I work on the Career Services Team at 80k Hours. Before that I was at the Centre for Effective Altruism, first as an engineer and then as Online Team Lead, overseeing the team that runs this Forum, the EA Newsletter, and the EA Opportunities Board.
Iâm also an EA Forum moderator.
Iâd be interested to hear more about why you didnât want to engage with posts like CEAâs, and what you mean by âmany important questions are just ânot the done thingââ. Not sure if itâs related, but I think people who push back on CEA tend to get lots of karma still. :)
Thanks for sharing! I mostly agree. If you read my posts from the past 2 years you can see part of the story for why the Forum is the way it is. Broadly, the Online Team has been more focused on supporting the rest of CEA and doing growth-related work, and weâve been putting less and less FTE toward the Forum over time (~1.5 FTE when I left).
I feel sad that we didnât push as much on quality and community as I had originally wanted. I found it challenging to try to convince leadership of the impact of doing cultivation work on the Forum, partly because the impact is actually quite nebulous and risks being just entertainment for EAs. Ultimately I still believe that there are tipping points that would cause the Forum to lose the majority of its value, and community building on the Forum can have significant impact by preventing that.
Weâre issuing Dubious Altruist a three-month ban. We previously warned them about repeatedly being uncivil and rude to other users, which is against our discussion norms. They recently published a comment that was clearly unnecessarily rude so we are following through with the warning we gave them.
As a reminder, the ban affects the user, not the account. During their ban period, the user will not be permitted to rejoin the Forum under another account name. If they return to the Forum, weâll expect a higher standard of norm-following. If we see them continuing to act rudely we will likely ban them for longer.
You can reach out to forum-moderation@effectivealtruism.org with any questions, and you can appeal the decision here.
Ah, a bit of extra context: the âstoriesâ page views vary a lot based on the marketing happening at any given time. I bet that was a recently released one when I took the screenshot and was getting posted across social media.
Just to clarify, are you responding to the âLikely that more than 10% of your post was drafted by an LLM?â message? Thatâs now always shown at the top of the editor, to notify users about our new policy. So thatâs not related to the body of your post. :) We do currently use Pangram but the results are only for internal use, and donât affect the editor.
I can see why that would be confusing, so Iâll update the wording to be more clearly a question.
Just a reminder that you can customize your own Frontpage feed, so if youâd like to give serious posts a chance today you can hide April Foolsâ Day posts.
Click on âCustomize feedâ, add âApril Foolsâ Dayâ by clicking on the + to search for the relevant tag, then click âHiddenâ.
Oh no, thanks so much for flagging this! Toby was on holiday today unfortunately, so Iâve just updated it.
I do think an argument over funding allocation is importantly different from the one made in your post â for example, I think convincing EA groups to do more of this work could be an effective way to improve the situation that could also be essentially free. Although if youâre trying to make a point similar to Doing Prioritization Better (âSince cross-cause prioritization work (and to a lesser extent cause prioritization) is presently rare, and has considerable benefits, the EA community may well be radically misallocating its prioritization efforts.â) then I broadly agree. :)
Iâm also curious whether you think CEARCH matches the solution youâre thinking of?
Weâre actually currently working on updating our policy on AI-generated content, so this thread (and follow up poll) is helpful! :)
Interestingly Iâve been thinking about something similar myself (in the context of what to do with the EA Forum this year), though I do feel skeptical that âshut down the EA Forumâ is the best solution. I appreciate a lot of the points you bring up, and I am always happy to hear critical feedback about the Forum, but I do find your post too overconfident[1] and I personally donât think the existing data warrants that level of confidence.
My best guess is that, although there is no perfect system for this right now, the Forum is close enough that itâs worth trying to make it serve this function better. There are many examples of Forum posts of this sort getting significant attention, such as Policy advocacy for eradicating screwworm looks remarkably cost-effective (which I think contributed to Launching Screwworm-Free Future â Funding and Support Request), Interstellar travel will probably doom the long-term future (which I believe led to the author getting his current position at Forethought), and Frog Welfare (one of the highest-karma posts from 2025). I would not characterize the comments in those posts as âaggressively red-teamingâ â in fact they skew quite supportive, moreso than I would personally like (but I think I am unusually happy to receive criticism).
You also mentioned EA Funds â Iâm not that familiar with their grantmaking processes, but just looking at their âFeatured grantsâ list I see that Alfredo Parra was given a â6-month salary to do prioritization research and community building focused on reducing extreme pain in humansâ, plus heâs written extensively about this work on the Forum and recently founded ClusterFree. This seems to me to be a success story for current systems.
In any case, I think a lot of people around EA have been successfully impactful because they do things rather than just post on the Forum. Since you think this is a problem, I would encourage you to take action to try to improve the situation, for example:
You could post a thread on the Forum asking people to pitch potential Cause X candidates, to get a better sense of âwhat might we be missingâ. Youâre welcome to contact the Forum team if youâd like us to consider pinning it or promoting it via other channels. I would be excited for more Forum users to proactively try to make the Forum a more valuable community space.
