Do you foresee any changes being made to the moderation guidelines on the forum? Now that CEA’s brand name is associated with it, do you think that could mean forbidding the posting of content that is deemed “not helpful” to the movement, similar to what we see on the Effective Altruists Facebook group?
If there are no anticipated changes to the moderation guidelines, how do you anticipate CEA navigating reputational risks from controversial content posted to the forum?
The main reason moderation on the Facebook group works the way it does is that the group has 13000+ members and no ability to downvote, so the ratio of signal to noise would be pretty sad if there were no screening. It’s very rare that the Facebook group moderators screen out a post for being harmful—almost everything that we screen out is because it’s not relevant enough.
With the Forum, everyone can upvote and downvote, so content that readers find most interesting and relevant gets sorted up to the top that way. There’s also a karma threshold to make a post (though we can help newcomers with that if they ask.) So I don’t have the same worry about the front page becoming mostly noise.
We still expect to enforce the standards of discussion on the Forum, described in the FAQ (“Spam, abuse and materials advocating major harm or illegal activities are deleted.”) But in general we expect that people don’t take everything posted on the Forum to represent CEA’s view.
Do you foresee any changes being made to the moderation guidelines on the forum? Now that CEA’s brand name is associated with it, do you think that could mean forbidding the posting of content that is deemed “not helpful” to the movement, similar to what we see on the Effective Altruists Facebook group?
If there are no anticipated changes to the moderation guidelines, how do you anticipate CEA navigating reputational risks from controversial content posted to the forum?
The main reason moderation on the Facebook group works the way it does is that the group has 13000+ members and no ability to downvote, so the ratio of signal to noise would be pretty sad if there were no screening. It’s very rare that the Facebook group moderators screen out a post for being harmful—almost everything that we screen out is because it’s not relevant enough.
With the Forum, everyone can upvote and downvote, so content that readers find most interesting and relevant gets sorted up to the top that way. There’s also a karma threshold to make a post (though we can help newcomers with that if they ask.) So I don’t have the same worry about the front page becoming mostly noise.
We still expect to enforce the standards of discussion on the Forum, described in the FAQ (“Spam, abuse and materials advocating major harm or illegal activities are deleted.”) But in general we expect that people don’t take everything posted on the Forum to represent CEA’s view.