I’d be interested to know if people thought this carried over to other EA forum adjacent spaces too, like EA twitter and lesswrong? My impression is that content might be slightly worse here too, but maybe not to the same extent as the forum. It seems like we might expect some of these mechanisms to translate to these spaces too, but not all of them, which would be useful for trying to determine which of these factors are actually important.
“Better” could mean lots of things here. Including: more entertaining; higher quality discussion; more engagement; it’s surpassed a ‘critical mass’ of people to sustain a regular group of posters and a community; better memes; more intellectually diverse; higher frequency of high quality takes; the best takes are higher quality; more welcoming and accessible conversations etc.
The aims of EA Twitter are different to the forum. But I think the most important metrics are the “quantity of discussion” ones.
My impression is that:
There are more “high quality takes” on EA Twitter now than a year ago (mostly due to more people being on it and people posting more frequently).
The “noise:quality ratio” is pretty bad on EA Twitter. Most of the space seems dominated by shit posting and in-group memes to me.
Obvs, shit posting is fine if that’s what you want. But I think it’s useful to be clear what you mean when you say “better”. If someone was looking for high quality discussion about important ideas in the world, I would personally not recommend them EA Twitter.
An interesting related question (and complement to (3)) is to what extent do higher quality conversations move on to other online spaces (as opposed to “being too busy to post” or taking their communications entirely offline).
For example, I’d be interested in if people have thoughts on whether the quality of conversations on LessWrong, Alignment Forum, the forecasting sites, etc., has gotten better or worse in the last few years.
I’d be interested to know if people thought this carried over to other EA forum adjacent spaces too, like EA twitter and lesswrong? My impression is that content might be slightly worse here too, but maybe not to the same extent as the forum. It seems like we might expect some of these mechanisms to translate to these spaces too, but not all of them, which would be useful for trying to determine which of these factors are actually important.
EA Twitter has been getting better, honestly, we’re having a great time
“Better” could mean lots of things here. Including: more entertaining; higher quality discussion; more engagement; it’s surpassed a ‘critical mass’ of people to sustain a regular group of posters and a community; better memes; more intellectually diverse; higher frequency of high quality takes; the best takes are higher quality; more welcoming and accessible conversations etc.
The aims of EA Twitter are different to the forum. But I think the most important metrics are the “quantity of discussion” ones.
My impression is that:
There are more “high quality takes” on EA Twitter now than a year ago (mostly due to more people being on it and people posting more frequently).
The “noise:quality ratio” is pretty bad on EA Twitter. Most of the space seems dominated by shit posting and in-group memes to me.
Obvs, shit posting is fine if that’s what you want. But I think it’s useful to be clear what you mean when you say “better”. If someone was looking for high quality discussion about important ideas in the world, I would personally not recommend them EA Twitter.
An interesting related question (and complement to (3)) is to what extent do higher quality conversations move on to other online spaces (as opposed to “being too busy to post” or taking their communications entirely offline).
For example, I’d be interested in if people have thoughts on whether the quality of conversations on LessWrong, Alignment Forum, the forecasting sites, etc., has gotten better or worse in the last few years.