Re: searching for great posts, there is also an archive page where you can order by top and other things in the gear menu.
Can you say more about how you used the old forum? I’m hearing something like “A couple of times per year I’d look at the top-posts list and read new things there”. (I infer a couple of times per year because once you’ve done it once or twice I’d guess you’ve read all the top posts.) I think that’s still very doable using the archive feature.
Am also surprised that you lose posts. My sense is that for a post to leave the frontpage takes a couple of days to a week. Do you keep tabs open that long? Or are you finding the posts somewhere else?
Re: searching for great posts, there is also an archive page where you can order by top and other things in the gear menu.
Ok, that’s quite a lot more helpful than I’d realised—why not make it more prominent though? I didn’t see these options even when actively looking for them, and even knowing they’re there, unless I deep link to the page as someone above suggested, it’s several clicks to reach where I want to be. Though (more on this below), the ‘top’ option is the only one I can see myself ever using.
Can you say more about how you used the old forum? I’m hearing something like “A couple of times per year I’d look at the top-posts list and read new things there”. (I infer a couple of times per year because once you’ve done it once or twice I’d guess you’ve read all the top posts.) I think that’s still very doable using the archive feature.
I mainly used the ‘top posts in <various time periods>’ option (typically the 1 or 3 month options, IIRC); median time between visits was probably something like 1-3 months, so that fit pretty well. That said, even on the old forum I strongly wished for a way to filter by subject. Honestly, my favourite forums for UX were probably the old phpBB style ones, where you’d have forums devoted to arbitrarily many subtopics. I don’t think they’re anywhere near the pinnacle of forum design, but ‘subtopic’ is such an important divider, that I feel much less clear on how I can get value from a forum without it (which is part of why I’ve never spent a huge amount of time on the EA forums—though a bigger part is just not having much time to spare)
To a lesser degree, I found the metadata on who’d been active recently. It let me pseudo-follow certain users (though I suspect an actual follow function would be more helpful)
Am also surprised that you lose posts. My sense is that for a post to leave the frontpage takes a couple of days to a week. Do you keep tabs open that long? Or are you finding the posts somewhere else?
Often a friend would link me to a post that had already been around for a week or two when I read it.
Ok, that’s quite a lot more helpful than I’d realised—why not make it more prominent though?
You can get it by clicking “view all posts” at the bottom of the recent post list on the frontpage. As you can see on LessWrong (which this site is a clone of) it’s also permanently on the left side of the screen even more prominently. The folks working on this site have slightly different site goals and haven’t included that (yet).
I mainly used the ‘top posts in <various time periods>’ option (typically the 1 or 3 month options, IIRC); median time between visits was probably something like 1-3 months, so that fit pretty well.
Interesting. I realise there’s a class of users who check on that regularity, and want to see the highlights from a couple of months. On LW we have the curated section which does this sort of thing, but the EA Forum doesn’t, so I guess it’d be especially useful here. This does move it up my priorities list quite a bit. Thx.
even on the old forum I strongly wished for a way to filter by subject… my favourite forums for UX were probably the old phpBB style ones, where you’d have forums devoted to arbitrarily many subtopics
My teammate Oli Habryka has strong opinions here, I’ll let him write stuff if he has time. Current plan is to not do this anytime soon.
I agree following users is important.
Often a friend would link me to a post that had already been around for a week or two when I read it.
In general I myself keep cool-looking tabs open for a while, and if I don’t read them and I close them I know that there’s no easy way to get back to them. I agree many sites are more static than this Forum—compare HackerNews to SlateStarCodex, where I can see all the SSC posts from the past few months listed on a screen, whereas with HN I can’t see all the posts from the last hour on the screen. But for the majority of places I’m interested in, if I don’t save the link prominently or recall the title clearly, I won’t lose them, so I’m surprised this is more prominent for you with this Forum.
