I broadly agree with the some of the other commenters. The goals of the EA Forum are different from those of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. There may well be a case for more audiovisual, engagement-optimized EA content, but moving the forum in the direction of engagement-optimized visually-flashy internet platforms seems like a mistake (especially because such content can be hosted on platforms optimized for it, as RyanCarey suggests in his comment, while maintaining the EA Forum as one of the rare sites based on long-form text).
In terms of specific things, the text-only nature of the front page in particular is a big asset for ease of getting information (can scan titles quickly), and for avoiding the tragedy-of-commons -style failure mode where images massively help with getting attention so everyone puts a flashy image on their post and now you have to scroll past lots of visual noise while still just reading the titles like before. (Note that my opinions on this matter are definitely personal and idiosyncratic; other people might find they prefer scrolling past a longer section of aesthetically-pleasing images over staring at a shorter chunk of stark text.)
In terms of more general points, I think the people who worry about how the medium affects the message are on to something – e.g. Amusing Ourselves to Death shaped my thinking on this and seems to point at a real and big problem.
That being said:
Comments attached to podcast timestamps is a great idea (as is everything that makes podcasts more searchable, easier to navigate through, and possible to consume in ways that aren’t hitting play at the start and listening through the entire thing).
I’ve heard people saying it feels like there’s a high barrier to posting on the forum. Things that make the Forum more informal and approachable seem good on net. One way to achieve this might be if some parts of it gave off a vibe that is associated with informal entertaining social media (i.e. jokes/memes acceptable). I strongly endorse things like Kat Woods’ post on on fun writing, and people creating value by putting funny things in posts.
Maybe the greatest gains are in interactive media? On the very elaborate side, there are sites like this that plausibly cut the learning/grokking effort for concepts like iterated prisoner’s dilemma or alternative voting methods by an order of magnitude. Even on a more limited level, being able to embed things like small interactive Javascript/Python-powered widgets or interactive Matplotlib graphs in posts might be high-value.
I broadly agree with the some of the other commenters. The goals of the EA Forum are different from those of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. There may well be a case for more audiovisual, engagement-optimized EA content, but moving the forum in the direction of engagement-optimized visually-flashy internet platforms seems like a mistake (especially because such content can be hosted on platforms optimized for it, as RyanCarey suggests in his comment, while maintaining the EA Forum as one of the rare sites based on long-form text).
In terms of specific things, the text-only nature of the front page in particular is a big asset for ease of getting information (can scan titles quickly), and for avoiding the tragedy-of-commons -style failure mode where images massively help with getting attention so everyone puts a flashy image on their post and now you have to scroll past lots of visual noise while still just reading the titles like before. (Note that my opinions on this matter are definitely personal and idiosyncratic; other people might find they prefer scrolling past a longer section of aesthetically-pleasing images over staring at a shorter chunk of stark text.)
In terms of more general points, I think the people who worry about how the medium affects the message are on to something – e.g. Amusing Ourselves to Death shaped my thinking on this and seems to point at a real and big problem.
That being said:
Comments attached to podcast timestamps is a great idea (as is everything that makes podcasts more searchable, easier to navigate through, and possible to consume in ways that aren’t hitting play at the start and listening through the entire thing).
I’ve heard people saying it feels like there’s a high barrier to posting on the forum. Things that make the Forum more informal and approachable seem good on net. One way to achieve this might be if some parts of it gave off a vibe that is associated with informal entertaining social media (i.e. jokes/memes acceptable). I strongly endorse things like Kat Woods’ post on on fun writing, and people creating value by putting funny things in posts.
Maybe the greatest gains are in interactive media? On the very elaborate side, there are sites like this that plausibly cut the learning/grokking effort for concepts like iterated prisoner’s dilemma or alternative voting methods by an order of magnitude. Even on a more limited level, being able to embed things like small interactive Javascript/Python-powered widgets or interactive Matplotlib graphs in posts might be high-value.