintermediate the platform.

[Esben Kran]

I will mention that an explicit goal with the research hackathon community server we run is that there’s no to little interaction between hackathons since people should be out in the world doing direct work.

For us, this means that we invite them into our research lab or they continue work other places, instead of being addicted. So rather than optimizing for engagement, optimize for information input /​ action output ratio when visiting.

[Stefan_Schubert]

Another disadvantage of moving to Reddit is that it would give the existing material on the EA Forum (which includes a lot of good stuff) less visibility (even though it would presumably stay online).

Overall I’d prefer the EA Forum to continue to exist.

[MathiasKB🔸]

The EA movement is chock-full of people who are good at programming. What about open-sourcing the EA source code and outsourcing development of new features to volunteer members who want to contribute?

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

Not sure what the disagree votes are about, but I agree that it would be nice to have more open source contributors! 😊 The Forum codebase is already open source and we do occasionally get contributions. We also have a (disorganized) list of issues that people can work on. IMO it’s not the easiest codebase to dive into, and we don’t have much capacity to assist people in getting set up, but now that LLM tools are much better I could imagine it being not too onerous to contribute.

If anyone wants to help, I’m happy to suggest issues for you! 🙂 Feel free to reach out to me.

[Ozzie Gooen]

I was thinking of Disagreeing.

On one hand, I’m very supportive of more people doing open-source development on things like this.

On the other, I think some people might think, “It’s open-source, and our community has tech people around. Therefore, people could probably do the maintenance work for free.”

From experience, it’s incredibly difficult to actually get useful open-source contributors, especially for long-term maintenance of apps that aren’t extraordinarily interesting and popular. So it can be a nice thing to encourage, but a tiny part of the big-picture strategic planning.

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

Great point — this matches my intuition, but I’ve never participated in any serious open source projects, so I wasn’t sure how feasible it would actually be to get useful contributions. I’ve volunteered to help with a few coding projects in the past, and most of the time I quickly lose motivation to work on them. So I expect most volunteers to also get bored/​distracted and not do anything useful.

[Ozzie Gooen]

Quick thoughts:

1. I appreciate the write up and transparency.

2. I’m a big fan of engineering work. At the same time, I realize it’s expensive, and it seems like we don’t have much money to work with these days. I think this makes it tricky to find situations where it’s clearly a good fit with the existing donors.

3. Bigger-picture, I imagine many readers here would have little idea of what “new engineering work” would really look like. It’s tough to do a lot with a tiny team, as you point out. I could imagine some features helping the forum, but would also expect many changes to be experimental.

4. “Everyone going to the Reddit thread, at once” seems doomed to me, as you point out. But I’d feel better about gradual things. Maybe we could have someone try moderating Reddit for a few months, and see if we can make it any better first. “Transitioning the EA Forum” could come very late, only if we’re able to show good success on a smaller scale.

5. That said, I’m skeptical of Reddit as a primary forum. I don’t know of other smart Academic-aligned groups who have really made it official infrastructure for them. It seems to me like Reddits are often branches of the overall Reddit community, which is quite separate from the EA community, so it will be difficult to find the slice that we want. I feel better about other paid Forum providers, if we go the route of shutting down the EA Forum.

6. I think that the EA Discords/​Slacks could use more support. Perhaps we shouldn’t try to have “One True Platform”, but have a variety of platforms that work with different sets of people.

7. As I think about it, I think it’s quite possible that many of the obvious technical improvements for the EA Forum, at this point, won’t translate nicely to user growth. It’s just very hard to make user growth happen, especially after a few years of tech improvements.

8. I think the EA Forum has major problems with scaling, and that this is a hard tech problem. It’s hard to cleanly split the community into sub-communities (I know there’s been some attempts here). So right now I think we have the issue that we can only have one internet community (to some extent), and this scares a bunch of people away.

9. Personally, what feels most missing to me around EA online is leadership/​communication about the big issues, some smart+effective moderation (this is really tough), and experimentation on online infrastructure outside the EA Forum (see Discords, online courses, online meetups, maybe new online platforms, etc). I think there’s a lot of work to do here, but would flag that it’s likely pretty hit-or-miss, maybe making it a more difficult ask for funders.

Anyway, this was just my quick take. Your team obviously has a lot more context.

I’m overall appreciative to the team and to the funders who have supported the team this long.

