I agree with the overall premise of this post that, generally speaking, the quality of engagement on the forum, through posts or comments, has decreased, though I am not convinced (yet) that some of the points made by the author as evidence for this are completely accurate. What follows are some comments on what a reduced average post quality of the forum could mean, along with a closing comment or two.
If it is true that certain aspects of EAF posts have gotten worse over time, it’s worth examining exactly which aspects of comments and posts have degraded, and I think, in this regard, this post will be / has been helpful. Point 13 does claim that the degradation of the average quality of the forum’s content may be an illusion, but HaydnBelfield’s comment that “spotting the signal from the noise has become harder” seems to be stronger evidence that the average quality has indeed decreased, which is important as this means that people’s time is being wasted sorting through posts. This can be solved partially by subscribing only to the forum posters who produce the best content, but this won’t work for people who are new to the forum and produce high quality content, so other interventions or approaches should be explored.
While the question of how “quality” engagement on forum should be measured is not discussed in this post, I imagine that in most people’s minds engagement “quality” on this site is probably some function of the proportion of different types of posts (e.g., linkposts, criticisms, meta-EA, analyses, summaries, etc...), the proportion of the types of content of posts (e.g., community building, organizational updates, AI safety, animal welfare, etc...), and the epistemics of each post (this last point might be able to integrated with the first point). The way people engage with the forum, the forum’s optics, and how much impact is generated as a result of the forum existing are all affected by the average quality of the forum’s posts, so there seems to be a lot at stake.
I don’t have a novel solution for improving the quality of forum’s posts and comments. Presently, downvotes can be used to disincentivize certain content, comments can be used to point out epistemic flaws to the author of a post and to generally improve the epistemics of a discussion, high quality posters can create more high quality posts to alter the proportion of posts that are high quality, and forum moderators can disincentivize poor epistemic practices. In the present state of the forum, diffusing or organizing contest posts might make it easier to locate high quality posts. Additionally, having one additional layer of moderated review for posts created by users with less than some threshold of karma might go a long way in increasing the average quality of post’s made on the forum (e.g., that the Metaculus moderation team reviews its questions seems to help maintain the epistemic baseline of the site—of course, there are counterexamples, but in terms of average quality, extra review usually works, though it is somewhat expensive).
The forum metrics listed in Miller’s comment seem useful as well for getting a more detailed description of how engagement has changed over the years as the number of forum posters has changed.
As for the points themselves, I will comment that I think point (4) should be fleshed out in more detail—what are some examples here. Also, I think point 7 and 11 can be merged, and that more attention should be diverted to this. There can be inadvertent and countervalue consequences of welcoming the reduction in strength of people’s conversational filters on the forum. As such, moderators should consider these things more deeply (they may have weighed the pros and cons of taking actions to incentivize more engagement on the forum, and determined that this is best for the long term potential of the forum and EA more generally, but I do not know of the existence of such efforts).
Thank you Thomas Kwa for contributing this take to the forum; I think it could lead to an increase in some people’s threshold for posting and might lead to forum figures searching for ways to organize similar posts (e.g., creating a means to organize contest spam) and move the average post quality upwards.
I agree with the overall premise of this post that, generally speaking, the quality of engagement on the forum, through posts or comments, has decreased, though I am not convinced (yet) that some of the points made by the author as evidence for this are completely accurate. What follows are some comments on what a reduced average post quality of the forum could mean, along with a closing comment or two.
If it is true that certain aspects of EAF posts have gotten worse over time, it’s worth examining exactly which aspects of comments and posts have degraded, and I think, in this regard, this post will be / has been helpful. Point 13 does claim that the degradation of the average quality of the forum’s content may be an illusion, but HaydnBelfield’s comment that “spotting the signal from the noise has become harder” seems to be stronger evidence that the average quality has indeed decreased, which is important as this means that people’s time is being wasted sorting through posts. This can be solved partially by subscribing only to the forum posters who produce the best content, but this won’t work for people who are new to the forum and produce high quality content, so other interventions or approaches should be explored.
While the question of how “quality” engagement on forum should be measured is not discussed in this post, I imagine that in most people’s minds engagement “quality” on this site is probably some function of the proportion of different types of posts (e.g., linkposts, criticisms, meta-EA, analyses, summaries, etc...), the proportion of the types of content of posts (e.g., community building, organizational updates, AI safety, animal welfare, etc...), and the epistemics of each post (this last point might be able to integrated with the first point). The way people engage with the forum, the forum’s optics, and how much impact is generated as a result of the forum existing are all affected by the average quality of the forum’s posts, so there seems to be a lot at stake.
I don’t have a novel solution for improving the quality of forum’s posts and comments. Presently, downvotes can be used to disincentivize certain content, comments can be used to point out epistemic flaws to the author of a post and to generally improve the epistemics of a discussion, high quality posters can create more high quality posts to alter the proportion of posts that are high quality, and forum moderators can disincentivize poor epistemic practices. In the present state of the forum, diffusing or organizing contest posts might make it easier to locate high quality posts. Additionally, having one additional layer of moderated review for posts created by users with less than some threshold of karma might go a long way in increasing the average quality of post’s made on the forum (e.g., that the Metaculus moderation team reviews its questions seems to help maintain the epistemic baseline of the site—of course, there are counterexamples, but in terms of average quality, extra review usually works, though it is somewhat expensive).
The forum metrics listed in Miller’s comment seem useful as well for getting a more detailed description of how engagement has changed over the years as the number of forum posters has changed.
As for the points themselves, I will comment that I think point (4) should be fleshed out in more detail—what are some examples here. Also, I think point 7 and 11 can be merged, and that more attention should be diverted to this. There can be inadvertent and countervalue consequences of welcoming the reduction in strength of people’s conversational filters on the forum. As such, moderators should consider these things more deeply (they may have weighed the pros and cons of taking actions to incentivize more engagement on the forum, and determined that this is best for the long term potential of the forum and EA more generally, but I do not know of the existence of such efforts).
Thank you Thomas Kwa for contributing this take to the forum; I think it could lead to an increase in some people’s threshold for posting and might lead to forum figures searching for ways to organize similar posts (e.g., creating a means to organize contest spam) and move the average post quality upwards.