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.
Thanks Jason! Luckily, which posts get categorized as “Personal blog” is public information (I think it’s easiest to skim via the All posts page), so I would be happy for people to check our work and contact us if you think we’ve made a mistake. If you take a look now, you’ll see that very few posts have been moved there so far, and I don’t expect the rate to change very much going forward.
2. My guess is that the vast majority of new users don’t even know what “Personal blog” means, so I’m not sure how demotivating it will be to them. As I mentioned in another comment, my guess is that getting downvoted is more demotivating for new users.
3. I think that’s a good idea, and I’d be happy for users to flag these as mistakes to the moderators, or just DM me directly and I can return a post to the Frontpage if I agree (I have the final say as head moderator).
Thanks Ben! 😊
(Toby’s title change was basically just the two of us trying to figure out how to better communicate his role to external people, it’s not related to his level. He has a fair amount of autonomy in his role, and I thought “Content Manager” didn’t properly reflect that. Also I personally could never remember which of “Content Manager” and “Content Specialist” was the more senior title… 😅)
Ah yeah sorry I was unclear! I basically meant what you said when I said “at their discretion, but starting conservatively” — so we are starting to take “quality” into account when deciding what stays in the Frontpage, because our readers’ time is valuable. You can kind of think of it like: if the mod would have downvoted a post from a new user, the mod can instead decide to move it to “Personal blog”. I think it’s possible that this is actually less discouraging to new users than getting downvoted, since it’s like you’re being moved to a category with different standards. You can check our work by looking at what gets categorized as “Personal blog” via the All posts page. :)
I expect this will affect only a small proportion of new users.
The EA Forum moderation team is going to experiment a bit with how we categorize posts. Currently there is a low bar for a Forum post being categorized as “Frontpage” after it’s approved. In comparison, LessWrong is much more opinionated about the content they allow, especially from new users. We’re considering moving in that direction, in order to maintain a higher percentage of valuable content on our Frontpage.
To start, we’re going to allow moderators to move posts from new users from “Frontpage” to “Personal blog”[1], at their discretion, but starting conservatively. We’ll keep an eye on this and, depending on how this goes, we may consider taking further steps such as using the “rejected content” feature (we don’t currently have that on the EA Forum).
Feel free to reply here if you have any questions or feedback.
If you’d like to make sure you see “Personal blog” posts in your Frontpage, you can customize your feed.
Yeah I would be interested in experimenting with ways we could do community-based funding for Forum things! :) You’ll definitely hear about it if we give it a shot lol
Thanks for sharing! That’s helpful to hear. :) This broadly matches my understanding, based on the data from our 2024 EA Forum user survey[1]. A majority of respondents said that little to none of their Forum time would otherwise have been spent on work, but our site usage increases during work hours — that tells me that a lot of people are using the Forum in place of other media they would procrastinate take a break with during work or school hours. I guess it’s good if people are replacing more addictive distractions with the Forum, since you can only really scroll the Forum so much. 😅
I’d like to write something publicly about the results, just haven’t prioritized it yet.
I’m not sure, but I actually think the amount of content capacity put towards the Forum has been about the same for its whole lifetime (~a bit less than 1 FTE). However, I think that content capacity has been focused on different things over time (Lizka got pulled into a bunch of random non-Forum projects for example, and there were fewer “Forum events” before Toby started running them). Also the Forum community has changed a lot over time.
In the early days, the community was really small, so probably they didn’t get many promotional posts because orgs didn’t know about it (and there were less EA-related orgs). But we got a huge boost in awareness and users around WWOTF and FTX, so that changes how orgs relate to the Forum. In another comment I mentioned that I think online spaces naturally move toward being “bulletin board”-like after they have an established audience. Personally I occasionally get this feeling when visiting the Forum, when a lot of the Frontpage are posts from orgs. Those just tend not to invite discussion, even if the org would in fact be happy for people to comment on them. I think we need to be careful about how the Forum “feels” and what visitors perceive the space to be “about” — I think if people start to think that it would feel weird to comment on a Forum post, that’s a really bad state for us to be in.
At the very least I expect the momentum could keep it going for a while.
Yup this seems right to me, but I would expect that usage would naturally go down over time. You can see this happening in the chart from my January post, for example.