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

Thanks! I found it helpful to hear your perspective. :)

I imagine many readers here would have little idea of what “new engineering work” would really look like

Yup this is fair — this includes work to customize the site for events (like the Donation Election voting system), and also work that is intended to be a longer-term investment that makes the site better (like updating our notification defaults, or improving site speed, or adding features like Google Docs import).

[Chris Leong]

I’d love to see you expand on this paragraph:

Personally, what feels most missing to me around EA online is leadership/​communication about the big issues, some smart+effective moderation (this is really tough), and experimentation on online infrastructure outside the EA Forum (see Discords, online courses, online meetups, maybe new online platforms, etc). I think there’s a lot of work to do here, but would flag that it’s likely pretty hit-or-miss, maybe making it a more difficult ask for funders.

[RyanCarey]

I think we should keep our eye the most important role that online EA (and adjacent) platforms have played historically. Over the last 20 years, there has always been one or two key locations for otherwise isolated EAs and utilitarians to discover like-minds online, get feedback on their ideas, and then become researchers or real-life contributors. Originally, it was (various incarnations of) Felicifia, and then the EA Forum. The rationalist community benefited in similar ways from the extropians mailing list, SL4, Overcoming Bias and LessWrong. The sheer geographical coverage, and the element of in-depth intellectual engagement aren’t practically replaceable by other community-building efforts.

I think that fulfilling this role is a lot more important than growing the EA community, and other goals that the EA Forum might have, and that it is worth doing until a better new venue comes along. Currently, I don’t think a better venue exists. I don’t think r/​effectivegiving or LessWrong would be a great successor. You could make a case for Substack+Twitter, but that may flip to something else in a few years time, how people want to connect online can change completely on that kind of timescale. Overall, I think it important to keep things running for the next 5-10 as the future of EA and the future of online discussion declare themselves.

Of course, this role could be performed without a lot of new technology.

The other thing I wonder is: if the online team stopped stewarding the EA Forum’s content, would it really turn into a mere bulletin board? I’m not so sure. I can imagine that plenty of people might continue to use the Forum to discuss EA matters and to post original research. If so, then this might be another way to cut costs with less change to the forum’s core role, compared to declaring it a bulletin board or moving conversation to a different platform.

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

I appreciate this comment a lot, thank you!

The sheer geographical coverage, and the element of in-depth intellectual engagement aren’t practically replaceable by other community-building efforts.

I think that fulfilling this role is a lot more important than growing the EA community, and other goals that the EA Forum might have, and that it is worth doing until a better new venue comes along.

I broadly agree with this! :) I personally care a lot about keeping the Forum community alive. Although I ultimately care about impact, and so I think it’s possible that we can do so while also spending our marginal resources on other projects (such as EA Funds).

if the online team stopped stewarding the EA Forum’s content, would it really turn into a mere bulletin board?

Yeah I mentioned in my post that I don’t know how likely the Forum is to turn into a bulletin board by default. I have the feeling that it was naturally moving in that direction last year, and I think that without some external push to make EA more salient, that’s just what would happen to an online discussion platform by default. For example, you can see this kind of thing happening pretty often in slacks. I think if you lose enough authors, you eventually hit a threshold where the platform no longer feels like a community of people (i.e. people view it as “the place where orgs post updates”), and that change in perception heavily discourages people from discussing things. I think we need to be attentive to how visitors view “what the EA Forum is about”.

[geoffrey]

I find searching for in-depth content on the EA Forum vastly better than Reddit. This isn’t just relating to EA topics. There are a few academic-ish subreddits that I like and will search when I’m interested in what the amateur experts think on a given topic. Finding relevant posts is about the same on Reddit but finding in-depth comments + related posts is very hard. I usually have to do some Google magic to make that happen.

Also on rare occasion, I end up liking a person’s writing style or thinking methods and want to deep dive into what else they’ve written about. On the EA Forum, about 100% of what I find will be tangential to things I care about. On Reddit, it’s more likely I’ll have to sift through lots of hobbyist content like about sports since it’s more of a “bring your whole self” platform.

[Neel Nanda]

Thank you for the post. I was a bit surprised by the bulletin board one. What goes wrong with just positioning the forum exactly as it is now, but saying you’re not going to do any maintenance or moderation. but without trying to reposition it as a bulletin board? At the very least I expect the momentum could keep it going for a while. Is the issue that you think you do a lot of active moderation work that sustains healthy discussion norms which matters a lot for the current forum but would matter less for a bulletin board?

