Over the course of 2024 (and indeed, since early 2023), Forum usage metrics have steadily gone down[1]. My subjective opinion was that the Forum did not meet my (perhaps too high) expectations in terms of producing valuable discussions that enable collective intellectual progress on the world’s most pressing problems[2].
I would start with the assumption that this had a lot more to do with the larger zeitgeist vs. anything to do with what the Forum team did / didn’t do. For instance:
In the era with fairly accessible and expanding financial & human resources, people might have been more motivated to devote time to proposing novel and exciting stuff because they assessed a higher probability of launch feasibility;
In the immediate post-FTX era, critical voices might have felt that the kettle was hot and that they had a better chance of getting desired reforms through vs. now;
And so on.
Some of this is normal, inevitable, and even necessary as a social movement develops. I don’t have any clear opinion on whether what you’re identifying here fits into the normal/necessary bucket or the something-to-be-addressed bucket. My low-confidence guess is that there is something in both?
All that is to say that I would be cautious about weighing raw quantitative or qualitative data about the quality of Forum discussions too heavily in the Forum team’s feedback loops. There is likely to be a lot of noise.
I feel like it’s hard to say how that impacts the Forum. Some people also crosspost their blogs onto the Forum, and our team even handles the crossposting for some authors. Some authors get more engagement on the Forum than on Substack. I’m just not sure if it overall helps or harms Forum usage.
As someone who started a Substack six months ago, I actually suspect it could have the opposite impact: people with relevant content will be even more eager to cross-post it here to try and build their audience.
I’ve not done this myself because most of my content is not EA-related and the two posts of mine which were EA-related felt too introductory for the forum (ex: defending EA against non-EA critics). I also felt weird about using an altruistic platform to self-promote too nakedly if the post wasn’t a good fit (and even now I feel weird that someone might interpret this comment that way—isn’t self-awareness fun?).
But to my point, neither of the posts I wrote on Substack were thoughts I’d have posted here if I hadn’t started a Substack. And if I did have thoughts that felt like they would be of value to people who were already highly involved EAs, I’d be especially excited to put in effort towards fleshing them out now compared to how excited I’d have been a year ago, due to the ability to cross-post and potentially draw more eyeballs to my Substack.
In short, watching the subscriber count rise is an even more flattering dopamine boost than EA forum karma, and the market is competitive enough that many writers are sharking for excuses to self-promote on external sites.
(Relatedly, I’d definitely +1 to the idea of making a Substack for the weekly Forum Digest as soon as possible (maybe you already have one but I couldn’t find it from a quick search just now).)
I’m so glad that you brought this up! This is broadly the headspace I was in for like, most of the time I’ve been working on the Forum. I think these are important points and I agree that external factors can play a huge role in how much usage the Forum gets. This feels like a clear takeaway from looking at how media around FTX affected Forum usage, for example.
In early 2024, our team did a marginal impact analysis that provided some evidence that our work was cost-effective (above an internal bar that I’m not going to explain more here). This made me made me feel like our work was valuable even if the overall usage numbers were going down, because I believed that the primary (basically in my head I rounded it to 100%) driver of usage was external factors (outside of some spikes around drama). As in, it didn’t feel like the tech work we did made any significant improvements (I had less visibility on the content side so I won’t really comment on that).
This was my view going into this new role. However, chatting with @Will Howard🔹 more about Forum strategy actually changed my mind on this quite a bit. My current hypothesis is something like: the actual current bottleneck around increasing Forum usage and the value of discussions is content quality (and vibes), rather than the number of visitors to the site. For example, I believe that traffic to 80k resources is still overall increasing (I’m not 100% sure though), and a lot of their traffic should flow through and impact Forum usage (like, they link directly to Forum posts in various places). The fact that our usage and [in my low-confidence, lightly-held, subjective opinion] overall value of discussions has still gone down is a sign that we cannot lay all the blame on external factors.
Broadly, I think that users’ perception/expectations/feelings about the Forum matter quite a lot for reaching our goals, and I am currently optimistic that we can make significant improvements by focusing attention and intention on community building.
(I also think that things like public awareness and marketing do matter still, which is why our team is putting some capacity towards promoting content externally, and we will likely explore things like paid advertising later this year.)
On a more meta level: in some way I think it would be the “easy way out” to continue believing that external factors are the overwhelmingly largest influence. There is certainly data one could use to support that hypothesis, and maybe it would be easier to believe that I have very little influence and therefore very little culpability. But I also feel like, ignoring the possibility that our team could make a big difference (by focusing on community building) would be neglecting our duty. So you could view this as me taking a bet on a new hypothesis (which may or may not pan out).
