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.
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.
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.
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.