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

At the very least I expect the momentum could keep it going for a while.

Yup this seems right to me, but I would expect that usage would naturally go down over time. You can see this happening in the chart from my January post, for example.

I think that online spaces naturally move toward being “a place [for orgs] to promote things” once they have an established audience. For example, I feel like most Slack workspaces turn into this. Most subreddits have rules against promotion, probably for this reason. Without a Forum Team that pays attention to the distribution of content being posted, and actively works to get more good content and retain strong contributors, my guess is that the site will gradually increase in promotions and decrease in discussions, and that this is a feedback loop that will cause strong contributors to continue to leave as the site feels less and less like a place to have interesting discussions.

Though of course I don’t know for sure what would happen, this is just my guess. :)

I really like and resonate with Lizka’s thoughts on this as well. For example, this bit pulled out of her doc:

Suppose that about 10% of EAs regularly use the Forum. I think we need a minimal critical mass of EAs using the Forum — under that, people start thinking it’s dead, or stop remembering it in conversations, etc., and there’s a mass exit (so it basically becomes an archive of content that you can reference on Twitter or in Slack). I don’t know exactly how big this critical mass should be, and whether it’s better to think of it as a percentage of the main EA network/​community or as a raw number of very-EA-aligned users. This means If we go down to 8% of EAs, we might be passing under the critical mass, which could noticeably up the chances of a mass exit of users.

[Jason]

I think that online spaces naturally move toward being “a place [for orgs] to promote things” once they have an established audience.

If having too many org-promotional posts is unhealthy for the Forum, one could argue for structuring the Frontpage to prevent org promotions/​announcements from becoming too prominent. That could mean a weighting adjustment, a hard cap on how many org-promo posts can appear on Frontpage (e.g., the community section), or adjusting the Frontpage algorithm to more heavily weight comments/​interaction (which these posts tend to have less of).

There may be an ideal stable range of activity level for the Forum. Users feel they can commit a certain amount of time to keeping up with things, and they may experience having too much content to wade through as frustrating and off-putting. And most authors will experience getting pushed off the Frontpage soon due to the volume of other content as demotivating. If that’s correct, then there’s a point at which seeking more discussion-related content to dilute org-promotional posts could backfire. I’m not suggesting that we are outside the ideal stable range at the moment.

However, techniques to limit the prominence of org promotions/​announcements should require a fairly modest investment of upfront staff time (with monitoring by volunteers or the community if necessary). Thus, calculating the risk that reducing paid staff time devoted to the Forum and/​or content development will lead to bulletin-board-ization should account for mitigating measures.

[Austin]

For example, Substack is a bigger deal now than a few years ago, and if the Forum becomes a much worse platform for authors by comparison, losing strong writers to Substack is a risk to the Forum community.

I’ve proposed to the LW folks and I’ll propose to y’all: make it easy to import/​xpost Substack posts into EA Forum! RIght now a lot of my writing goes from Notion draft ⇒ our Substack ⇒ LW/​EAF, and getting the formatting exactly right (esp around images, spacing, and footnotes) is a pain. I would love the ability to just drop in our Substack link and have that automatically, correctly, import the article into these places.

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

Nice! I think LW has a work-in-progress branch with this sort of thing, though I have no idea if/​when they will wrap it up. We also have an admin-facing feature where we can set up a process to automatically import posts to your Forum account from an RSS feed (although it’s rarely used so it’s probably buggy).

My recommendation is actually to let our team assistant manually crosspost your pieces to your Forum account. She does this for Lewis Bollard’s Substack, for example. For now, I expect she will do a better job than any of the automated options.

If anyone would like us to handle crossposting their external blog to the Forum, please let us know! You can contact us in various ways, or just DM me directly.

[Austin]

Thanks, we’ll definitely consider that option for future pieces!

[Lizka]

I think going for Option 2 (“A bulletin board”) or 3 (“Shut down”) would be pretty a serious mistake, fwiw. (I have fewer/​weaker opinions on 1, although I suspect I’m more pessimistic about it than ~most others.)

...

