I’m a product manager with a software, data science, and healthcare background. I worked on the EA Forum from 2022-2023, and previously spent 8 years as a software engineer and product manager in healthcare tech.
Sharang Phadke
Feedback requested: EA Forum reactions
Thanks Michael, karma and author name do seem reasonable to add if we can easily keep episodes up to date from a technical perspective. Will put this on our list and work out how to prioritize it.
Announcement: you can now listen to all new EA Forum posts
Interesting, thanks for your takes. One of the pros that we’ve been most excited about is sharing positive feedback beyond karma back with authors (some combination of your pros). The “serious” culture is super valuable, but also has the effect of scaring people away from posting their ideas, so we’re thinking about what the right balance is.
Anyway, thanks for your takes! We’ll probably post some ideas in the next week for more feedback.
You can give feature suggestions here any time.
Hi Will, we’re playing with some designs for reactions now. One question we have is whether to introduce reactions at the comment level or the post level. Do you have any gut takes on that?
Fair point! Even seeing these things mentioned at this level from the execs and some senators seemed like a positive step to me.
Thanks for pulling out these quotes, I found this useful!
Interesting, the hearing was much more directly focused on core AI Safety issues than I expected. I find myself continuing to get more optimistic about some dynamics like whether AI Safety discussions are happening in serious venues, but continue to be uncertain about some dynamics like open source / decentralized systems and fast takeoff scenarios.
Thanks for this suggestion, we’ve put this problem a bit higher up on our backlog, since we noticed it affected a few different users in the last few months! (no specific timeline on solving it at the moment)
By the way, this is now done
Thanks for sharing this. There isn’t currently a way to remove this section, but we are pretty interested in addressing this (no exact timeline, but I’d estimate in the next 2-3 months). You’re right that these are largely something like old classics, and we’re hoping to eventually move them somewhere that someone looking for this sort of content can go find it rather than in the “new and updated” feed.
Thanks for this observation! Funnily enough, “bookish” is exactly the descriptor we were using for the old design.
I’m sorry the information feels overwhelming, and we’d like to see how this plays out as we all get more used to the new design.
I want to expand on some of the reasons we’re showing more information and using friendlier fonts.
One of our goals on the Forum team is to make the Forum accessible to people who are getting more engaged with the ideas of EA, but haven’t yet been part of the community for a long time.. Without getting into a full theory of change here, I think we’ve neglected designing for this user group a bit over the last several years. Some of the barriers to entry for these folks include:
Feeling that the Forum experience (fonts, look and feel) is quite jarring, and different from a lot of the internet they’re used to.
Understanding what the Forum as a space is all about
Of course, we have to balance designing for this group of users with folks who actually use the Forum on a regular basis, and we’re hoping to strike that balance by collecting feedback like this, seeing how things play out, and continuing to experiment.
- Mar 27, 2023, 7:48 PM; 4 points) 's comment on electroswing’s Quick takes by (
Got it, thanks for the clarification. There’s a before/after mobile screenshot in this post if that’s helpful. The amount of information is pretty similar, but the karma pulled out on the left hand side might be giving a pretty different feel.
Thanks for the suggestion! Just to clarify, is it a more compact view that you’re interested in, or is it expanding to show even more information?
Thanks for calling this out Sonia. A number of folks have suggested this and we’re thinking about it actively on the Forum team.
Hi there, sorry for the late reply. Regarding your comments on subforums, we really did go back and forth on this, but ultimately felt like we were unlikely to displace slacks and discord groups across the board for “discussion”. We felt like the Forum’s core competency is longform posts and comments on those posts, and the number of features we’d have to build well to displace these other platforms was really large. So for now, we decided to reduce the goals of “subforums” and just focus on topic views that are more coherent than the current wiki.
This doesn’t mean subforums are off the table forever, but we’d like to focus on some other things that we think are higher impact righ tnow.
Thanks for the details! Just curious. It does feel post-y, but I can understand. Maybe posting as a personal blog (not on the frontpage) or on the animal welfare topic but not on the frontpage would have worked for what you are looking for
Hi, I’m curious what made you write this as a shortform rather than a post?
“Community” posts have their own section, subforums are closing, and more (Forum update February 2023)
@Matt Goodman thanks for all your suggestions. I think they all make sense or have been suggested before, and we’ll have to prioritize them against our other work!
The main reason for this is that in our interviews with an initial set of reactions that included negative attitudes, we found that authors felt fairly strongly compelled to respond to these reactions in some way—clarifying their writing, understanding the nature of the reaction, etc. With this experience in mind, we felt that it would be preferable for negative reactions to be articulated as comments with some explanation.
Reading the comments here so far, I think I’m more open to some very clear negative reactions to bring more balance particularly at the post level - (e.g. thumbs down or disagree at the post level).
But broadly, I’m personally more worried about the downsides of negative reactions to discussion coherence than the risks of reactions being positive-biased.