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 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! I basically landed on using my personal account since most people seem to prefer that. I suppose I’ll accept the karma if that’s what everyone else wants! :P
Honestly I think it’s somewhat misleading for me to post with my account because I am posting this in my capacity as part of the Forum Team, even though I’m still an individual making a judgement. It’s like when I get a marketing email signed by “Liz” — probably this is a real person writing the email, but it’s still more the voice of the company than of an individual, so it feels a bit misleading to say it’s from “Liz”. On the other hand, I guess all my Forum content has been in my capacity as part of the Forum Team so no reason to change that now! :)
(I also agree with your points about “LinkpostBot” feeling like it should be an automation, and that having a team account for linkposting runs the risk of making those seem privileged.)
Interesting, why’s that? :)
For context: I want the Forum team to be able to do more active crossposting in the future, so it seems reasonable to have a sort of “placeholder” account for when the author of the original piece doesn’t have a Forum account. Personally when I see a linkpost, I generally assume that the author here is also the original author (outside of obvious cases like a NYT article link), and it’s kinda confusing when that’s not the case (I’m more used to this now but it was extra confusing when I was a new user). I also personally feel kinda weird getting karma for just linking to someone else’s work, and probably don’t want my Forum profile to mostly be links to other articles.
On the other hand, I do want users to feel free to linkpost external articles that they didn’t write, especially if they add their own commentary, or even just make some editorial decisions on which parts to quote. (That’s why I was fine with crossposting this using my own account, for example.)
Gosh yeah that’s reasonable. I was hoping to avoid making another team account to do this kind of crossposting but that’s probably the best solution. I guess it’s time for SummaryBot to get a sibling, maybe LinkpostBot?
I crossposted this because it was an interesting read, and it makes an argument that I’ve never heard before. I’d be curious if anyone with more expertise has takes on this! :)
I think the dip in ~May 2022 is most likely simply a data issue, if that’s what you’re referring to. Probably the real usage data is smoother.
There’s a lot I could say here, but I’ll try to keep it brief, so this is a bit of a disorganized list. :)
Pros:
I think the Forum UX takes bits from other platforms, which enables a bunch of different kinds of interactions (like Question posts, quick takes, longform posts, and reacts).
In general we are able to build the UX in such a way that respects users more than most other platforms (like we don’t have paid ads and we are not optimizing for clicks or engagement hours).
I think separating out karma voting from agree/disagree is important for enabling productive discussions and disagreements.
I value openness and accessibility and I appreciate that the Forum is extremely open by default (for example, relative to slack).
I think this is also good for “Writing on the Forum is so high quality and relevant that it often gets republished and quoted elsewhere”.
The fact that discussions here are less transient than say, Twitter, means that we’re better able to build common knowledge, and I think it makes discussions feel more like they matter (so people are more willing to put effort into their writing and adhere to high standards).
Personally, I think it’s good to keep the Forum broadly a unified space (rather than having channels or subreddits for cause areas) because I want the project of EA to be open to new ideas, and I would worry that too much structured separation would encourage silos.
Cons:
Not much of the Forum UX updates in realtime, which to me makes it feel a bit old-fashioned or something, but it’s hard to say if that matters.
I think it’s good to keep the Forum broadly a unified space, but this can be confusing for users, and can cause content that has a niche audience to be overlooked.
I think optimizing for engagement/fun would potentially build more community here, but at the cost of our actual goals (something like, “being the version of the Forum that most improves the world”).
There’s probably more we can to do make the Forum UX feel delightful and immediately satisfying without harming users.
Thanks for the suggestions!
I agree that emailing users more often will probably get them to return to the site more often.
I’m less confident than you [sound] that this will have a major effect.
Since our team has been focused on software/product for a while and haven’t noticeably increased MAUs, I am skeptical that further work in this space will be the magic bullet. For example, we made significant improvements in site speed and didn’t see metrics improve as much as we expected.
Our team has been more willing to email users recently (for example, about Forum events) and I want to be careful about going too far and annoying users/causing unsubscribes.
