I’d say a big problem with trying to make the forum a community space is that it’s just not a lot of fun to post here. The forum has a dry and serious tone and voice that emulates that of academic papers, which communicates that this is a place for posting Serious and Important articles, while attempts at levity or informality often get downvoted, and god forbid you don’t write in perfect grammatically correct English. Sometimes when I’m posting here I feel a pressure to act like a robot, which is not exactly conducive to community bonding.
I do get the concern about the EA forum being very serious. I myself find it intimidating to write here and very much share the sentiment of Olivia Addy’s great post.
At the same time, I don’t think the culture here should change.
In defense of gatekeeping:
There are already EA communities that are more casual—on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Slack. The forum presents a unique niche.
I assume most people lurking the forum are more on the casual side (pulling it from general internet user base rates?). I’d worry that less-serious posts would get more engagement for the virtue of being less-serious and more accessible to people new to EA, while more sophisticated posts would be drowned out.
I’m not sure if you can stop the culture shift when it starts (see: Thresholding—by Duncan Sabien—Homo Sabiens). And when it changes enough, the people who were initially the most engaged stop posting.
Anecdotal examples from my n=1:
A Discord server for negative utilitarians—I once went through all messages spanning a few years (don’t ask me why) and saw the shift from a discussion not too different from the EA forum, through gradual casualization to the current state where it’s mostly young people discussing suicide and venting about their arguments with ‘breeders’. The people who engaged with the server in the beginning, when it was EAforum-like, have completely stopped posting.
Another Discord server I was in went through the same shift—some people joined the server and gradually shifted the culture towards something resembling Twitter. They weren’t doing anything bad enough to be banned (thresholding problem again), but dominated the discussion and made the veterans leave. In the end, the server got closed by the admin, citing the culture shift.
Exactly the same happened to a fairly large Facebook group I was in. It got closed down as well.
I observed that as subreddits grow, the culture undergoes the same shift. It takes a few people to start posting less thought-through content → the silent majority of casual lurkers upvotes these posts into the frontpage → people see that and start posting more of this kind of content → veterans leave, because it’s not the same space anymore.
It may look this way, but I have nothing against casual communities. In fact, in the majority of communities I’m in I am the casual lurker upvoting the memes and skipping over dissertations. I think both kinds of spaces are needed, it’s just that the more niche ones need some curation/protection.
Maybe putting a link to the EA Anywhere Slack somewhere visible would be a good idea? I only learned about its existence at the recent EAG, and I think it’s the kind of space that a lot of people here are after.
Thanks for this! The examples are really helpful, and your overall take resonates with me. (I acknowledge that your comment is basically just reinforcing my own view though, so maybe this is just confirmation bias — I would love to hear if anyone has any counterexamples!)
I’m not sure if “fun” is quite what I would want on the EA Forum… but maybe something like “friendliness” or “welcomingness”? It is possible that the best situation would be have the EA Forum be 2⁄10 on this metric, and various EA Facebook groups or Slack workspaces be 5⁄10 on this metric, and in-person meetups be 8⁄10 on this metric.
I do think that the reactions on the EA Forum of heart, helpful, insightful, and changed my mind have made the EA forum a bit more friendly. It makes it easy for people to give small compliment or to express gratitude.
Yeah I agree that “friendliness” and “welcomingness” are more important than “fun”, and I’m more confident that we should be prioritizing increasing those qualities.
I’m reminded of how certain subreddits allow you to add tags/flair your posts. These serve often as metadata about the type of post (serious, venting, question, discussion, silly, etc.), and roughly informs people on how they should engage with the post. I know that the EA Forum has ‘topics,’ but that is about the topic of the post rather than the style/register.
Do you think it would help if the EA forum had tags like “fun/silly,” “serious discussion,” “butterfly thought,” and so on, as a way to specifically indicate that a post should/shouldn’t be interpreted in a dry and somber manner?
Good point — yeah the Forum has a few tags in a similar vein (like Opinion), so that’s a possibility. Personally I feel like the question of tone matters more for comments than top-level posts (like, posts are almost always serious, except around April Fools day) so I’m not sure this would make much difference. (Also I think adding more tags would make the UI more cluttered so I’m hesitant to encourage that.)
Personal take: with the kind of work EA is mainly about (practice altruism, reduce suffering, tackle serious issues), it is very hard to be very “fun” about it. I don’t think it is about perfect grammar (I am sure you can still have grammar mistakes while being serious), but it is more about the “boundary” of “fun” and how sometimes the non-serious tone is correlated with non-serious attitude towards certain topics, and that may not be helpful to address those topics.