An internal memo I wrote in early 2023 (during my time on the Online Team) seems relevant, so I’ve made a public copy: Vision /​ models /​ principles for the Forum and the Forum+ team^[1]

I probably no longer believe some of what I wrote there, but still endorse the broad points/​models, which lead me think, among other things:

1. That people would probably ~stop visiting the Forum if it were closer to a bulletin board

2. That people would just not relate to the Reddit version in a way that gets remotely close to what the Forum currently does (e.g. I probs believe something in the direction of “support for posting longform content in the subreddit is almost irrelevant; people won’t really be doing it”)

3. That investment from the Online Team matters in part to maintain ~trust that the Forum will continue existing as the kind of space people want to invest in

4. That major shifts could be irreversible even when they don’t seem inherently so (e.g. “pausing” the Forum to re-evaluate would be closer to killing it, probably; people would very likely not come back /​ the space would be fundamentally different if they did)

5. Etc.

Other notes (adding to what the models I’d described in the memo lead me to believe, or articulating nearby/​more specific versions of the claims I make there, etc.):

• A platform’s vibe/​form actually matters for the kind of content and discussion it gets

  • I expect a lot less high-effort content would get posted even e.g. if the Forum itself suddenly looked like Reddit (and a lot of that kind of content won’t ever get written)

• I feel like the discussion here should probably more clearly differentiate between:

  • “What should happen to the Forum” /​ “how good or bad are different futures for the Forum” vs

  • “What should the Online Team do/​ how valuable are various kinds of investment”

  • and maybe also: “How can we cut costs /​ fund this work”

    • (I suspect it might make sense for the Online Team to fundraise from the EA community—although I don’t know if that’s an option given the current setup)

1. ^

   (also called “Equilibrium curves & being stewards of the special thing”)

   The memo outlines some of how I was thinking about how the Forum works, especially an “equilibrium curves” model and a view that trust is an key thing to track/​build towards. It also discusses the value of the Online Team’s work, theories of change, and when (if ever) “closing” the Forum would make sense and how that could work/​play out.

   (I know Sarah’s read this, but figured I’d share it in case others are interested, and because I’m about to reference stuff from there.)

   Note: At least two fairly important parts of my current models seem missing from the doc (and I suspect I’d think of several more if I thought about it for more than the time it took to skim the doc and write this comment): (1) the Forum as a “two-sided marketplace” (“writers /​ content producers” and “readers”), and (2) creation of (object-level) common knowledge as an important thing the Forum does sometimes.

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

Hey Lizka! I love that memo and I agree with most of it (I don’t have any particular disagreements, I just feel unsure about some things). It’s been a significant influence on the Online Team overall, and on how I think about running the Forum. I also agree with the specific points in your comment.

Part of the goal of the exercise was to, as the Online Team, “stare into the abyss” and try to figure out, how much does it really make the world better for us to put capacity towards the Forum? Are we only putting resources towards the Forum because of momentum/​personal interest/​job security/​etc, or do we think that there is actually counterfactual value?

Some additional context is that CEA is [moving toward becoming] more of a unified organization now than it has been in the past. My understanding is that we can broadly only do work that aligns with CEA’s overall strategy:

Instead of optimizing for each of our team’s programs, we’ll be optimizing for EA as a whole.

And, I believe that everyone on the Online Team does want to do the work that is most impactful overall, whether or not that involves the Forum. So part of that equation is, what are the costs (in terms of “impact”) of us putting less resources towards the Forum? For example, it’s possible that having our product/​engineers work on EA Funds would be a more impactful use of their time, and it’s also possible that product/​engineering work on both projects is valuable enough that we should hire enough people to cover both the EA Forum and EA Funds.

[Lizka]

Re not necessarily “optimizing” for the Forum, I guess my frame is:

The Online Team is the current custodian of an important shared resource (the Forum). If the team can’t actually commit to fulfilling its “Forum custodian” duties, e.g. because the priorities of CEA might change, then it should probably start trying to (responsibly) hand that role off to another person/​group.

(TBC this doesn’t mean that Online should be putting all of its efforts into the Forum, just like a parent has no duty to spend all their energy caring for their child. And it’s not necessarily clear what the bar for responsibly fulfilling Forum custodian duties actually is — maybe moderation and bug fixes are core charges, but “no new engineering work” is fine, I’m not sure.)

