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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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:
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.
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.
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):
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?
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.
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?