I think it’s possible there’s too much promotion on the EA Forum these days. There are lots of posts announcing new organizations, hiring rounds, events, or opportunities. These are useful but not that informative, and they take up space on the frontpage. I’d rather see more posts about research, cause prioritization, critiques and redteams, and analysis. Perhaps promotional posts should be collected into a megathread, the way we do with hiring.
In general it feels like the signal-to-noise ration on the frontpage is lower now than it was a year ago, though I could be wrong. One metric might be number of comments—right now, 5⁄12 posts I see on the frontpage have 0 comments, and 11⁄12 have 10 comments or fewer.
We might also want to praise users to those who have a high ratio of highly upvoted comments to posts
One thing that confuses me is that the karma metric probably already massively overemphasizes rather than underemphasizes the value of comments relative to posts. Writing 4 comments that have ~25 karma each probably provides much less value (and certainly takes me much less effort) than writing a post that gets ~100 karma.
There is a population of highly informed people on the forum.
The activity of these people on the forum is much less “share new insights or introduce content”, but instead they guide discussion and balance things out (or if you take a less sanguine view, “intervene”).
This population of people, who are very informed, persuasive and respected, is sort of a key part of how the forum works and why it functions well. Like sort of quasi-moderators.
This comment isn’t super directly relevant, I guess the awareness of this population of people, as opposed to some technology or maybe “culture” thing, is good to know and related to the purpose of this thread.
Also many of those people are on that list and it’s good to be explicit about their intentional role, and not double count them in some way.
I think it’s possible there’s too much promotion on the EA Forum these days. There are lots of posts announcing new organizations, hiring rounds, events, or opportunities. These are useful but not that informative, and they take up space on the frontpage. I’d rather see more posts about research, cause prioritization, critiques and redteams, and analysis. Perhaps promotional posts should be collected into a megathread, the way we do with hiring.
In general it feels like the signal-to-noise ration on the frontpage is lower now than it was a year ago, though I could be wrong. One metric might be number of comments—right now, 5⁄12 posts I see on the frontpage have 0 comments, and 11⁄12 have 10 comments or fewer.
Agreed- people should look at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts and sort by newest and then vote more as a public good to improve the signal to noise ratio.
We might also want to praise users to those who have a high ratio of highly upvoted comments to posts—here’s a ranking:
1 khorton
2 larks
3 linch
4 max_daniel
5 michaela
6 michaelstjules
7 pablo_stafforini
8 habryka
9 peter_wildeford
10 maxra
11 jonas-vollmer
12 stefan_schubert
13 john_maxwell
14 aaron-gertler
15 carlshulman
16 john-g-halstead
17 benjamin_todd
18 greg_colbourn
19 michaelplant
20 willbradshaw
21 wei_dai
22 rohinmshah
23 buck
24 owen_cotton-barratt
25 jackm
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vew8Wa5MpTYdUYfyGVacNWgNx2Eyp0yhzITMFWgVkGU/edit#gid=0
needs to grant access.
One thing that confuses me is that the karma metric probably already massively overemphasizes rather than underemphasizes the value of comments relative to posts. Writing 4 comments that have ~25 karma each probably provides much less value (and certainly takes me much less effort) than writing a post that gets ~100 karma.
There is a population of highly informed people on the forum.
The activity of these people on the forum is much less “share new insights or introduce content”, but instead they guide discussion and balance things out (or if you take a less sanguine view, “intervene”).
This population of people, who are very informed, persuasive and respected, is sort of a key part of how the forum works and why it functions well. Like sort of quasi-moderators.
This comment isn’t super directly relevant, I guess the awareness of this population of people, as opposed to some technology or maybe “culture” thing, is good to know and related to the purpose of this thread.
Also many of those people are on that list and it’s good to be explicit about their intentional role, and not double count them in some way.
It seems like there should be a way to get a graph of comments on front page posts over time going? :)