I would view this somewhat differently if it was possible for another group to compete with or step in for CEA /​ the Online Team if it seemed that the team is not investing [enough] in the Forum (or investing poorly). But that’s not actually possible — in fact even if the Online Team stopped ~everything, by default no one else would be able to take over. I’d also feel somewhat differently if the the broader community hadn’t invested so much in the Forum, and if I didn’t think that a baseline ~trust in (and therefore clear commitment from) the team was so important for the Forum’s fate (which I believe for reasons loosely outlined in the memo, IIRC).

...

Btw, I very much agree that staring into the abyss (occasionally) is really useful. And I really appreciate you posting this on the Forum, and also engaging deeply/​openly in the replies.

[Lizka]

Yeah actually I think @Habryka [Deactivated] discusses these kinds of dynamics here: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​4NFDwQRhHBB2Ad4ZY/​​the-filan-cabinet-podcast-with-oliver-habryka-transcript

Excerpt (bold mine, Habryka speaking):

One of the core things that I was always thinking about with LessWrong, and that was my kind of primary analysis of what went wrong with previous LessWrong revivals, was [kind of] an iterated, [the term] “prisoner’s dilemma” is overused, but a bit of an iterated prisoner’s dilemma or something where, like, people needed to have the trust on an ongoing basis that the maintainers and the people who run it will actually stick with it. And there’s a large amount of trust that the people need to have that, if they invest in a site and start writing content on it, that the maintainers and the people who run it actually will put the effort into making that content be shepherded well. And the people who want to shepherd it only want to do that if the maintainers actually...

And so, one of the key things that I was thinking about, was trying to figure out how to guarantee reliability. This meant, to a lot of the core contributors of the site, I made a promise when I started it, that was basically, I’m going to be making sure that LessWrong is healthy and keeps running for five years from the time I started. Which was a huge commitment—five years is a hugely long time. But my sense at the time was that type of commitment is exactly the most important thing. Because the most usual thing that I get when I talk [in] user interviews to authors and commenters is that they don’t want to contribute because they expect the thing to decline in the future. So reliability was a huge part of that.

And then I also think, signaling that there was real investment here was definitely a good chunk of it. I think UI is important, and readability of the site is important. And I think I made a lot of improvements there to decide that I’m quite happy with. But I think a lot of it was also just a costly signal that somebody cares.

I don’t know how I feel about that in retrospect. But I think that was a huge effect, where I think people looked on the site, and when [they] looked at LessWrong 2.0, there was just a very concrete sense that I could see in user interviews that they were like, “Oh, this is a site that is being taken care of. This is a thing that people are paying attention to and that is being kept up well.” In a similar [sense] to how, I don’t know, a clean house has the same symbol. I don’t really know. I think a lot of it was, they were like, wow, a lot of stuff is changing. And the fact that a lot of work is being put into this, the work itself is doing a lot of valuable signaling.

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

Yeah I definitely have this in my head when thinking about how to run the EA Forum. But I haven’t made a commitment to personally run the site for five years (I’m not a commitment sort of person in general). Maybe that means I’m not a good fit for this role?

I also hear conflicting views on whether it’s good or bad to “signal that there is real investment”. I think I intuitively agree with Habryka here, but then others tell me that it can look bad for us to talk about doing work that doesn’t tie directly to impact — like maybe if we talk about improving the UX of the site, people will think that we are wasting charitable money, and that will decrease some people’s trust in our team. So for some people, I think they would trust us more if we were doing less work on the site?

[Ozzie Gooen]

Yeah I definitely have this in my head when thinking about how to run the EA Forum. But I haven’t made a commitment to personally run the site for five years (I’m not a commitment sort of person in general). Maybe that means I’m not a good fit for this role?

I want to quickly flag that this sounds very wrong to me. In Oliver’s case, he was the CEO of that org, and if he left then, I think it’s very likely the organization would have died.

In comparison, I think CEA is in a much more robust place. There’s a different CEO, and it’s an important enough organization that I’d expect that if the CEO left, there would be sufficient motivation to replace that person with someone at least decent.

I think that it would be nice for CEA to make some commitments here. At very least, if it were the case that the forum was in great risk of closing in a few years, I assume many people here would want to know (and start migrating to other solutions). But I think CEA can make the commitments without you having to be personally committed.

