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 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!)