If you view the forum from a UX lens and put it in the context of different categories of online community infrastructures (e.g. Facebook/Twitter feed of short posts, Discord/Slack channel-based, Quora/StackExchange/Reddit upvote/question-based and more traditional forums with defined categories/aubcategories and threads), what do you think are the pros and cons of how the Forum is currently structured and how does that facilitate (or not facilitate) what you would like to see happen in online EA community building? Would also be curious to hear how you would compare the Forum to that of the many existing EA Slack channels.
There’s a lot I could say here, but I’ll try to keep it brief, so this is a bit of a disorganized list. :)
Pros:
I think the Forum UX takes bits from other platforms, which enables a bunch of different kinds of interactions (like Question posts, quick takes, longform posts, and reacts).
In general we are able to build the UX in such a way that respects users more than most other platforms (like we don’t have paid ads and we are not optimizing for clicks or engagement hours).
I think separating out karma voting from agree/disagree is important for enabling productive discussions and disagreements.
I value openness and accessibility and I appreciate that the Forum is extremely open by default (for example, relative to slack).
The fact that discussions here are less transient than say, Twitter, means that we’re better able to build common knowledge, and I think it makes discussions feel more like they matter (so people are more willing to put effort into their writing and adhere to high standards).
Personally, I think it’s good to keep the Forum broadly a unified space (rather than having channels or subreddits for cause areas) because I want the project of EA to be open to new ideas, and I would worry that too much structured separation would encourage silos.
Cons:
Not much of the Forum UX updates in realtime, which to me makes it feel a bit old-fashioned or something, but it’s hard to say if that matters.
I think it’s good to keep the Forum broadly a unified space, but this can be confusing for users, and can cause content that has a niche audience to be overlooked.
I think optimizing for engagement/fun would potentially build more community here, but at the cost of our actual goals (something like, “being the version of the Forum that most improves the world”).
There’s probably more we can to do make the Forum UX feel delightful and immediately satisfying without harming users.
Thanks a lot for your input here Sarah! These are all good points, some of which were not obvious to me as a user, for sure.
I’d be curious what would happen if you would run some tiny experiment on breaking the unified space, and I don’t think structural siloing necessarily would correlate with epistemic siloing (even though I get that many posts do not fit single categories and that it would be a difficult meta-question around what categories would be appropriate).
To me, a unified space can create the feeling of having a discussion with lots of people, which I find more difficult than if there is a smaller discussion group.
If you view the forum from a UX lens and put it in the context of different categories of online community infrastructures (e.g. Facebook/Twitter feed of short posts, Discord/Slack channel-based, Quora/StackExchange/Reddit upvote/question-based and more traditional forums with defined categories/aubcategories and threads), what do you think are the pros and cons of how the Forum is currently structured and how does that facilitate (or not facilitate) what you would like to see happen in online EA community building? Would also be curious to hear how you would compare the Forum to that of the many existing EA Slack channels.
There’s a lot I could say here, but I’ll try to keep it brief, so this is a bit of a disorganized list. :)
Pros:
I think the Forum UX takes bits from other platforms, which enables a bunch of different kinds of interactions (like Question posts, quick takes, longform posts, and reacts).
In general we are able to build the UX in such a way that respects users more than most other platforms (like we don’t have paid ads and we are not optimizing for clicks or engagement hours).
I think separating out karma voting from agree/disagree is important for enabling productive discussions and disagreements.
I value openness and accessibility and I appreciate that the Forum is extremely open by default (for example, relative to slack).
I think this is also good for “Writing on the Forum is so high quality and relevant that it often gets republished and quoted elsewhere”.
The fact that discussions here are less transient than say, Twitter, means that we’re better able to build common knowledge, and I think it makes discussions feel more like they matter (so people are more willing to put effort into their writing and adhere to high standards).
Personally, I think it’s good to keep the Forum broadly a unified space (rather than having channels or subreddits for cause areas) because I want the project of EA to be open to new ideas, and I would worry that too much structured separation would encourage silos.
Cons:
Not much of the Forum UX updates in realtime, which to me makes it feel a bit old-fashioned or something, but it’s hard to say if that matters.
I think it’s good to keep the Forum broadly a unified space, but this can be confusing for users, and can cause content that has a niche audience to be overlooked.
I think optimizing for engagement/fun would potentially build more community here, but at the cost of our actual goals (something like, “being the version of the Forum that most improves the world”).
There’s probably more we can to do make the Forum UX feel delightful and immediately satisfying without harming users.
Thanks a lot for your input here Sarah! These are all good points, some of which were not obvious to me as a user, for sure.
I’d be curious what would happen if you would run some tiny experiment on breaking the unified space, and I don’t think structural siloing necessarily would correlate with epistemic siloing (even though I get that many posts do not fit single categories and that it would be a difficult meta-question around what categories would be appropriate).
To me, a unified space can create the feeling of having a discussion with lots of people, which I find more difficult than if there is a smaller discussion group.