I want to provide a little bit of narrative. At an AVA Conference I took some silly pictures with people; we still wanted to cause change in food systems and reduce the number of animals that suffer, and we took 60 seconds to giggle and pose for pictures. At an EA book discussion group folks were smiling and friendly while discussing moral philosophy and career issues. At an EAG conference I got a group of people together to have afternoon tea and we had light-hearted chitchat, even through we all desperately wanted to reduce suffering in the world. At an EAGx conference folks got together for drinks and dinner, with lots of laughter and non-serious topics.
Tentatively, I want to say that it is possible for serious pursuits and for enjoyment/fun to co-exist, although I’m less confident if is is realistic to expect a large number of strangers to do so on an internet forum. The type of fun probably matters a lot: I don’t want to see the EA Forum become filled with memes and jokes, even if they are EA-relevant.
I see where you’re coming from, but I can’t help but wonder if a more cheerful approach isn’t also possible and perhaps even more conducive to impact. Julia Wise’s thoughts in http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html and also especially Nate Soares’ https://mindingourway.com/detach-the-grim-o-meter/ would perhaps go in that direction. Basically: Being grim kind of sucks long-term. And maybe being more positive will lead to more impact.
But without further empirical data this is just speculation on my part :P
(Just as a couple of thoughts that are better than my n=1: In community building the recommendation is opportunity, rather than obligation, framing, so it probably works better? I recall there also being some studies on advertisements with negative/positive/humorous tone, and the latter two had better effects. Probably low external validity though. Also, though, comedians like John Oliver probably have a much higher reach compared to the usual by just being, well, entertaining and fun.)
I am not completely sure on the emphasizing of the community building based on fun part - that might be what fundamentally I view differently on; I believe people should best be united by passion/values and the things to do, the other stuff seems a bit for entertaining/personal/socializing purposes (and harder to be unified on), less for “a community with a goal” type of organizations (which could def happen in smaller subsets/scale) - people who are passionate about the values will stick around anyways is my take/current thought
On being cheerful though- that part I agree. I like posts celebrating progress as well
Thanks both! Yeah I do think ultimately the goals of EA and the Forum are not “fun” per say, but hopefully we can still create a space that has positivity. And I think currently, when people write about good news or progress or celebrating success, they get a relatively large amount of karma.
I also agree that we don’t want the tone to be too grim, both because that’s probably bad for motivation, and because I think that can even skew the topics that get discussed in bad ways (like if discussions were all doomy). I think that the Forum could use more cheerful content on the margin. :)
It’s personal taste, but for me the high standards (if implicit) - not only in reasoning quality but also as you say, formality (and I’d add comprehensiveness/covering all your bases) are a much bigger disincentive to posting than dry/serious tone (which maybe I just don’t mind a ton).
I’m not even sure this is bad; possibly lower standards would be worse all things considered. But still, it’s a major disincentive to publishing.
Thanks! I think the question of how much “fun” is allowed or encouraged is an important one for us to consider. Honestly I still feel unsure about how to balance this. Here are some disorganized thoughts:
I agree that if people felt more like it was fun to be on the Forum, that might increase our overall usage.
I think we can make the Forum compelling even if it doesn’t fulfill all of the reasons one might enjoy a community (for example, discussions can still be thought-provoking and feel valuable without being fun).
I think that moving away from seriousness runs the risk of making communication harder, and I think clearly communicating is quite important because this is a space where we should care about nuance and truth-seeking. I worry that the more people talk past each other and the less we understand what the other is saying, the less productive discussions will be.
I also think it matters how people who are unfamiliar with EA read and interpret what happens on the Forum, more so than other spaces (like EA Facebook groups). So, at least when just considering this reason, the importance of clear communication here is higher than other platforms.
I’m guessing that if we are otherwise successful at increasing the amount of “community” on the Forum, that one side-effect is that [groups of] users will know each other better and be more able to communicate clearly between them, so naturally there will be more writing that is informal and the overall tone will become less serious. (It’s possible that this is a chicken and egg situation though, I just don’t know.)
I generally agree with some points others brought up around how other platforms can fulfill that need (of being a culturally EA space that is more about fun).
It might just be too hard for a single space to succeed at both serious + productive discussion and being fun, in which case I think it’s more important for us to succeed at the former.
I still do want us to be a space where people can do silly and fun things (like April Fools day), partly because like, it makes me happy! :)
I wrote a bit more about seriousness and having high standards in this earlier comment as well.
