I ran the Forum for three years. I’m no longer an active moderator, but I still provide advice to the team in some cases.
I’m a Communications Officer at Open Philanthropy. Before that, I worked at CEA, on the Forum and other projects. I also started Yale’s student EA group, and I spend a few hours a month advising a small, un-Googleable private foundation that makes EA-adjacent donations.
Outside of EA, I play Magic: the Gathering on a semi-professional level and donate half my winnings (more than $50k in 2020) to charity.
Before my first job in EA, I was a tutor, a freelance writer, a tech support agent, and a music journalist. I blog, and keep a public list of my donations, at aarongertler.net.
This has probably been what many people experienced over the last few years, especially as the rest of the world also started getting into AI.
But I think it’s possible to counteract by curating one’s own “public sphere” instead.
For example, you could follow all of your favorite charities and altruistic projects on Twitter. This might be a good starting point. For inspiration, you could also check the follow lists of places like Open Phil (my employer; we follow a ton of our grantees) or CEA’s “official EA” account. Throw in Dylan Matthews and Kelsey Piper while you’re at it; Future Perfect publishes content across many cause areas. And finally, at the risk of sounding biased, I’ll note that Alexander Berger has one of the best EA-flavored research feeds I know of.
If you mostly follow concrete, visibly impactful projects, Twitter will start throwing more of those your way. I assume you’ll start seeing development economists and YIMBYs working on local policy — at least, that’s what happened to me. And maybe some of those people have blogs you want to follow, or respond when you comment on their stuff, and suddenly you find yourself floating peacefully among a bunch of adjacent-to-EA communities focused on things that excite you.
The Forum also lets you filter by topic pretty aggressively, hiding or highlighting whatever tags you want. You just have to click “Customize feed” at the top of the homepage...
...and follow these instructions. (You might be familiar with this, but many Forum users aren’t, so I figured I’d mention it.)
Of course, it’s not essential for anyone to follow a bunch of “EA content” — your plan of donating to and supporting projects you like is a good one. But if you previously enjoyed reading the Forum, and find it annoying as of late, it may be possible to restore (or improve upon!) your earlier experience and end up with a lot of stuff to read.