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

The Online Team is the current custodian of an important shared resource (the Forum). If the team can’t actually commit to fulfilling its “Forum custodian” duties, e.g. because the priorities of CEA might change, then it should probably start trying to (responsibly) hand that role off to another person/​group.

I agree with this, though I feel like the devil is in the details of what “Forum custodian” means. FWIW I don’t think anyone at CEA is interested in shutting down the Forum, or reducing the moderation capacity.

Maybe a useful example of “new engineering work” is: we might want to start using the “rejected content” feature that LW has, but we’d need an engineer to update the codebase to enable it on the Forum. So under a strict “no new engineering work” policy, we couldn’t start rejecting content, and in fact there’s a lot of moderation we couldn’t do. We are still doing some engineering work, but we broadly need to justify any work we do under CEA’s new strategy. Maybe you think that, if we fail to justify this work under CEA’s strategy, but we still think it’s valuable to do, then that’s the point at which we should start handing the Forum off to someone else?

[Will Aldred]

Note: Long-time power user of this forum, @NunoSempere, has just rebooted the r/​forecasting subreddit. How that goes could give some info re. the question of “to what extent can a subreddit host the kind of intellectual discussion we aim for?”

(I’m not aware of any subreddits that meet our bar for discussion, right now—and I’m therefore skeptical that this forum should move to Reddit—but that might just be because most subreddit moderators aren’t aiming for the same things as this forum’s moderators. r/​forecasting is an interesting experiment because I see Nuño as similar to this forum’s mods in terms of aims and competence.^[1])

1. ^

   Though Nuño might disagree!

[Manuel Allgaier]

If at some point you’re seriously considering downsizing the EA forum team or even shutting it down, maybe consider running a (simple) crowdfunding campaign for the EA forum among users, both to get funding and to get a better sense of how much users value having a value-aligned forum (optimizing for quality, usefulness & user happiness) instead of only a subreddit.

My sense is that quite a lot of users value it quite a lot (just based on how much time people seem to spend on the forum), but I don’t have data on it.

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

Yeah I would be interested in experimenting with ways we could do community-based funding for Forum things! :) You’ll definitely hear about it if we give it a shot lol

[Jason]

How much paid staff time was devoted to content development work in the past? I briefly skimmed the list of top posts in years past, and I didn’t get the impression that the Forum was a “bulletin board” in years past. If there were less paid staff time devoted to content development in years past, it would make me think it less likely that reducing that effort now would trigger a meaningful loss of Forum quality. It’s of course possible that something is different now—either to justify a greater or lesser level of content work than for years prior.

My guess is that the optimal number of FTEs working on the Forum is greater than 0.0 (let’s please not go to Reddit) and less than 3.0. But it’s hard for me to say where I think it should be within that range.

[Sarah Cheng 🔸]

I’m not sure, but I actually think the amount of content capacity put towards the Forum has been about the same for its whole lifetime (~a bit less than 1 FTE). However, I think that content capacity has been focused on different things over time (Lizka got pulled into a bunch of random non-Forum projects for example, and there were fewer “Forum events” before Toby started running them). Also the Forum community has changed a lot over time.

In the early days, the community was really small, so probably they didn’t get many promotional posts because orgs didn’t know about it (and there were less EA-related orgs). But we got a huge boost in awareness and users around WWOTF and FTX, so that changes how orgs relate to the Forum. In another comment I mentioned that I think online spaces naturally move toward being “bulletin board”-like after they have an established audience. Personally I occasionally get this feeling when visiting the Forum, when a lot of the Frontpage are posts from orgs. Those just tend not to invite discussion, even if the org would in fact be happy for people to comment on them. I think we need to be careful about how the Forum “feels” and what visitors perceive the space to be “about” — I think if people start to think that it would feel weird to comment on a Forum post, that’s a really bad state for us to be in.

[Vasco Grilo🔸]

Thanks for sharing, Sarah! I agree with your takes. I think it would be good to survey the users before making major changes like the ones described in 2 or 3.

[Chris Leong]

The forum both delivers a lot of value and is expensive. One way to improve the balance would be to cut costs, but another would be to increase the value provided.

Very excited to hear that the forum has picked up the EA opportunities board.

It would take substantial work to integrate it into the forum, but I expect that such an integration would allow the board to deliver a lot more value. I’m sure I’d personally check the board more if it were just a click away. Even better, by shifting people’s careers, it would be delivering the kind of value that is legible to funders.