I think that online spaces naturally move toward being “a place [for orgs] to promote things” once they have an established audience. For example, I feel like most Slack workspaces turn into this. Most subreddits have rules against promotion, probably for this reason. Without a Forum Team that pays attention to the distribution of content being posted, and actively works to get more good content and retain strong contributors, my guess is that the site will gradually increase in promotions and decrease in discussions, and that this is a feedback loop that will cause strong contributors to continue to leave as the site feels less and less like a place to have interesting discussions.
Though of course I don’t know for sure what would happen, this is just my guess. :)
I really like and resonate with Lizka’s thoughts on this as well. For example, this bit pulled out of her doc:
Suppose that about 10% of EAs regularly use the Forum. I think we need a minimal critical mass of EAs using the Forum — under that, people start thinking it’s dead, or stop remembering it in conversations, etc., and there’s a mass exit (so it basically becomes an archive of content that you can reference on Twitter or in Slack). I don’t know exactly how big this critical mass should be, and whether it’s better to think of it as a percentage of the main EA network/community or as a raw number of very-EA-aligned users. This means If we go down to 8% of EAs, we might be passing under the critical mass, which could noticeably up the chances of a mass exit of users.
Yeah I definitely have this in my head when thinking about how to run the EA Forum. But I haven’t made a commitment to personally run the site for five years (I’m not a commitment sort of person in general). Maybe that means I’m not a good fit for this role?
I also hear conflicting views on whether it’s good or bad to “signal that there is real investment”. I think I intuitively agree with Habryka here, but then others tell me that it can look bad for us to talk about doing work that doesn’t tie directly to impact — like maybe if we talk about improving the UX of the site, people will think that we are wasting charitable money, and that will decrease some people’s trust in our team. So for some people, I think they would trust us more if we were doing less work on the site?
The Online Team is the current custodian of an important shared resource (the Forum). If the team can’t actually commit to fulfilling its “Forum custodian” duties, e.g. because the priorities of CEA might change, then it should probably start trying to (responsibly) hand that role off to another person/group.
I agree with this, though I feel like the devil is in the details of what “Forum custodian” means. FWIW I don’t think anyone at CEA is interested in shutting down the Forum, or reducing the moderation capacity.
Maybe a useful example of “new engineering work” is: we might want to start using the “rejected content” feature that LW has, but we’d need an engineer to update the codebase to enable it on the Forum. So under a strict “no new engineering work” policy, we couldn’t start rejecting content, and in fact there’s a lot of moderation we couldn’t do. We are still doing some engineering work, but we broadly need to justify any work we do under CEA’s new strategy. Maybe you think that, if we fail to justify this work under CEA’s strategy, but we still think it’s valuable to do, then that’s the point at which we should start handing the Forum off to someone else?
I appreciate this comment a lot, thank you!
The sheer geographical coverage, and the element of in-depth intellectual engagement aren’t practically replaceable by other community-building efforts.
I think that fulfilling this role is a lot more important than growing the EA community, and other goals that the EA Forum might have, and that it is worth doing until a better new venue comes along.
I broadly agree with this! :) I personally care a lot about keeping the Forum community alive. Although I ultimately care about impact, and so I think it’s possible that we can do so while also spending our marginal resources on other projects (such as EA Funds).
if the online team stopped stewarding the EA Forum’s content, would it really turn into a mere bulletin board?
Yeah I mentioned in my post that I don’t know how likely the Forum is to turn into a bulletin board by default. I have the feeling that it was naturally moving in that direction last year, and I think that without some external push to make EA more salient, that’s just what would happen to an online discussion platform by default. For example, you can see this kind of thing happening pretty often in slacks. I think if you lose enough authors, you eventually hit a threshold where the platform no longer feels like a community of people (i.e. people view it as “the place where orgs post updates”), and that change in perception heavily discourages people from discussing things. I think we need to be attentive to how visitors view “what the EA Forum is about”.
Thanks! I found it helpful to hear your perspective. :)
I imagine many readers here would have little idea of what “new engineering work” would really look like
Yup this is fair — this includes work to customize the site for events (like the Donation Election voting system), and also work that is intended to be a longer-term investment that makes the site better (like updating our notification defaults, or improving site speed, or adding features like Google Docs import).
when you say “engage,” I hear “try to elicit compulsive behavior from.”
Yeah this is a bit tricky. Historically, the EA Forum and LW have been far on the side “respect users’ time”. For example, the default setting for karma notifications on LW is to be batched daily, so that you only see that star once per day rather than right after you’ve gotten an upvote. This was also the case on the EA Forum until earlier this year, when we decided to change a bunch of our default notification settings, and specifically we changed the default karma notifications to be realtime. This moves our site more towards “try to elicit compulsive behavior”, but I still think it’s within reason to do this, because we’re making changes that better align our defaults to what new users expect for a website, and also users can still customize their notifications to be less attention-grabbing.
