The obvious idea here is to have different subforums grouped by cause area—AI risk, global health/development, animal welfare, etc. I agree that this is probably the best way to dice things up. But here are some other options that might be worth considering:
Separate subforums for “news events, announcements, and org updates” (posts about things that are actually happening in the world, like an EA newspaper), versus “academic-paper style research” (a fancy dignified arXiv-like subforum for academics and advanced discussion, like the AI Alignment Forum versus LessWrong), versus more casual & exploratory online discussion and community stuff (like LessWrong versus the Alignment Forum). Although you’d want to be careful about this—perhaps right now, the online discussion and academic research is “cross-subsidizing” the announcements and org updates, such that nobody would read the announcements and org updates if they were split off into their own thing. (Or vice versa! My point is that for all subforum ideas, it is important to understand the dynamics here and what is “cross-subsidizing” what, in an attention-economy sense.)
Taking another page out of the Alignment Forum’s playbook, consider just going fully elitist and creating a subforum for 500+ karma users or something, plus maybe include the option to create private posts not publicly viewable if you are not logged in. There are several potential goals here:
To separate “EA 101” discussion, where we want to have a welcoming attitude for newcomers, from a space for more advanced discussion and debate. (See, eg, me making an overly-harsh comment recently because I didn’t realize that a user was new to the Forum!)
To sequester community drama in a place where it won’t waste the attention of people who aren’t heavily involved in the community (similar to how the “community” tag is currently used to down-weight some posts).
Most importantly, to make a play for capturing some of the energy that goes into the vast ecosystem of privately-shared google docs… creating a semi-public/semi-private forum for highly engaged EAs (or highly engaged EAs within a certain cause area, or etc) could offer a middle ground between posting on the normal Forum versus sharing a doc through a bunch of personal social connections.
The obvious idea here is to have different subforums grouped by cause area—AI risk, global health/development, animal welfare, etc. I agree that this is probably the best way to dice things up. But here are some other options that might be worth considering:
Separate subforums for “news events, announcements, and org updates” (posts about things that are actually happening in the world, like an EA newspaper), versus “academic-paper style research” (a fancy dignified arXiv-like subforum for academics and advanced discussion, like the AI Alignment Forum versus LessWrong), versus more casual & exploratory online discussion and community stuff (like LessWrong versus the Alignment Forum). Although you’d want to be careful about this—perhaps right now, the online discussion and academic research is “cross-subsidizing” the announcements and org updates, such that nobody would read the announcements and org updates if they were split off into their own thing. (Or vice versa! My point is that for all subforum ideas, it is important to understand the dynamics here and what is “cross-subsidizing” what, in an attention-economy sense.)
Taking another page out of the Alignment Forum’s playbook, consider just going fully elitist and creating a subforum for 500+ karma users or something, plus maybe include the option to create private posts not publicly viewable if you are not logged in. There are several potential goals here:
To separate “EA 101” discussion, where we want to have a welcoming attitude for newcomers, from a space for more advanced discussion and debate. (See, eg, me making an overly-harsh comment recently because I didn’t realize that a user was new to the Forum!)
To sequester community drama in a place where it won’t waste the attention of people who aren’t heavily involved in the community (similar to how the “community” tag is currently used to down-weight some posts).
Most importantly, to make a play for capturing some of the energy that goes into the vast ecosystem of privately-shared google docs… creating a semi-public/semi-private forum for highly engaged EAs (or highly engaged EAs within a certain cause area, or etc) could offer a middle ground between posting on the normal Forum versus sharing a doc through a bunch of personal social connections.
Create a Spanish- or German-language subforum, to help assist the growth of EA communities in other regions of the world. Naturally this would start out small, with not very frequent posting. But that is okay—the EA Forum itself was once small!
Finally, re-upping an idea of mine from the Dank EA Memes facebook group:
Thank you for your take, I very much appreciate the tradeoffs of any direction we split things.