This is great to see! Do you have a sense of what fraction of the EA community is engaging with the forum? I’m curious how much of this growth is driven by the increased size of the EA community, versus an increased percentage of community members using the forum.
Among respondents to the EA Survey, in 2020, 38% of respondents were EA Forum members. In 2019 it was 30%. In 2018 it was 20%.
Those numbers are doubtless inflated though, because EA Forum members (a very disproportionately highly engaged group: >80% are levels 4-5 out of 5 in self-reported engagement) are more likely to take the survey. The question is how many less engaged (who are less likely to be on the Forum) there are, which is less easy to estimate, although there is a model in this post.
A useful comparison point might be how many EAs are members of a local group. A priori, one might think that being a member of an in-person group is a higher bar/more demanding than being a member of an EA Forum, but historically that has not been the case.
One other thing that may be of interest is that we don’t see much of difference in the increase in EA group EA forum membership between EAS 2019 and EAS 2020. But, apparently, there’s been a lot more support for groups too, so perhaps that’s not surprising. (One other possible thing of note (not shown) is that the EA Forum also seems to be increasing its share among newer EAs, where previously it had been almost exclusively the preserve of established EAs).
A couple of people have already posted some data sources, but I will add one more: my attempt to identify the percentage of people who engaged with one CEA program that went on to use the Forum in the next year. This relied on naïve matching of email addresses, so it’s probably a substantial underestimate, but found 25-40% of event attendees read a Forum post within 2021.
I also track a data set of people who are in leadership positions at EA organizations, and this group averages reading 0.7 posts/day (i.e. they are super engaged on the Forum).
Penetration is substantially lower among people who are newer to EA. Over the next year, we are considering focusing more of our attention on them.
This is great to see! Do you have a sense of what fraction of the EA community is engaging with the forum? I’m curious how much of this growth is driven by the increased size of the EA community, versus an increased percentage of community members using the forum.
Would be useful to see the number of unique users over time, rather than just engagement hours.
I’ve added a chart to the post.
Among respondents to the EA Survey, in 2020, 38% of respondents were EA Forum members. In 2019 it was 30%. In 2018 it was 20%.
Those numbers are doubtless inflated though, because EA Forum members (a very disproportionately highly engaged group: >80% are levels 4-5 out of 5 in self-reported engagement) are more likely to take the survey. The question is how many less engaged (who are less likely to be on the Forum) there are, which is less easy to estimate, although there is a model in this post.
A useful comparison point might be how many EAs are members of a local group. A priori, one might think that being a member of an in-person group is a higher bar/more demanding than being a member of an EA Forum, but historically that has not been the case.
One other thing that may be of interest is that we don’t see much of difference in the increase in EA group EA forum membership between EAS 2019 and EAS 2020. But, apparently, there’s been a lot more support for groups too, so perhaps that’s not surprising. (One other possible thing of note (not shown) is that the EA Forum also seems to be increasing its share among newer EAs, where previously it had been almost exclusively the preserve of established EAs).
A couple of people have already posted some data sources, but I will add one more: my attempt to identify the percentage of people who engaged with one CEA program that went on to use the Forum in the next year. This relied on naïve matching of email addresses, so it’s probably a substantial underestimate, but found 25-40% of event attendees read a Forum post within 2021.
I also track a data set of people who are in leadership positions at EA organizations, and this group averages reading 0.7 posts/day (i.e. they are super engaged on the Forum).
Penetration is substantially lower among people who are newer to EA. Over the next year, we are considering focusing more of our attention on them.