I worked as a software/product engineer at the Centre for Effective Altruism for three years, and recently became the EA Forum Project Lead. If you’d like to support our work, sign up for a 30 min user interview with someone on our team. Hearing about your experience with the Forum helps us improve the site for everyone.
In general, we’d be happy to hear any feedback you have! :) Feel free to contact us or post in this suggestion thread. You can also give us anonymous feedback via this form.
Hi! I just want to start by clarifying that a user’s first post/comment doesn’t go up immediately while our facilitators/moderators check for spam or a clear norm violation (such as posting flame bait/clear trolling). Ideally this process takes no more than a day, though we currently don’t have anyone checking new users outside of approximately US Eastern Time business hours.
However, some content (like your first comment) requires additional back and forth internally (such as checking with moderators) and/or with the new user. This process involves various non-obvious judgement calls, which is what caused a long delay between your submitting the comment and us reaching out to you (plus the fact that many people were out over the winter holidays). In the case of your comment, we asked you to edit it and you didn’t respond to us or edit the comment for over a week, and then our facilitator felt bad for keeping you in the queue for so long so they approved your comment.
We currently do not use the rejected content feature that LW uses. Instead, almost all[1] of the content that may have been rejected under their system ends up appearing on the rest of our site, and we currently mostly rely on users voting to make content more or less visible (for example, karma affects where a post is displayed on the Frontpage). I plan to seriously consider whether we should start using the rejected content feature here soon; if so, then I expect that we’ll have the same page set up.
I think that, if we had been using the rejected content feature, the right move would have been for us to reject your comment instead of approving it.
My guess is that there are edge cases, but in practice we keep our queue clear, so my understanding is that users are typically not in limbo for more than a few days. Things like spam are not rejected — accounts that post spam are banned.
To quickly add on to what Toby wrote: the CEA Online Team has also been redesigning effectivealtruism.org and we expect to soft launch it soon. I post quick takes when we update our half-quarterly plans, so you can follow along there. :)
For example many editions of the EA handbook spend a huge fraction of their introductions to other cause areas effectively arguing why you should work on AI instead. CEA staffers very heavily favor AI.
Just wanted to quickly add that I don’t think that this is quite accurate.
My experience facilitating the Intro Fellowship using the previous version of the EA Handbook was that AI basically didn’t come up until the week about longtermism, and glancing through the current version that doesn’t seem to have changed. Though I welcome people to read the current version of the EA Handbook and come to their own conclusions.
The most recent relevant data on CEA staff cause prio is this post about where people are donating, and I think animal welfare is more common in that list than AI safety (though this only includes a subset of staff who were interested in participating in the post).
I’ve updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team’s OKRs to add Q2.1 (the next six weeks).
Thanks for the suggestion! I reached out to them last week about their USAID content, and I expect to see something here from them soon. :)
If you see content you like from GiveWell in the future, I encourage you to to reach out to them and suggest that they crosspost it! You can also flag it to myself or Toby and we can reach out, though that may take longer.
Thanks for writing this Ozzie! :) I think lots of things about the EA community are confusing for people, especially relationships between organizations. As we are currently redesigning EA.org it might be helpful for us to add some explanation on that site. (I would be interested to hear if anyone has specific suggestions!)
From my own limited perspective (I work at CEA but don’t personally interact much with OP directly), your impression sounds about right. I guess my own view of OP is that it’s better to think of them as a funder rather than a collaborator (though as I said I don’t personally interact with them much so haven’t given this much thought, and I wouldn’t be surprised if others at CEA disagree). They have their own goals as an organization, and it’s not necessarily bad if those goals are not exactly aligned with the overall EA community. My understanding is that it’s very standard for projects to adapt their pitches for funders that do not have the same goals/values as them. For example, I’m not running the Forum in a way that would maximize career changes[1] (TBH I don’t think OP would want me to do this anyway), but it’s helpful to include data we have about how the Forum affects career changes when writing a funding proposal[2]. In fact, no one at OP has ever asked me to maximize career changes as a requirement before or after receiving funding, nor do I recall anyone at OP ever asking me to make any changes to the Forum (OP staff do provide feedback but I personally weigh those mostly relative to how much I think they understand the Forum — for example, I’d probably weigh Lizka’s feedback higher than anyone at OP).
I acknowledge that this is complicated by the fact that CEA likely has a unique relationship with OP (due to our large size relative to other community building orgs, long history working in this space, and the fact that our current CEO used to work at OP), so I expect that my own experience with OP does not necessarily generalize to other fundees. Also OP is the overwhelmingly largest funder for EA community building, and so the extent to which they are not aligned with the overall EA community does matter, as money straightforwardly gives them power and influence, though I don’t personally have a good picture of the practical effects.