I’d say a big problem with trying to make the forum a community space is that it’s just not a lot of fun to post here. The forum has a dry and serious tone and voice that emulates that of academic papers, which communicates that this is a place for posting Serious and Important articles, while attempts at levity or informality often get downvoted, and god forbid you don’t write in perfect grammatically correct English. Sometimes when I’m posting here I feel a pressure to act like a robot, which is not exactly conducive to community bonding.
I do get the concern about the EA forum being very serious. I myself find it intimidating to write here and very much share the sentiment of Olivia Addy’s great post.
At the same time, I don’t think the culture here should change.
In defense of gatekeeping:
There are already EA communities that are more casual—on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Slack. The forum presents a unique niche.
I assume most people lurking the forum are more on the casual side (pulling it from general internet user base rates?). I’d worry that less-serious posts would get more engagement for the virtue of being less-serious and more accessible to people new to EA, while more sophisticated posts would be drowned out.
I’m not sure if you can stop the culture shift when it starts (see: Thresholding—by Duncan Sabien—Homo Sabiens). And when it changes enough, the people who were initially the most engaged stop posting.
Anecdotal examples from my n=1:
A Discord server for negative utilitarians—I once went through all messages spanning a few years (don’t ask me why) and saw the shift from a discussion not too different from the EA forum, through gradual casualization to the current state where it’s mostly young people discussing suicide and venting about their arguments with ‘breeders’. The people who engaged with the server in the beginning, when it was EAforum-like, have completely stopped posting.
Another Discord server I was in went through the same shift—some people joined the server and gradually shifted the culture towards something resembling Twitter. They weren’t doing anything bad enough to be banned (thresholding problem again), but dominated the discussion and made the veterans leave. In the end, the server got closed by the admin, citing the culture shift.
Exactly the same happened to a fairly large Facebook group I was in. It got closed down as well.
I observed that as subreddits grow, the culture undergoes the same shift. It takes a few people to start posting less thought-through content → the silent majority of casual lurkers upvotes these posts into the frontpage → people see that and start posting more of this kind of content → veterans leave, because it’s not the same space anymore.
It may look this way, but I have nothing against casual communities. In fact, in the majority of communities I’m in I am the casual lurker upvoting the memes and skipping over dissertations. I think both kinds of spaces are needed, it’s just that the more niche ones need some curation/protection.
Maybe putting a link to the EA Anywhere Slack somewhere visible would be a good idea? I only learned about its existence at the recent EAG, and I think it’s the kind of space that a lot of people here are after.
Thanks for this! The examples are really helpful, and your overall take resonates with me. (I acknowledge that your comment is basically just reinforcing my own view though, so maybe this is just confirmation bias — I would love to hear if anyone has any counterexamples!)
I sort of think that Twitter/Bluesky is the place for that, to be honest. I’m not sure that the forum needs to be that.
I’m not sure if “fun” is quite what I would want on the EA Forum… but maybe something like “friendliness” or “welcomingness”? It is possible that the best situation would be have the EA Forum be 2⁄10 on this metric, and various EA Facebook groups or Slack workspaces be 5⁄10 on this metric, and in-person meetups be 8⁄10 on this metric.
I do think that the reactions on the EA Forum of heart, helpful, insightful, and changed my mind have made the EA forum a bit more friendly. It makes it easy for people to give small compliment or to express gratitude.
Yeah I agree that “friendliness” and “welcomingness” are more important than “fun”, and I’m more confident that we should be prioritizing increasing those qualities.
I’m reminded of how certain subreddits allow you to add tags/flair your posts. These serve often as metadata about the type of post (serious, venting, question, discussion, silly, etc.), and roughly informs people on how they should engage with the post. I know that the EA Forum has ‘topics,’ but that is about the topic of the post rather than the style/register.
Do you think it would help if the EA forum had tags like “fun/silly,” “serious discussion,” “butterfly thought,” and so on, as a way to specifically indicate that a post should/shouldn’t be interpreted in a dry and somber manner?
Good point — yeah the Forum has a few tags in a similar vein (like Opinion), so that’s a possibility. Personally I feel like the question of tone matters more for comments than top-level posts (like, posts are almost always serious, except around April Fools day) so I’m not sure this would make much difference. (Also I think adding more tags would make the UI more cluttered so I’m hesitant to encourage that.)
Personal take: with the kind of work EA is mainly about (practice altruism, reduce suffering, tackle serious issues), it is very hard to be very “fun” about it. I don’t think it is about perfect grammar (I am sure you can still have grammar mistakes while being serious), but it is more about the “boundary” of “fun” and how sometimes the non-serious tone is correlated with non-serious attitude towards certain topics, and that may not be helpful to address those topics.
