Thereās a lot I could say here, but Iāll 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 donāt have paid ads and we are not optimizing for clicks or engagement hours).
I think separating out karma voting from agree/ādisagree 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 weāre 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 itās 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 itās hard to say if that matters.
I think itās 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/āfun would potentially build more community here, but at the cost of our actual goals (something like, ābeing the version of the Forum that most improves the worldā).
Thereās 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.
Iād be curious what would happen if you would run some tiny experiment on breaking the unified space, and I donāt 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.
Thereās a lot I could say here, but Iāll 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 donāt have paid ads and we are not optimizing for clicks or engagement hours).
I think separating out karma voting from agree/ādisagree 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 āWriting on the Forum is so high quality and relevant that it often gets republished and quoted elsewhereā.
The fact that discussions here are less transient than say, Twitter, means that weāre 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 itās 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 itās hard to say if that matters.
I think itās 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/āfun would potentially build more community here, but at the cost of our actual goals (something like, ābeing the version of the Forum that most improves the worldā).
Thereās 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.
Iād be curious what would happen if you would run some tiny experiment on breaking the unified space, and I donāt 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.