A response we’ve heard multiple times from churned Forum users is that they just forgot the Forum exists, and we should email them more often. I think it’s easy for a new user to write a good comment and not know that they got any upvotes, because they expected to be notified that they got upvotes (and they were not), and then get discouraged and quickly forget to come back to the Forum.
for twitter and Reddit in particular, engagement looks like addiction for a lot of folks
Yeah I am worried about the addiction/compulsive usage, and I really appreciate how much LW was designed to respect users’ time. I think right now we are too far on the “people forget we exist” side. But I do think it’s important that we respect our users’ time as well, so we make sure to include ways to opt out of most features (like the ability to individually customize the frequency of every type of email notification).
In general, I still think it’s valuable to try to understand why people like these other sites and whether there are bits we should be stealing.
Put differently, a lot of platforms are designed at the outset for specialists & connoisseurs, and when they get (pressured to become) big, they lose what’s special about them and just end up shoving short-form video content in an endless scroll in front of an undifferentiated mass of users. I don’t think folks generally want this when they start platforms, but it seems to happen when they heed the siren’s call of engagement. I like that the forum is still for a small, specialized group.
Yeah this seems right to me, I guess this is what’s happening with the Substack app. I’d say that we’re only really focused on engagement now because we think there is a risk of losing the Forum community, and if the community were in a healthier place then we wouldn’t necessarily care about engagement. Ultimately we are trying to have a positive impact, so we tend to approach “engagement” by trying to get valuable content on the site and by making people more aware of that content.
Hey Lizka! I love that memo and I agree with most of it (I don’t have any particular disagreements, I just feel unsure about some things). It’s been a significant influence on the Online Team overall, and on how I think about running the Forum. I also agree with the specific points in your comment.
Part of the goal of the exercise was to, as the Online Team, “stare into the abyss” and try to figure out, how much does it really make the world better for us to put capacity towards the Forum? Are we only putting resources towards the Forum because of momentum/personal interest/job security/etc, or do we think that there is actually counterfactual value?
Some additional context is that CEA is [moving toward becoming] more of a unified organization now than it has been in the past. My understanding is that we can broadly only do work that aligns with CEA’s overall strategy:
Instead of optimizing for each of our team’s programs, we’ll be optimizing for EA as a whole.
And, I believe that everyone on the Online Team does want to do the work that is most impactful overall, whether or not that involves the Forum. So part of that equation is, what are the costs (in terms of “impact”) of us putting less resources towards the Forum? For example, it’s possible that having our product/engineers work on EA Funds would be a more impactful use of their time, and it’s also possible that product/engineering work on both projects is valuable enough that we should hire enough people to cover both the EA Forum and EA Funds.
Great point — this matches my intuition, but I’ve never participated in any serious open source projects, so I wasn’t sure how feasible it would actually be to get useful contributions. I’ve volunteered to help with a few coding projects in the past, and most of the time I quickly lose motivation to work on them. So I expect most volunteers to also get bored/distracted and not do anything useful.
Nice! I think LW has a work-in-progress branch with this sort of thing, though I have no idea if/when they will wrap it up. We also have an admin-facing feature where we can set up a process to automatically import posts to your Forum account from an RSS feed (although it’s rarely used so it’s probably buggy).
My recommendation is actually to let our team assistant manually crosspost your pieces to your Forum account. She does this for Lewis Bollard’s Substack, for example. For now, I expect she will do a better job than any of the automated options.
If anyone would like us to handle crossposting their external blog to the Forum, please let us know! You can contact us in various ways, or just DM me directly.
Not sure what the disagree votes are about, but I agree that it would be nice to have more open source contributors! 😊 The Forum codebase is already open source and we do occasionally get contributions. We also have a (disorganized) list of issues that people can work on. IMO it’s not the easiest codebase to dive into, and we don’t have much capacity to assist people in getting set up, but now that LLM tools are much better I could imagine it being not too onerous to contribute.
If anyone wants to help, I’m happy to suggest issues for you! 🙂 Feel free to reach out to me.
I think it does help to have a username that people recognize, but IMO it’s not too hard to get to that point. There’s not a ton of activity on the EA Forum and it’s not that hard to read most comments, so if you write a few good comments people will probably start to recognize your username.