I want to provide a little bit of narrative. At an AVA Conference I took some silly pictures with people; we still wanted to cause change in food systems and reduce the number of animals that suffer, and we took 60 seconds to giggle and pose for pictures. At an EA book discussion group folks were smiling and friendly while discussing moral philosophy and career issues. At an EAG conference I got a group of people together to have afternoon tea and we had light-hearted chitchat, even through we all desperately wanted to reduce suffering in the world. At an EAGx conference folks got together for drinks and dinner, with lots of laughter and non-serious topics.
Tentatively, I want to say that it is possible for serious pursuits and for enjoyment/fun to co-exist, although I’m less confident if is is realistic to expect a large number of strangers to do so on an internet forum. The type of fun probably matters a lot: I don’t want to see the EA Forum become filled with memes and jokes, even if they are EA-relevant.
I see where you’re coming from, but I can’t help but wonder if a more cheerful approach isn’t also possible and perhaps even more conducive to impact. Julia Wise’s thoughts in http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html and also especially Nate Soares’ https://mindingourway.com/detach-the-grim-o-meter/ would perhaps go in that direction. Basically: Being grim kind of sucks long-term. And maybe being more positive will lead to more impact.
But without further empirical data this is just speculation on my part :P
(Just as a couple of thoughts that are better than my n=1: In community building the recommendation is opportunity, rather than obligation, framing, so it probably works better? I recall there also being some studies on advertisements with negative/positive/humorous tone, and the latter two had better effects. Probably low external validity though. Also, though, comedians like John Oliver probably have a much higher reach compared to the usual by just being, well, entertaining and fun.)
I am not completely sure on the emphasizing of the community building based on fun part - that might be what fundamentally I view differently on; I believe people should best be united by passion/values and the things to do, the other stuff seems a bit for entertaining/personal/socializing purposes (and harder to be unified on), less for “a community with a goal” type of organizations (which could def happen in smaller subsets/scale) - people who are passionate about the values will stick around anyways is my take/current thought
On being cheerful though- that part I agree. I like posts celebrating progress as well
Thanks both! Yeah I do think ultimately the goals of EA and the Forum are not “fun” per say, but hopefully we can still create a space that has positivity. And I think currently, when people write about good news or progress or celebrating success, they get a relatively large amount of karma.
I also agree that we don’t want the tone to be too grim, both because that’s probably bad for motivation, and because I think that can even skew the topics that get discussed in bad ways (like if discussions were all doomy). I think that the Forum could use more cheerful content on the margin. :)
It’s personal taste, but for me the high standards (if implicit) - not only in reasoning quality but also as you say, formality (and I’d add comprehensiveness/covering all your bases) are a much bigger disincentive to posting than dry/serious tone (which maybe I just don’t mind a ton).
I’m not even sure this is bad; possibly lower standards would be worse all things considered. But still, it’s a major disincentive to publishing.
Thanks! I think the question of how much “fun” is allowed or encouraged is an important one for us to consider. Honestly I still feel unsure about how to balance this. Here are some disorganized thoughts:
I agree that if people felt more like it was fun to be on the Forum, that might increase our overall usage.
I think we can make the Forum compelling even if it doesn’t fulfill all of the reasons one might enjoy a community (for example, discussions can still be thought-provoking and feel valuable without being fun).
I think that moving away from seriousness runs the risk of making communication harder, and I think clearly communicating is quite important because this is a space where we should care about nuance and truth-seeking. I worry that the more people talk past each other and the less we understand what the other is saying, the less productive discussions will be.
I also think it matters how people who are unfamiliar with EA read and interpret what happens on the Forum, more so than other spaces (like EA Facebook groups). So, at least when just considering this reason, the importance of clear communication here is higher than other platforms.
I’m guessing that if we are otherwise successful at increasing the amount of “community” on the Forum, that one side-effect is that [groups of] users will know each other better and be more able to communicate clearly between them, so naturally there will be more writing that is informal and the overall tone will become less serious. (It’s possible that this is a chicken and egg situation though, I just don’t know.)
I generally agree with some points others brought up around how other platforms can fulfill that need (of being a culturally EA space that is more about fun).
It might just be too hard for a single space to succeed at both serious + productive discussion and being fun, in which case I think it’s more important for us to succeed at the former.
I still do want us to be a space where people can do silly and fun things (like April Fools day), partly because like, it makes me happy! :)
I wrote a bit more about seriousness and having high standards in this earlier comment as well.