Hi Saulius, thanks for writing this up! I’m super on board with a lot of this.
The way I imagine it, if someone sends them an EA forum post that’s relevant, they will read it. But if they then go to the EA forum frontpage or something, they see a bunch of posts that are mostly irrelevant for them.
This is a good point, and one I think I have probably neglected in my past thinking.
A bit of my models, hopefully briefly: I want niches within the Forum where people can interact with others who share their interests. I think this lowers the barrier to commenting / posting, as there’s less of a “the whole EA community will see this :grimace:” vibe. I do want to make sure the epistemic culture of the Forum is still preserved in such spaces. And I want the Forum to continue to have a broad reach, serving as a fabric holding the community together (avoiding silos).
Sure, they can press on a tag, but those are mostly old posts. They might be irrelevant now and if they comment on such a post, barely anyone will notice so there isn’t much incentive to do so.
This to me is the thing. Tags are currently good at curating historic content, and their descriptions (which make up the Wiki) provide an excellent introduction to the content. But they’re not spaces for people who are interested in the topic to interact.
An idea I’ve been thinking about for a while is to convert tags into communities. And slowly, piece by piece, without ever upending the Forum with a massive experiment, have subforums. (To my knowledge I haven’t written this up before.) The best content can get promoted to the frontpage, but users are free to interact with their peers with less exposure.
Unfortunately, I can’t promise you a timeline, and (after an initial foray last fall) I have paused working on it. But I do think this is a valuable direction for the Forum.
Sounds like perhaps there should be more developers working on the EA forum? I imagine that it wouldn’t be too hard to hire for such a position, and my uninformed intuition is that someone working on this would compare favourably to a marginal Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund grant although I don’t have a good feel for that. Of course, I understand that it takes time to train staff and that software projects do not scale easily.
If you know of any talented software engineers, please do encourage them to apply for the expression of interest role here. We might start hiring engineers in earnest sooner or later in 2022, depending on filling some other roles, but would hire an excellent fit opportunistically.
(Any time I describe apply to jobs, I’m obliged to say: it’s best to let the hiring org be the judge of fit, and err on the side of applying. — In particular, I was extremely confident I would not be the best fit for my role and had to be encouraged by someone close to CEA to apply.)
Hi Saulius, thanks for writing this up! I’m super on board with a lot of this.
This is a good point, and one I think I have probably neglected in my past thinking.
A bit of my models, hopefully briefly: I want niches within the Forum where people can interact with others who share their interests. I think this lowers the barrier to commenting / posting, as there’s less of a “the whole EA community will see this :grimace:” vibe. I do want to make sure the epistemic culture of the Forum is still preserved in such spaces. And I want the Forum to continue to have a broad reach, serving as a fabric holding the community together (avoiding silos).
This to me is the thing. Tags are currently good at curating historic content, and their descriptions (which make up the Wiki) provide an excellent introduction to the content. But they’re not spaces for people who are interested in the topic to interact.
An idea I’ve been thinking about for a while is to convert tags into communities. And slowly, piece by piece, without ever upending the Forum with a massive experiment, have subforums. (To my knowledge I haven’t written this up before.) The best content can get promoted to the frontpage, but users are free to interact with their peers with less exposure.
Unfortunately, I can’t promise you a timeline, and (after an initial foray last fall) I have paused working on it. But I do think this is a valuable direction for the Forum.
Sounds like perhaps there should be more developers working on the EA forum? I imagine that it wouldn’t be too hard to hire for such a position, and my uninformed intuition is that someone working on this would compare favourably to a marginal Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund grant although I don’t have a good feel for that. Of course, I understand that it takes time to train staff and that software projects do not scale easily.
If you know of any talented software engineers, please do encourage them to apply for the expression of interest role here. We might start hiring engineers in earnest sooner or later in 2022, depending on filling some other roles, but would hire an excellent fit opportunistically.
(Any time I describe apply to jobs, I’m obliged to say: it’s best to let the hiring org be the judge of fit, and err on the side of applying. — In particular, I was extremely confident I would not be the best fit for my role and had to be encouraged by someone close to CEA to apply.)