Product Managers: the EA Forum Needs You

[Ben_West]

Edit: we’ve hired someone. Thanks everyone who applied!

This forum has undergone huge growth recently:

This growth is exciting, but also brings new problems. We are no longer in a world where even the most dedicated EA’s can keep up with everything that’s written, and the large influx of new people will stretch our ability to create and share common knowledge. EA seems poised to influence the next generation of thinkers and leaders, and this site is a major way we communicate with each other, from top journalists to CEOs of billion-dollar companies.

The EA Forum team is considering:

1. Introducing Reddit-style federated sub-forums, to better direct people to the content they find useful

2. Diving deep into key user journeys, to understand where people bounce and how we can prevent that. For instance, trying to better understand the experience of a newcomer who gets sent a post by their group organizer for the first time.

3. Improving recommendations and personalization such that newcomers don’t bounce from confusion but old-timers don’t bounce from boredom

This work requires both product management expertise and a deep understanding of the EA network. The intended role will be the ‘product owner’, prioritizing projects (like those listed above) and executing them.

The CEA Online team grew from three people last year, to 10 as of this writing, and is expected to be around 15 by the end of the year.

If you want to join a rapidly growing team of engineers, designers, and content creators, working on a product that users love, that has a big positive impact on the world, then we would love to hear from you.

If you know someone else who might fit this description, please send this post to them!

The Online team as of early June

Apply Here

[Stefan_Schubert]

Extraordinary growth. How does it look on other metrics; e.g. numbers of posts and comments? Also, can you tell us what the growth rate has been per year? It’s a bit hard to eyeball the graph. Thanks.

[Ben_West]

Thanks! All of our metrics are pretty well correlated with each other; you can see more information here.

Our primary metric is hours of engagement, which I didn’t use for this post because the data doesn’t stretch back as far. But the growth rate there is:

• 2020 (estimated): 90%

• 2021: 100.2%

• 2022 (so far): 140%

• Implied 3-year growth: 912%

More about how this is calculated and our historical data can be found here.

[Stefan_Schubert]

Thanks!

[Emrik]

I’m generally in favour subdivisions, but there are many ways of doing it. E.g. you could have literal subforums, or just have more ways of sorting things. One idea is to split karma into subcategories. Get rid of karma as an indicator of “overall quality” of posts, and instead split into something like “quality_1“, “quality_2”, “quality_3”, and have buttons for each category. The qualities could be any of “novelty”, “altruism”, “community”, “urgent”, “concise”, etc.

The point is that karma can only capture something like the weighted average of the various qualities a post has to offer, and the more quality-dimensions posts can vary on (and the more people vary on what they care about), the more you gain from splitting the ranking system to start capturing several subsets of quality individually. Now people who care about varying dimensions of quality have an easier time self-matching to posts that score high on the dimensions they care about. It could potentially increase the both the quantity and diversity of what people read, due to high-variance strategy/​market segmentation.

Another consideration in favour of such a system is that overall-quality karma can exacerbate suboptimal incentives. People want to “stay in the loop”, so they read things in order to not feel left out of the discussion. And overall-quality karma generates stronger signals about what’s “in the loop” than split-karma would. This is bad insofar as it skews people’s reading incentives from what’s optimal.

[Ben_West]

Thanks! Lesswrong is currently experimenting with multidimensional voting; if you haven’t already, I would suggest trying that out and giving them feedback.

[PeterSlattery]

Great work with the growth! I like the new ideas, and I am excited to see more improvements on the forum. Good luck with the hire.

[Ben_West]

Thanks!

[Guy Raveh]

Off-topic comment as usual: that “about the author” block is really cool, how does one do that? Can we just have them for every post or something?

[Ben_West]

Thanks! It’s a new feature we are piloting – authors can turn it on in their settings:

We will have an announcement post about it coming out soon