I would start with the assumption that this had a lot more to do with the larger zeitgeist vs. anything to do with what the Forum team did / didn’t do. For instance:
In the era with fairly accessible and expanding financial & human resources, people might have been more motivated to devote time to proposing novel and exciting stuff because they assessed a higher probability of launch feasibility;
In the immediate post-FTX era, critical voices might have felt that the kettle was hot and that they had a better chance of getting desired reforms through vs. now;
And so on.
Some of this is normal, inevitable, and even necessary as a social movement develops. I don’t have any clear opinion on whether what you’re identifying here fits into the normal/necessary bucket or the something-to-be-addressed bucket. My low-confidence guess is that there is something in both?
All that is to say that I would be cautious about weighing raw quantitative or qualitative data about the quality of Forum discussions too heavily in the Forum team’s feedback loops. There is likely to be a lot of noise.
I wonder if the slow resurgentce of bloggng largely via substack has pulled some better content off the forum as well (uncertain)
I feel like it’s hard to say how that impacts the Forum. Some people also crosspost their blogs onto the Forum, and our team even handles the crossposting for some authors. Some authors get more engagement on the Forum than on Substack. I’m just not sure if it overall helps or harms Forum usage.
As someone who started a Substack six months ago, I actually suspect it could have the opposite impact: people with relevant content will be even more eager to cross-post it here to try and build their audience.
I’ve not done this myself because most of my content is not EA-related and the two posts of mine which were EA-related felt too introductory for the forum (ex: defending EA against non-EA critics). I also felt weird about using an altruistic platform to self-promote too nakedly if the post wasn’t a good fit (and even now I feel weird that someone might interpret this comment that way—isn’t self-awareness fun?).
But to my point, neither of the posts I wrote on Substack were thoughts I’d have posted here if I hadn’t started a Substack. And if I did have thoughts that felt like they would be of value to people who were already highly involved EAs, I’d be especially excited to put in effort towards fleshing them out now compared to how excited I’d have been a year ago, due to the ability to cross-post and potentially draw more eyeballs to my Substack.
In short, watching the subscriber count rise is an even more flattering dopamine boost than EA forum karma, and the market is competitive enough that many writers are sharking for excuses to self-promote on external sites.
(Relatedly, I’d definitely +1 to the idea of making a Substack for the weekly Forum Digest as soon as possible (maybe you already have one but I couldn’t find it from a quick search just now).)
I’m so glad that you brought this up! This is broadly the headspace I was in for like, most of the time I’ve been working on the Forum. I think these are important points and I agree that external factors can play a huge role in how much usage the Forum gets. This feels like a clear takeaway from looking at how media around FTX affected Forum usage, for example.
In early 2024, our team did a marginal impact analysis that provided some evidence that our work was cost-effective (above an internal bar that I’m not going to explain more here). This made me made me feel like our work was valuable even if the overall usage numbers were going down, because I believed that the primary (basically in my head I rounded it to 100%) driver of usage was external factors (outside of some spikes around drama). As in, it didn’t feel like the tech work we did made any significant improvements (I had less visibility on the content side so I won’t really comment on that).
This was my view going into this new role. However, chatting with @Will Howard🔹 more about Forum strategy actually changed my mind on this quite a bit. My current hypothesis is something like: the actual current bottleneck around increasing Forum usage and the value of discussions is content quality (and vibes), rather than the number of visitors to the site. For example, I believe that traffic to 80k resources is still overall increasing (I’m not 100% sure though), and a lot of their traffic should flow through and impact Forum usage (like, they link directly to Forum posts in various places). The fact that our usage and [in my low-confidence, lightly-held, subjective opinion] overall value of discussions has still gone down is a sign that we cannot lay all the blame on external factors.
Broadly, I think that users’ perception/expectations/feelings about the Forum matter quite a lot for reaching our goals, and I am currently optimistic that we can make significant improvements by focusing attention and intention on community building.
(I also think that things like public awareness and marketing do matter still, which is why our team is putting some capacity towards promoting content externally, and we will likely explore things like paid advertising later this year.)
On a more meta level: in some way I think it would be the “easy way out” to continue believing that external factors are the overwhelmingly largest influence. There is certainly data one could use to support that hypothesis, and maybe it would be easier to believe that I have very little influence and therefore very little culpability. But I also feel like, ignoring the possibility that our team could make a big difference (by focusing on community building) would be neglecting our duty. So you could view this as me taking a bet on a new hypothesis (which may or may not pan out).