Thanks for sharing some data here! I think the picture is more complicated than it seems (isn’t it always), though I’m not super confident about that. A couple points:
I think one relevant factor here is that (I believe) the Events and Groups teams rely more on funding to scale, and so when funding became less available they (I think) made an explicit decision to spend less. Funding doesn’t affect Forum usage nearly as much (for example, we’ve almost always had one content manager on the Forum Team).
I mentioned in a comment I just wrote earlier that my understanding is that traffic to 80k resources has not declined.
Actually you may be interested to read my whole comment that I linked to, since I think it adds some context relevant to this thread.
Another relevant dimension is that the forum (and Groups) are the most targeted to EAs, so they will be most sensitive to fluctuations in the size of the EA community, whereas 80k will be the least sensitive, and Events will be somewhere in-between.
Given this and the sharp decline in applications to events, it seems like the issue is really a decrease in the size of, or enthusiasm in the EA community, rather than anything specific to the forum.
Thanks for sharing some data here! I think the picture is more complicated than it seems (isn’t it always), though I’m not super confident about that. A couple points:
I think one relevant factor here is that (I believe) the Events and Groups teams rely more on funding to scale, and so when funding became less available they (I think) made an explicit decision to spend less. Funding doesn’t affect Forum usage nearly as much (for example, we’ve almost always had one content manager on the Forum Team).
I mentioned in a comment I just wrote earlier that my understanding is that traffic to 80k resources has not declined.
Actually you may be interested to read my whole comment that I linked to, since I think it adds some context relevant to this thread.
Another relevant dimension is that the forum (and Groups) are the most targeted to EAs, so they will be most sensitive to fluctuations in the size of the EA community, whereas 80k will be the least sensitive, and Events will be somewhere in-between.
Given this and the sharp decline in applications to events, it seems like the issue is really a decrease in the size of, or enthusiasm in the EA community, rather than anything specific to the forum.