Regarding âThere are various ways that the EA Forum falls short of other sites that better engage users, like Substack, Reddit, and Twitterâ â I for one much prefer the forum to any of those platforms, and when you say âengage,â I hear âtry to elicit compulsive behavior from.â I know thatâs 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 whatâs 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 donât think folks generally want this when they start platforms, but it seems to happen when they heed the sirenâs call of engagement. I like that the forum is still for a small, specialized group. (Likewise I hope the forum doesnât move to Reddit.)
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 itâs 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 wouldnât be surprised if that counterfactually leads to many more hours spent on important EA work.
Itâs hard to measure that as most people are hesitant to comment about this publicly or donât have a good sense of how much time they âwasteâ on Reddit etc. If anyone here wants more data, an anonymous poll or mini survey could help.
Thanks for sharing! Thatâs 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 â 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 itâs good if people are replacing more addictive distractions with the Forum, since you can only really scroll the Forum so much. đ
when you say âengage,â I hear âtry to elicit compulsive behavior from.â
Yeah this is a bit tricky. Historically, the EA Forum and LW have been far on the side ârespect usersâ timeâ. 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 youâve 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 âtry to elicit compulsive behaviorâ, but I still think itâs within reason to do this, because weâre 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 weâve heard multiple times from churned Forum users is that they just forgot the Forum exists, and we should email them more often. I think itâs 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/âcompulsive usage, and I really appreciate how much LW was designed to respect usersâ time. I think right now we are too far on the âpeople forget we existâ side. But I do think itâs important that we respect our usersâ 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 itâs 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 whatâs 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 donât think folks generally want this when they start platforms, but it seems to happen when they heed the sirenâs 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 whatâs happening with the Substack app. Iâd say that weâre 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 wouldnât necessarily care about engagement. Ultimately we are trying to have a positive impact, so we tend to approach âengagementâ by trying to get valuable content on the site and by making people more aware of that content.
In general Iâm grateful that youâve put a lot of thought into this, I think it shows in a high-quality forum experience. A few observations:
I agree that changing the default Karma settings is fine, in part because itâs easy for users to revert.[1]
As to churned forum users who forget the forum existsâEA is not for everyone. Itâs ultimately some pretty serious questions and it attracts serious people. I know itâs 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 weâre looking for.
We face an unavoidable sensitivity/âspecificity 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. Iâd be less likely tocontribute to a forum with a wider reach but a lower average quality of conversation.
Also I unironically like that youâve changed the default but preserved the âWarning: Immediate karma updates may lead to over-updating on tiny amounts of feedback, and to checking the site frequently when youâd rather be doing something else.â
Iâm particularly not sure I understand the concern that people might switch to other platforms with completely different audiences and feature sets.
Substackâs 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
Substackâs value (or a blog + newsletter mailchimp/âlistmonk/âbuttondown/âetc.) is also that the writer owns the mailing list, and so itâs easy to disintermediate the platform.
I will mention that an explicit goal with the research hackathon community server we run is that thereâs 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 /â action output ratio when visiting.
đ thanks for all you do!
Regarding âThere are various ways that the EA Forum falls short of other sites that better engage users, like Substack, Reddit, and Twitterâ â I for one much prefer the forum to any of those platforms, and when you say âengage,â I hear âtry to elicit compulsive behavior from.â I know thatâs 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 whatâs 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 donât think folks generally want this when they start platforms, but it seems to happen when they heed the sirenâs call of engagement. I like that the forum is still for a small, specialized group. (Likewise I hope the forum doesnât move to Reddit.)
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 itâs 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 wouldnât be surprised if that counterfactually leads to many more hours spent on important EA work.
Itâs hard to measure that as most people are hesitant to comment about this publicly or donât have a good sense of how much time they âwasteâ on Reddit etc. If anyone here wants more data, an anonymous poll or mini survey could help.
Thanks for sharing! Thatâs 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 â that tells me that a lot of people are using the Forum in place of other media they would
procrastinatetake a break with during work or school hours. I guess itâs good if people are replacing more addictive distractions with the Forum, since you can only really scroll the Forum so much. đIâd like to write something publicly about the results, just havenât prioritized it yet.
Yeah this is a bit tricky. Historically, the EA Forum and LW have been far on the side ârespect usersâ timeâ. 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 youâve 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 âtry to elicit compulsive behaviorâ, but I still think itâs within reason to do this, because weâre 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 weâve heard multiple times from churned Forum users is that they just forgot the Forum exists, and we should email them more often. I think itâs 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.
Yeah I am worried about the addiction/âcompulsive usage, and I really appreciate how much LW was designed to respect usersâ time. I think right now we are too far on the âpeople forget we existâ side. But I do think itâs important that we respect our usersâ 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 itâs valuable to try to understand why people like these other sites and whether there are bits we should be stealing.
Yeah this seems right to me, I guess this is whatâs happening with the Substack app. Iâd say that weâre 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 wouldnât necessarily care about engagement. Ultimately we are trying to have a positive impact, so we tend to approach âengagementâ by trying to get valuable content on the site and by making people more aware of that content.
Hi Sarah,
In general Iâm grateful that youâve put a lot of thought into this, I think it shows in a high-quality forum experience. A few observations:
I agree that changing the default Karma settings is fine, in part because itâs easy for users to revert.[1]
As to churned forum users who forget the forum existsâEA is not for everyone. Itâs ultimately some pretty serious questions and it attracts serious people. I know itâs 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 weâre looking for.
We face an unavoidable sensitivity/âspecificity 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. Iâd be less likely to contribute to a forum with a wider reach but a lower average quality of conversation.
Also I unironically like that youâve changed the default but preserved the âWarning: Immediate karma updates may lead to over-updating on tiny amounts of feedback, and to checking the site frequently when youâd rather be doing something else.â
Iâm particularly not sure I understand the concern that people might switch to other platforms with completely different audiences and feature sets.
Substackâs 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
Substackâs value (or a blog + newsletter mailchimp/âlistmonk/âbuttondown/âetc.) is also that the writer owns the mailing list, and so itâs easy to disintermediate the platform.
I will mention that an explicit goal with the research hackathon community server we run is that thereâs 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 /â action output ratio when visiting.