I agree that the main EA Facebook group has many low quality comments which “do not meet the bar for intellectual quality or epistemic standards that we should have EA associated with.” That said, it seems that one of the main reasons for this is that the Facebook group contains many more people with very low or tangential involvement with EA. I think we should be pretty cautious about more heavily moderating or trying to exclude the contributions of newer or less involved members
As an illustration: the 2018 EA Survey found >50% of respondents were members of the Facebook group, but only 20% (i.e. 1 in 5) were members of the Forum. Clearly the Facebook group has many more users who are even less engaged with EA, who don’t take the EA Survey. The forthcoming 2019 results were fairly similar.
At the moment I think the EA Facebook group plays a fairly important role alongside the EA Forum (which only a small minority of EAs are involved with) in giving people newer to the community somewhere where they can express their views. Higher moderation of comments would probably add to the pervasive (we will discuss this in a future EA Survey post) sense that EA is exclusive and elitist.
I do think it’s worth considering whether low quality discussion on the EA Facebook group will cause promising prospective EAs to ‘bounce’ i.e. see the low quality discussion, infer that EA is low quality and leave. The extent to which this happens is a tricky broader question, but I’m inclined to hope that it wouldn’t be too frequent since readers can easily see the higher quality articles and numerous Forum posts linked on Facebook and I would also hope that most readers will know that online discussion on Facebook is often low quality and not update too heavily against EA on the basis of it.
It also seems worth bearing in mind that since most members of the Facebook group clearly don’t make the decision to move over to participating in the EA Forum, that efforts to make the EA Facebook discussion more like the Forum, may just put off a large number of users.
I agree that the main EA Facebook group has many low quality comments which “do not meet the bar for intellectual quality or epistemic standards that we should have EA associated with.” That said, it seems that one of the main reasons for this is that the Facebook group contains many more people with very low or tangential involvement with EA. I think we should be pretty cautious about more heavily moderating or trying to exclude the contributions of newer or less involved members
As an illustration: the 2018 EA Survey found >50% of respondents were members of the Facebook group, but only 20% (i.e. 1 in 5) were members of the Forum. Clearly the Facebook group has many more users who are even less engaged with EA, who don’t take the EA Survey. The forthcoming 2019 results were fairly similar.
At the moment I think the EA Facebook group plays a fairly important role alongside the EA Forum (which only a small minority of EAs are involved with) in giving people newer to the community somewhere where they can express their views. Higher moderation of comments would probably add to the pervasive (we will discuss this in a future EA Survey post) sense that EA is exclusive and elitist.
I do think it’s worth considering whether low quality discussion on the EA Facebook group will cause promising prospective EAs to ‘bounce’ i.e. see the low quality discussion, infer that EA is low quality and leave. The extent to which this happens is a tricky broader question, but I’m inclined to hope that it wouldn’t be too frequent since readers can easily see the higher quality articles and numerous Forum posts linked on Facebook and I would also hope that most readers will know that online discussion on Facebook is often low quality and not update too heavily against EA on the basis of it.
It also seems worth bearing in mind that since most members of the Facebook group clearly don’t make the decision to move over to participating in the EA Forum, that efforts to make the EA Facebook discussion more like the Forum, may just put off a large number of users.