(I work on the Forum but I am only speaking for myself.)
To respond to some bits related to the Forum:
In the actual world, the community doesn’t really know… why some posts get tagged as ‘community’ on the forum, and therefore effectively suppressed while similar ones stay at the top level
If you’re referring to “why” as in, what criteria is used for determining when to tag a post as “Community”, that is listed in the Community topic page. If you’re referring to “why” as in, how does that judgement happen, this is done by either the post author or a Forum Facilitator (as described here).
In the actual world, the community doesn’t really know… why the ‘community’ tag has been made admin-editable-only
We provided a brief explanation in this Forum update post. The gist is that we would like to prevent misuse (i.e. people applying it to posts because they wanted to move them down, or people removing it from posts because they wanted to move them up).
Thank you for flagging your interest in this information! In general we don’t publicly post about every small technical change we make on the Forum, as it’s hard to know what people are interested in reading about. If you have additional questions about the Forum, please feel free to contact us.
In general, our codebase is open source so you’re welcome to look at our PRs descriptions. It’s true that those can be sparse sometimes — feel free to comment on the PR if you have questions about it.
we don’t have any regular venue for being able to discuss such questions and community-facing CEA policies and metrics with some non-negligible chance of CEA responding—a simple weekly office hours policy could fix this.
If you have questions for the Forum team, you’re welcome to contact us at any time. I know that we have not been perfect at responding but we do care about being responsive and do try to improve. You can DM me directly if you don’t get a response; I am happy to answer questions about the Forum. I also attend multiple EAG(x) conferences each year and am generally easy to talk to there—I take a shift at the CEA org fair booth (if I am not too busy volunteering), and fill my 1:1 slots with user interviews asking people for feedback on the Forum. I think most people are excited for others to show an interest in their work, and that applies to me as well! :)
> “While we often strive to collaborate and to support people in their engagement with EA, our primary goal is having a positive impact on the world, not satisfying community members (though oftentimes the two are intertwined).”
I think this politicianspeak. If AMF said ‘our primary goal is having a positive impact on the world rather than distributing bednets’ and used that as a rationale to remove their hyperfocus on bednets, I’m confident a) that they would become much less positive on the world, and b) that Givewell would stop recommending them for that reason. Taking a risk on choosing your focus and core competencies is essential to actually doing something useful—if you later find out that your core competencies aren’t that valuable then you can either disband the organisation, or attempt a radical pivot (as Charity Science’s founders did on multiple occasions!).
I personally disagree that it would be better for CEA to have a goal that includes a specific solution to their overarching goal. I think it is often the case that it’s better to focus on outcomes rather than specific solutions. In the specific case of the Forum team, having an overarching goal that is about having a positive impact means that we feel free to do work that is unrelated to the Forum if we believe that it will be impactful. This can take the shape of, for example, a month-long technical project for another organization that has no tech team. I think if our goal were more like “have a positive impact by improving the EA Forum” that would be severely limiting.
I also personally disagree that this is “politicianspeak”, in the sense that I believe the quoted text is accurate, will help you predict our future actions, and highlights a meaningful distinction. I’ll refer back to an example from my other long comment: when we released the big Forum redesign, the feedback from the community was mostly negative, and yet I believe it was the right thing to do from an impact perspective (as it gave the site a better UX for new users). I think there are very few examples of us making a change to the Forum that the community overall disagrees with, but I think it is both more accurate for us to say that “our primary goal is having a positive impact on the world”, and better for the world that that is our primary goal (rather than “community satisfaction”).
(I work on the Forum but I am only speaking for myself.)
To respond to some bits related to the Forum:
If you’re referring to “why” as in, what criteria is used for determining when to tag a post as “Community”, that is listed in the Community topic page. If you’re referring to “why” as in, how does that judgement happen, this is done by either the post author or a Forum Facilitator (as described here).
We provided a brief explanation in this Forum update post. The gist is that we would like to prevent misuse (i.e. people applying it to posts because they wanted to move them down, or people removing it from posts because they wanted to move them up).
Thank you for flagging your interest in this information! In general we don’t publicly post about every small technical change we make on the Forum, as it’s hard to know what people are interested in reading about. If you have additional questions about the Forum, please feel free to contact us.
In general, our codebase is open source so you’re welcome to look at our PRs descriptions. It’s true that those can be sparse sometimes — feel free to comment on the PR if you have questions about it.
If you have questions for the Forum team, you’re welcome to contact us at any time. I know that we have not been perfect at responding but we do care about being responsive and do try to improve. You can DM me directly if you don’t get a response; I am happy to answer questions about the Forum. I also attend multiple EAG(x) conferences each year and am generally easy to talk to there—I take a shift at the CEA org fair booth (if I am not too busy volunteering), and fill my 1:1 slots with user interviews asking people for feedback on the Forum. I think most people are excited for others to show an interest in their work, and that applies to me as well! :)
I personally disagree that it would be better for CEA to have a goal that includes a specific solution to their overarching goal. I think it is often the case that it’s better to focus on outcomes rather than specific solutions. In the specific case of the Forum team, having an overarching goal that is about having a positive impact means that we feel free to do work that is unrelated to the Forum if we believe that it will be impactful. This can take the shape of, for example, a month-long technical project for another organization that has no tech team. I think if our goal were more like “have a positive impact by improving the EA Forum” that would be severely limiting.
I also personally disagree that this is “politicianspeak”, in the sense that I believe the quoted text is accurate, will help you predict our future actions, and highlights a meaningful distinction. I’ll refer back to an example from my other long comment: when we released the big Forum redesign, the feedback from the community was mostly negative, and yet I believe it was the right thing to do from an impact perspective (as it gave the site a better UX for new users). I think there are very few examples of us making a change to the Forum that the community overall disagrees with, but I think it is both more accurate for us to say that “our primary goal is having a positive impact on the world”, and better for the world that that is our primary goal (rather than “community satisfaction”).