I think that having these discussions in a public community space is valuable, so I appreciate you sharing this here!
For the sake of this comment, I’m assuming that Ozzie’s description accurately describes OP’s view, though I have never talked with anyone at OP about this so I don’t actually know if it’s accurate.
Note that I care about improving the world, and I think that getting people to do high-impact jobs is in fact a good way to make the world better.
Yeah I agree that funding diversification is a big challenge for EA, and I agree that OP/GV also want more funders in this space. In the last MCF, which is run by CEA, the two main themes were brand and funding, which are two of CEA’s internal priorities. (Though note that in the past year we were more focused on hiring to set strong foundations for ops/systems within CEA.) Not to say that CEA has this covered though — I’d be happy to see more work in this space overall!
Personally, I worry that funding diversification is a bit downstream of improving the EA brand — it may be hard for people to be excited to support EA community building projects if they feel like others dislike it, and it may be hard to convince new people/orgs to fund EA community things if they read stuff about how EA is bad. So I’m personally more optimistic about prioritizing brand-related work (one example being highlighting EA Forum content on other platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Substack).
Thank you for sharing your disagreements about this! :)
I would love for there to be more discussion on the Forum about how current events affect key EA priorities. I agree that those discussions can be quite valuable, and I strongly encourage people who have relevant knowledge to post about this.
I’ll re-up my ask from my Forum update post: we are a small team (Toby is our only content manager, and he doesn’t spend his full 1 FTE on the Forum) and we would love community support to make this space better:
We don’t currently have the capacity to maintain expertise and situational awareness in all the relevant cause areas. We’re considering deputizing others to actively support the Forum community — if you’re interested in volunteering some time, please let us know (feel free to DM myself or Toby).
In general, we are happy to provide support for people who may want to discuss or post something on the Forum but are unsure how to, or are unsure if that’s a good fit. For example, if you want to run an AMA, or something like a Symposium for a specific topic, you can ask us for help! :) Please have a low bar for reaching out to myself or Toby to ask for support.
Historically, the EA Forum has strongly leaned in the direction of community-run space (rather than CEA-run space). Recently we’ve done a bit more proactively organizing content (like Giving Season and debate weeks), but I really don’t want to discourage the rest of the community from making conversations happen on the Forum that you think are important. We have such little capacity and expertise on our team, relative to the entirety of the community, so we won’t always have the right answers!
To address your specific concerns: I’ll just say that I’m not confident about what the right decision would have been, though I currently lean towards “this was fine, and led to some interesting posts and valuable discussions”. I broadly agree with other commenters so I’ll try not to repeat their points. Here are some additional considerations:
Debate weeks take a long time to plan out (around a month, though it depends on the topic), since it requires a bunch of coordination, which makes it particularly hard to do this around current events (for example, at some point I thought that the USAID cut was going to be reversed, and if that happened after we decided on the debate week topic we’d need to pivot our plans, and possibly this would make posts that people wrote in advance pretty useless).
USAID in particular was discussed at various points on the Forum previously and those posts got a lot of karma/attention, so it’s not clear to me if a debate week on that topic would have been clearly more valuable.
Traditional news sources, and even some relevant academic communities, are likely much better at reaching non-EA funders than the Forum could do right now, even on our best days. So if our goal were around influencing non-EA funders, I don’t think we would do any interventions that utilize the EA Forum.
RE: “I do think that Forum weeks are significant attentional devices signaling what we see as priorities” — I would be surprised if anyone who doesn’t actively use the Forum thought this, partially because there’s not really a way to access Forum events after they are done, so they are quite hard to find. The biggest Forum event that we run is Giving Season (it spans ~2 months), which I think you’d agree is much more action-relevant and palatable to people who don’t associate with EA, and I would be somewhat surprised to learn that that event influenced any non-EA funders (at least I haven’t heard any stories about this happening), so I would be significantly more surprised if any non-EA funders were influenced by a debate week. (I think these rarely get any outside coverage, and I even know of people who work at EA orgs who don’t know about our debate week events.)
We’ve set up a Substack mirror for the Forum digest! 😊
Please share and help us promote it! The primary reason we’ve set it up is to help with EA comms work and expand the reach of valuable Forum content.
Please give us feedback — I’m not much of a Substack user myself, so any suggestions you have for improving it would be appreciated!