Regarding the breakdown by subject, I agree that this would be very valuable, but that having a bunch of subforums probably isn’t the answer. To me, the obvious solution is having keyword/tag support, where authors and/or mods set the keywords for their article, and users can view all posts with a given tag. This feature is built into popular blog-building platforms like Hugo (through Hugo “taxonomies”); I have no idea how hard it would be to implement in the LW/EA forum software. But the ability to filter to posts relating to AI, wild-animal suffering, community building, cause prioritization, etc. seems to be an important feature for making forum posts on a given topic remain relevant long after they have fallen off the Latest Posts list.
Thx for the post.
Re: searching for great posts, there is also an archive page where you can order by top and other things in the gear menu.
Can you say more about how you used the old forum? I’m hearing something like “A couple of times per year I’d look at the top-posts list and read new things there”. (I infer a couple of times per year because once you’ve done it once or twice I’d guess you’ve read all the top posts.) I think that’s still very doable using the archive feature.
Am also surprised that you lose posts. My sense is that for a post to leave the frontpage takes a couple of days to a week. Do you keep tabs open that long? Or are you finding the posts somewhere else?
Ok, that’s quite a lot more helpful than I’d realised—why not make it more prominent though? I didn’t see these options even when actively looking for them, and even knowing they’re there, unless I deep link to the page as someone above suggested, it’s several clicks to reach where I want to be. Though (more on this below), the ‘top’ option is the only one I can see myself ever using.
I mainly used the ‘top posts in <various time periods>’ option (typically the 1 or 3 month options, IIRC); median time between visits was probably something like 1-3 months, so that fit pretty well. That said, even on the old forum I strongly wished for a way to filter by subject. Honestly, my favourite forums for UX were probably the old phpBB style ones, where you’d have forums devoted to arbitrarily many subtopics. I don’t think they’re anywhere near the pinnacle of forum design, but ‘subtopic’ is such an important divider, that I feel much less clear on how I can get value from a forum without it (which is part of why I’ve never spent a huge amount of time on the EA forums—though a bigger part is just not having much time to spare)
To a lesser degree, I found the metadata on who’d been active recently. It let me pseudo-follow certain users (though I suspect an actual follow function would be more helpful)
Often a friend would link me to a post that had already been around for a week or two when I read it.
You can get it by clicking “view all posts” at the bottom of the recent post list on the frontpage. As you can see on LessWrong (which this site is a clone of) it’s also permanently on the left side of the screen even more prominently. The folks working on this site have slightly different site goals and haven’t included that (yet).
Interesting. I realise there’s a class of users who check on that regularity, and want to see the highlights from a couple of months. On LW we have the curated section which does this sort of thing, but the EA Forum doesn’t, so I guess it’d be especially useful here. This does move it up my priorities list quite a bit. Thx.
My teammate Oli Habryka has strong opinions here, I’ll let him write stuff if he has time. Current plan is to not do this anytime soon.
I agree following users is important.
In general I myself keep cool-looking tabs open for a while, and if I don’t read them and I close them I know that there’s no easy way to get back to them. I agree many sites are more static than this Forum—compare HackerNews to SlateStarCodex, where I can see all the SSC posts from the past few months listed on a screen, whereas with HN I can’t see all the posts from the last hour on the screen. But for the majority of places I’m interested in, if I don’t save the link prominently or recall the title clearly, I won’t lose them, so I’m surprised this is more prominent for you with this Forum.
Regarding the breakdown by subject, I agree that this would be very valuable, but that having a bunch of subforums probably isn’t the answer. To me, the obvious solution is having keyword/tag support, where authors and/or mods set the keywords for their article, and users can view all posts with a given tag. This feature is built into popular blog-building platforms like Hugo (through Hugo “taxonomies”); I have no idea how hard it would be to implement in the LW/EA forum software. But the ability to filter to posts relating to AI, wild-animal suffering, community building, cause prioritization, etc. seems to be an important feature for making forum posts on a given topic remain relevant long after they have fallen off the Latest Posts list.