Weâre very open to Forum users running events, since our capacity is stretched pretty thin. If you want a green-teaming contest to happen on the Forum, especially if youâre willing to put in the effort to help organize it, contact us!
Pitch this as an activity for EA groups â I think this could both be valuable for the community and a valuable exercise for groups to work on together, to practice EA thinking. (And Iâd love to see them post their results on the Forum! đ)
I would guess that, if you attended some EA events or conferences and talked to some people about this, you could find at least one other person who would be interested in starting a project to address this problem (especially if you had a list of âpotential Cause X candidatesâ that they thought looked promising). I bet if you could show positive results from a small side-project, youâd have a significantly easier time getting funding to work on this more or convincing someone else to work on it.
If you have specific suggestions for the EA Forum (including if you want to expand on your âshut it downâ idea), Iâd be happy to hear it! :)
Which may just be an artifact of the AI-assistance
Hi 98373, I run the EA Forum team so I thought it would be helpful to respond.
First off, Iâm always happy to hear feedback about the Forum, especially critical feedback, so thank you!
Iâll also say that I think not participating in any specific Forum event or even not using the Forum at all is very reasonable, so Iâm not here to try to convince you otherwise. Things are not always a good fit for all people.
But I would like to correct the places where I think your post is misleading:
âyou cannot delete your postâ
You can archive any draft post, which effectively deletes it from the site. That doesnât delete the text from our database, but you can always just contact our team and ask us to do so.
âWhen you make a comment, after a period of time, you cannot delete your comment at all.â
I think what youâre referring to is that users canât delete their comment when it has a reply. There is no time component.
This was a decision made before my time, but my guess is that this is just a complicated case due to needing to weigh the interests of many users (including the respondents) â as above, youâre welcome to contact our team if you want to delete such a comment and we can discuss on a case-by-case basis.
Itâs also very possible that youâve run into a bug. We have a small team and there are plenty of issues to fix. Our codebase is open source so youâre welcome to take a look at how this is implemented.
TL;DR if youâd like to do something with your Forum data that you canât do via the site, you can just contact us and ask us to help.
It is irresponsible for the EA Forum not to provide the easiest and best opportunities for users to preserve their anonymity while participating in the community⌠The EA forum does not have that limitation because it is not aiming to maximise profits by on selling data to advertisers or government agencies.
I think we do pretty well at this given our very limited resources. To make a Forum account, you only need to give us an email address and come up with a username, neither of which need to be closely associated with your real identity. So Iâm not quite clear on what threats you are thinking of that canât be addressed by current systems â in all your examples there are pretty straightforward ways to disassociate your Forum account with your real identity. (As above, if you want help changing your account username or email address you can just contact us.)
We have orders of magnitude less resources than most comparable apps (for example, last year we spent less than 2 FTE on the Forum). We are a nonprofit, and have a responsibility to use our charitable dollars thoughtfully. As a very small team, we certainly wonât have state-of-the-art secure software. I hope anyone who is concerned their software usage putting them in physical danger will default to not providing identifiable personal information to websites, especially in a case like the Forum when itâs clear that your username will be publicly visible and discoverable by search engines. For example, donât use an identifiable username or email address when creating a Forum account.
For anyone who has uncertainties, I think itâs very reasonable to not even create a Forum account. There are also many ways to engage with the EA community outside of the EA Forum, for example via in-person groups, conferences, or other programs.
The surprise is what kind of sweet! ^^
@Toby Tremlettđš and I will be repping the EA Forum Team at EAG SF in mid-Feb â stop by our office hours to ask questions, give us your hottest Forum takes, or just say hi and come get a surprise sweet! :)
Thanks for the question Ben! The main reason that this is a priority is to help EA Funds (which is now part of CEA) grow and diversify their donations, by making it easier to gather info from donors[1] and build relationships with them, and giving us more freedom to optimize the UX of the donation flow. AWF in particular has ambitious 2026 plans and a significant funding gap, and weâd be excited to help them reach their donation goal for this year! :)
GWWC, the primary platform EA Funds has used historically, defaults to opt-out for donor data sharing. As far as I understand, this prevents us from being able to contact the majority of donors. We recently added the option of donating via every.org as well, which is opt-in by default so thatâs improved the situation.
Thanks JP â thatâs right that we originally showed it at the top of the post editor for first-time authors (and it wouldnât appear anymore after the user checked the box). Now I believe, because we moved the checkbox to the new user onboarding flow, it doesnât appear on the post page anymore.
For those who are interested in what the CEA Online Team[1] is up to, Iâve set up a new OKRs doc for 2026 and summarized our Q1 2026 plans.
Our team runs this Forum
Youâre great Toby, but I do worry that it will be hard to make progress without getting you more capacity for the Forum. Iâm glad that we were given more freedom this year, and I hope that means CEA will invest more than the current 1.5 FTE into the Forum, at least in 2027.
With your limited time, I wonder if you should focus more on proactive community building, in the sense we discussed when I first took over the team. I think peopleâs perceptions of the space matter a great deal to how they engage with it, as you can see from some of Nathanâs comments under the parent quick take. We can chat about it when we meet tomorrow. :)