We’re still running the existing EA Forum Digest newsletter (via Mailchimp) for various reasons, including the fact that it’s cleaner to integrate with the Forum itself. You can edit your subscription to that via the account settings page. (For example, if you prefer to read the Substack version, you can unsubscribe to the Mailchimp one.)
You can read more about this decision in Will’s quick take here.
I appreciate you sharing your views on this! I agree that as a whole, this is suboptimal.
I don’t currently feel confident enough about the take that “shallow criticism often gets valorized” to prioritize tackling it, though I am spending some time thinking about moderation and managing user-generated content and I expect that the mod team (including myself) will discuss how we’d like to handle critical comments, so this will probably come up in our discussions.
I’m kind of worried that there’s not necessarily an objective truth to how shallow/low-quality any particular criticism is, and I personally would prefer to err on the side of allowing more criticism. So it’s possible that not much changes in the public discourse, and any interventions we do may need to be behind the scenes (such as our team spending more time talking with people who get criticized).
Habryka, just wanted to say thank you for your contributions to the Forum. Overall I’ve appreciated them a lot! I’m happy that we’ll continue to collaborate behind the scenes, at least because I think there’s still plenty I can learn from you. I think we agree that running the Forum is a big responsibility, so I hope you feel free to share your honest thoughts with me.
I do think we disagree on some points. For example, you seem significantly more negative about CEA than I am (I’m probably biased because I work there, though I certainly don’t think it’s perfect). I also think that the discussions on the Forum do affect real change, though of course it’s hard to know how much with any real confidence. I know of at least two specific cases when a person in a position with some power (in the real world, not in the EA community) has taken action based on something they read on the Forum, and my impression is that many people who have power within the EA community continue to read the Forum even if they don’t make time to write here. Of course, it’s true that they could ignore serious criticism is they wanted to, but my sense is that people actually quite often feel unable to ignore criticism. So I guess I am more optimistic that the Forum, as an extremely public community space, can continue to provide value by playing this role.
By the way, I personally care a lot about EA reaching its future potential for doing the most good. Habryka, I don’t know the details of what you went through when trying to make things better, but I’m sorry to hear that it felt so bad. I’ll just say that, if anyone feels like they are trying to make things better in EA and are unable to do so, you’re welcome to reach out to me directly (you can message me via the Forum). I will at least hear you out and give you my thoughts, and perhaps you can convince me to help.
I’m excited to see an increase in the percentage of respondents doing earning to give! :) A lot of important work still needs funding, and I think effective giving is the most impactful option for many people.
We’ve updated the user menu in the site header! 🎉 I’m really excited, since I think it looks way better and is much easier to use.
We’ve pulled out all the “New ___” items to a submenu, except for “New question” which you can still do from the “New post” page (it’s still a tab there, as is linkpost). And you can see your quick takes via your profile page. See more discussion in the relevant PR.
Let us know what you think! 😊
Bonus: we’ve also added Bluesky to the list of profile links, feel free to add yours!
I’ve just updated the doc with a summary of the CEA Online Team’s Q1.2 OKRs.
Thanks for the suggestion! This should be relatively quick to add so I’ll see if we can do it soon. :) I was also thinking of setting up a bluesky bot account similar to our twitter account. Do you know how active the EA-ish bluesky community is?
I appreciate you saying this Nick — I totally agree with you and couldn’t have said it better myself.
Thanks for the suggestion! It’s cool to see that people use the vote history feature, since I made it as a random hackathon project. 😄 I like the idea of filtering by reaction! I’ll add this to our backlog.
Thanks for flagging! It looks like they took the board down so I’ve removed the link. (For future reference, I believe anyone who has earned any karma can edit topic descriptions, so I think you could also remove any broken links directly.)
Thanks for the feedback! I think moderation is tricky and I’m relatively new at it myself. I’m sad at how long users can get stuck in the queue, and I’d love to improve how fast we resolve moderation questions, but where exactly we draw these lines will probably be a learning process for me, and we’ll continue to iterate on that.
It looks like you submitted the comment on Dec 17, and our facilitator messaged you on Jan 6 (the delay partly being due to people being out for the holidays), and then they approved your comment a little over a week after messaging you. Yeah I agree that this was an edge case, and I don’t think you were being malicious, but I think you could have made your point more productively by, for example, just using “torture”.
I feel that using the rejected content feature would give our team more leeway to be opinionated about shaping the home page of our site (compared to now), and we’d feel somewhat free to reject things that don’t fit the type of discussions we want to see. For example, it looks like LW rejects posts from new users that don’t have a clear introduction. So I think if something is an edge case in the current system, then it would likely get rejected under the other system.