I didn’t realize it before until I read: “6. Promoting some good Forum content on other platforms”, but it strikes me that there seems to be a strange lack of forum content shared elsewhere, even in other EA circles.
I don’t think it content quality that is the problem (though lots of good stuff here is link-posted from elsewhere), my inclination is that content presentation just isn’t amenable to sharing.
Other platforms remind you at every turn to share content, subscribe, follow, etc. The forum doesn’t. Plus, maybe people aren’t sharing because it doesn’t have pretty pictures? Basically the norm for Substacks now is to include a nice picture at the top, even if it’s just a vaguely relevant AI-generation. Substack strongly encourages writers to do this!
My guess is, but I could be wrong, EA forum content is often just difficult to share with a broader audience as it’s usually not the target audience? And even when it’s ideas worth sharing with a broader audience, it may still be filled with EA jargon / way of speaking that’s difficult to follow for a lot of people. I am saying this assuming most people’s followers aren’t EAs but friends, colleagues and family. Even within EA, people are focused on different cause areas and many may not priorize reading stuff outside their cause area. I am not saying all of this is bad, I haven’t thought that through, but it does make sense to me. It’s similar to academic papers in a way, you generally wouldn’t share those on your social media platforms. But you do send them to people you think could be interested, just like how in EA I feel like posts are shared in messages with each other all the time.
I do think encouraging to share and add a picture can help and is a good idea!
Nice — I like the way you described this, and I broadly agree. It’s possible that it’s more effective for the Forum Team to be doing a lot of the work to share on external sites (like via our Twitter account) so that others can contribute by lower-effort actions like retweeting, liking, and commenting (as opposed to us trying to get individual readers to share content more).
From past user interviews, I feel like a surprising amount of Forum content gets shared. A common story is that people only really go to the Forum when a link is shared with them. However, it’s possible that that view is outdated and less sharing is happening now.
We have improved the shareability of posts in the past year or two (I forgot exactly when we did some things), like by letting authors edit the social preview image and text for their posts, and showing that image in the post hoverovers, and adding a “share” icon at the top of the post page with a dropdown of options. As far as I know those didn’t move the needle a lot, though I haven’t personally dug much into that data. I would hesitate to add more to the UI than that to encourage sharing content, because I don’t want to add clutter to the post page.
We are considering updating our default social preview image at least, so maybe that will help. :)
I didn’t realize it before until I read: “6. Promoting some good Forum content on other platforms”, but it strikes me that there seems to be a strange lack of forum content shared elsewhere, even in other EA circles.
I don’t think it content quality that is the problem (though lots of good stuff here is link-posted from elsewhere), my inclination is that content presentation just isn’t amenable to sharing.
Other platforms remind you at every turn to share content, subscribe, follow, etc. The forum doesn’t. Plus, maybe people aren’t sharing because it doesn’t have pretty pictures? Basically the norm for Substacks now is to include a nice picture at the top, even if it’s just a vaguely relevant AI-generation. Substack strongly encourages writers to do this!
My guess is, but I could be wrong, EA forum content is often just difficult to share with a broader audience as it’s usually not the target audience? And even when it’s ideas worth sharing with a broader audience, it may still be filled with EA jargon / way of speaking that’s difficult to follow for a lot of people. I am saying this assuming most people’s followers aren’t EAs but friends, colleagues and family. Even within EA, people are focused on different cause areas and many may not priorize reading stuff outside their cause area. I am not saying all of this is bad, I haven’t thought that through, but it does make sense to me. It’s similar to academic papers in a way, you generally wouldn’t share those on your social media platforms. But you do send them to people you think could be interested, just like how in EA I feel like posts are shared in messages with each other all the time.
I do think encouraging to share and add a picture can help and is a good idea!
Nice — I like the way you described this, and I broadly agree. It’s possible that it’s more effective for the Forum Team to be doing a lot of the work to share on external sites (like via our Twitter account) so that others can contribute by lower-effort actions like retweeting, liking, and commenting (as opposed to us trying to get individual readers to share content more).
From past user interviews, I feel like a surprising amount of Forum content gets shared. A common story is that people only really go to the Forum when a link is shared with them. However, it’s possible that that view is outdated and less sharing is happening now.
We have improved the shareability of posts in the past year or two (I forgot exactly when we did some things), like by letting authors edit the social preview image and text for their posts, and showing that image in the post hoverovers, and adding a “share” icon at the top of the post page with a dropdown of options. As far as I know those didn’t move the needle a lot, though I haven’t personally dug much into that data. I would hesitate to add more to the UI than that to encourage sharing content, because I don’t want to add clutter to the post page.
We are considering updating our default social preview image at least, so maybe that will help. :)