I’d rather keep the EA Forum as far away from images/video/audio as possible, so that it can best support serious discourse. There are better ways to widen the reach of EA, like:
creating a magazine, like Works in Progress, Unherd, etc. Mostly this is about creating content.
using non-EA platforms, i.e. we go against our programmer instincts (wanting to build a platform) and moderator instincts (trying to regulate conversation) and just communicate on Twitter etc. Again, mostly content.
promoting simplified versions of content to get more views: promoting a paper with a Medium post, a blog post on Twitter, a Tweet with a meme, etc.
None of these is perfect, or even an uncontroversially good idea, but I think they’re much better than trying to fit a round peg into a square hole by modifying the Forum into something more like Web 2.0, or a classic subreddit. In general, I find people to be systematically unimaginative about how to promote EA, and they fixate on existing entities like the Forum more than makes sense: Forum prizes (rather than prizes for content anywhere), meme pages on the Forum (rather than on r/effectivealtruism), videos on the forum, et cetera. The Forum is great for what it does, but it makes little sense to try to shoehorn such ambitions into it, when there are so many other possible ways to post and organise content.
Intuitively I’m pretty interested in the possibility of supporting more formats in service of serious discourse (e.g. having a place to share recordings of conversations that others might benefit from), and pretty uninterested in extra formats for the sake of driving more engagement … there’s a middle ground of “driving engagement with serious discourse” which I’m not sure what to feel about.
Thanks Ryan! I am also interested in twitter, but it seems like a pretty different use case. If I choose a random post which is currently on the front page of the Forum, for example, I’m hesitant to suggest “how about you turn your 4,000 word guide about running a workplace group into a twitter thread.” (Whereas a video guide to running a workplace group seems plausibly useful to me.)
I agree with you that sponsoring content creation is potentially useful, and something I would like our new content specialist to consider.
Agreed. But if you’re not an audio-creator, and you want to seriously refer to a podcast, it would usually make most sense to just transcribe it. Especially as this becomes automatable.
I’d rather keep the EA Forum as far away from images/video/audio as possible, so that it can best support serious discourse. There are better ways to widen the reach of EA, like:
creating a magazine, like Works in Progress, Unherd, etc. Mostly this is about creating content.
using non-EA platforms, i.e. we go against our programmer instincts (wanting to build a platform) and moderator instincts (trying to regulate conversation) and just communicate on Twitter etc. Again, mostly content.
promoting simplified versions of content to get more views: promoting a paper with a Medium post, a blog post on Twitter, a Tweet with a meme, etc.
None of these is perfect, or even an uncontroversially good idea, but I think they’re much better than trying to fit a round peg into a square hole by modifying the Forum into something more like Web 2.0, or a classic subreddit. In general, I find people to be systematically unimaginative about how to promote EA, and they fixate on existing entities like the Forum more than makes sense: Forum prizes (rather than prizes for content anywhere), meme pages on the Forum (rather than on r/effectivealtruism), videos on the forum, et cetera. The Forum is great for what it does, but it makes little sense to try to shoehorn such ambitions into it, when there are so many other possible ways to post and organise content.
Intuitively I’m pretty interested in the possibility of supporting more formats in service of serious discourse (e.g. having a place to share recordings of conversations that others might benefit from), and pretty uninterested in extra formats for the sake of driving more engagement … there’s a middle ground of “driving engagement with serious discourse” which I’m not sure what to feel about.
Thanks Ryan! I am also interested in twitter, but it seems like a pretty different use case. If I choose a random post which is currently on the front page of the Forum, for example, I’m hesitant to suggest “how about you turn your 4,000 word guide about running a workplace group into a twitter thread.” (Whereas a video guide to running a workplace group seems plausibly useful to me.)
I agree with you that sponsoring content creation is potentially useful, and something I would like our new content specialist to consider.
I see the reasoning here for images/video, but I’m not sure it applies to audio—long-form podcasting is a great medium for serious discourse.
Agreed. But if you’re not an audio-creator, and you want to seriously refer to a podcast, it would usually make most sense to just transcribe it. Especially as this becomes automatable.