A single crosspost with a bit of context from the author—e.g. a few sentences each of summary/highlights, commentary, and action items/takeaways—seems better to me than three or four crossposts with no context at all. In my view, the best Forum content tends to give busy people a quick way to decide whether to read further.
“Written by someone connected to EA” is a decent filter, but quality/”special” relevance seem like better filters.
In some ways, non-EA academics could be better to crosspost—they’re less likely to post their own work, and they’re more likely to be “discovered” by people who hadn’t seen their work before because it was outside the community. (That said, the greater likelihood that an EA-involved person participates in discussion still makes that feature seem net-positive to me.)
If people are sharing too much interesting information on the Forum, and the site becomes cluttered, that’s our team’s responsibility to handle—not a problem caused by the crossposter.
We might eventually try to push for higher standards if crossposts overwhelm the Forum, but I think we’re pretty far from that point right now.
Absent these “higher standards”, we have other ways to mitigate a potential flood of crossposts; for example, we could add a way for people to filter out crossposts from their feed (using a “crosspost” tag is the simple version of this, but linkposts are distinct from regular posts in our code, so there are probably other ways it could be built).
A few notes on “deciding how much to crosspost”:
A single crosspost with a bit of context from the author—e.g. a few sentences each of summary/highlights, commentary, and action items/takeaways—seems better to me than three or four crossposts with no context at all. In my view, the best Forum content tends to give busy people a quick way to decide whether to read further.
“Written by someone connected to EA” is a decent filter, but quality/”special” relevance seem like better filters.
In some ways, non-EA academics could be better to crosspost—they’re less likely to post their own work, and they’re more likely to be “discovered” by people who hadn’t seen their work before because it was outside the community. (That said, the greater likelihood that an EA-involved person participates in discussion still makes that feature seem net-positive to me.)
If people are sharing too much interesting information on the Forum, and the site becomes cluttered, that’s our team’s responsibility to handle—not a problem caused by the crossposter.
We might eventually try to push for higher standards if crossposts overwhelm the Forum, but I think we’re pretty far from that point right now.
Absent these “higher standards”, we have other ways to mitigate a potential flood of crossposts; for example, we could add a way for people to filter out crossposts from their feed (using a “crosspost” tag is the simple version of this, but linkposts are distinct from regular posts in our code, so there are probably other ways it could be built).
That all makes sense to me—thanks!