Youāve written more here than I can easily respond to, especially the day before EA Global begins! ;-)
...but Iāll focus on your last point:
I worry one default outcome of āFrontpageā posts, well, being on the frontpage on the EA Forum, and their receiving more attention, meaning they will be assumed to be of higher quality.
Some Forum posts seem like they will more accessible than others to people who have little previous experience with the EA community. Because these posts have a larger potential audience (in theory), we currently expose them to a larger audience using the Frontpage category.
This doesnāt mean that Frontpage posts are necessarily ābetterā, or even more useful to the average Forum visitor. But they could theoretically appeal to new audiences who arenāt as familiar with EA.
For example, while a lot more Forum users might be interested in a post on the historical growth of the movement than on a post about nuclear war (because most Forum users are experienced with/āinvested in the EA community), a post about nuclear war could be interesting to people from many communities totally separate from EA (think-tank researchers, scientists, journalists, etc.)
Historically, a lot more posts get the āFrontpageā category than the āCommunityā category. But as you can see by going to the āCommunityā page on the Forum, posts in that category often get a lot of votes and commentsāprobably because they appeal broadly to the people who use the Forum most, whatever cause area they might care about.
I doubt that someone looking at posts in both categories would conclude that āFrontpageā posts were ābetterā or āmore importantā, at least if they took the time to read a couple of posts in each category.
That said, we did inherit the āFrontpageā name from LessWrong, and we may consider changing it in the future. (Iād welcome any suggestions for new namesāāResearchā doesnāt quite fit, I think, but good names are probably something along those lines.)
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Historically, the Forumās homepage gets roughly ten times as much traffic as the Community page. But of the dozen posts with the most views in June, seven are Frontpage and five are Community. This is partly because many visitors to the homepage donāt read anything, or read one article and bounce off (as for basically any website) and partly because much of the Forumās traffic comes from link-sharing through social media, the EA Newsletter, etc. (places where categorization doesnāt matter at all).
Do you have any further questions about this point?
Youāve written more here than I can easily respond to, especially the day before EA Global begins! ;-)
...but Iāll focus on your last point:
Some Forum posts seem like they will more accessible than others to people who have little previous experience with the EA community. Because these posts have a larger potential audience (in theory), we currently expose them to a larger audience using the Frontpage category.
This doesnāt mean that Frontpage posts are necessarily ābetterā, or even more useful to the average Forum visitor. But they could theoretically appeal to new audiences who arenāt as familiar with EA.
For example, while a lot more Forum users might be interested in a post on the historical growth of the movement than on a post about nuclear war (because most Forum users are experienced with/āinvested in the EA community), a post about nuclear war could be interesting to people from many communities totally separate from EA (think-tank researchers, scientists, journalists, etc.)
Historically, a lot more posts get the āFrontpageā category than the āCommunityā category. But as you can see by going to the āCommunityā page on the Forum, posts in that category often get a lot of votes and commentsāprobably because they appeal broadly to the people who use the Forum most, whatever cause area they might care about.
I doubt that someone looking at posts in both categories would conclude that āFrontpageā posts were ābetterā or āmore importantā, at least if they took the time to read a couple of posts in each category.
That said, we did inherit the āFrontpageā name from LessWrong, and we may consider changing it in the future. (Iād welcome any suggestions for new namesāāResearchā doesnāt quite fit, I think, but good names are probably something along those lines.)
----
Historically, the Forumās homepage gets roughly ten times as much traffic as the Community page. But of the dozen posts with the most views in June, seven are Frontpage and five are Community. This is partly because many visitors to the homepage donāt read anything, or read one article and bounce off (as for basically any website) and partly because much of the Forumās traffic comes from link-sharing through social media, the EA Newsletter, etc. (places where categorization doesnāt matter at all).
Do you have any further questions about this point?
Hi. Iām just revisiting this comment now. I donāt have anymore questions. Thanks for your detailed response.