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
Karma: 1,031
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.
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?
@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!
Thanks, I think think this is good feedback. I recognize the way parent / child tags work now isn’t ideal. We’ll have to prioritize improving this against other things we could work on!
If anyone has insights about what they find themselves marking as “most important” and want to share them with me, I would love to hear more about your ideas. Our goal with this is to learn how we can encourage more of the most valuable content, and your opinion is valuable!
You can message me on the Forum or schedule time to chat here.
Subforums will allow two types of posts:
“discussions”, which are more casual and will only appear on the subforum
“posts”, which are simply regular posts with the tag that the subforum uses—these can appear on the Frontpage as well as the subofurm if the user selects this option (it is selected by default)
Thanks Matt, noted!
I’d recommend getting in touch with the folks at [Generation Pledge] (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/generation-pledge), who focus on helping inheritors think through how to use their resources for good. Just send Sid an email or message on the forum!
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.