Honestly I’m not totally sure why basically none of the default notifications include an email, which makes me somewhat nervous to significantly change this. My guess is that you are a bit unusual in finding lots of email notifications fun, and probably more people would find that overwhelming or annoying.
That said, we do plan to test out making our default notification settings more in line with other sites (for example, making karma notifications realtime by default instead of batched daily) and sending a delayed email to new users explaining how they can customize their notification settings.
We’ll certainly consider changing other notification default settings, but again I want to be careful with this, not just because some people would dislike it, but also because ultimately our goal is not to increase usage. I want people to have a healthy relationship with the Forum, and only use it to the extent that they think is worthwhile.
I feel like changing the notification settings for existing users is probably crossing a line.
Thanks for the suggestions!
We do this to some extent. Users can “Opt into experimental (beta) features” via their account settings, and we will sometime release features early for them and ask for feedback or see how they interact with it. We also do normal user interviews during feature development.
We also encourage people to comment here if they have ideas for the Forum, or reach out to us directly.
I will also reiterate that we are looking for volunteers to help us do cause-specific community building, and we would very likely reach out to those volunteers for quick feedback about Forum things.
My colleague Emma has done one of these. We’d be interested to do more of this but we need help figuring out who to interview, so we’d welcome more suggestions!
Our Content Manager Toby has done these for people more closely associated with EA, but he is our only person working on Forum content so he is quite busy. It’s hard to prioritize doing a single interview over spending the same time encouraging multiple authors to write content.
I think that interviewing knowledgable people and sharing on the Forum is quite valuable, so I want to encourage other users to do this! :) I’ve also considered having our team commission this kind of work, which we may do at some point.
Yeah, I think it’s hard (and maybe not worth our resources) to build one space that fulfills all of those criteria. I think it would be fun for the Forum to have a more casual space, but there exist many other places that can fill that need:
The EA subreddit
EA Anywhere’s slack workspace and virtual events
EA Gather (a virtual space to hang out and co-work)
The Effective Altruism Facebook group
The EA Hangout Facebook group
Personally I don’t use any of these very often so I don’t have much opinion on them.
Thanks for the feedback!
We’ve invested a fair amount of team resources into changes to improve the new user experience over the past two years, such as the big redesign, adding the “Best of” page that you mentioned, and an improved onboarding flow for new user accounts. I agree that new users do sometimes still find the home page overwhelming, but I think that, on the margin, improving the new user experience is not currently the best use of our team’s resources (outside of specifically the new author experience).
Thank you for sharing, and apologies for making you feel uncomfortable. If it helps, users can hide themselves from the “People directory” by checking a box in their account settings (under “privacy”). I will say that I don’t view the “People directory” as any sort of definitive list, since literally anyone can make an account (for example there are lots of spam accounts listed, and we haven’t prioritized removing them). Forum user accounts have always been publicly searchable — the directory is just a view on top of the same data, intended to make it easier for, say, hiring managers to find people with relevant interests.
Thank you for sharing your experience and your feedback! :) I’m happy to hear that the Forum has been valuable for you in the past.
I’d like to think the Forum could better blur that distinction to avoid hubs becoming silos with strong views (which I think contributes to the confusion around the public perception of EA).
I like this framing, and I think it is a real value that the Forum can provide. Seems like it fits into my point #3 here, about why a central online space is a good bet.
the Forum right now is confusing because it’s providing multiple services in one; a newspaper, an opportunities/classifieds board, a library (the wiki) and a discussion space though not as free flowing as slack/discord. Now with groups and CRM and event tracking it’s becoming a catch-all for EA information
Yeah this is fair. I still think that the core of the Forum is discussion. The wiki is mostly useful to organize that discussion (including making it easy to view past relevant discussions). News posts are significantly more valuable if people discuss it in the comments.
Things like job postings do provide some value to the world (sometimes it leads to people getting hired in an impactful role), but I don’t view that as the primary goal of the Forum. I think dedicated job and opportunity boards are better suited for those goals. Think of it this way: if the Forum frontpage was only job postings, then people would only come if they were looking for a job. In that situation we’ve just turned into a worse version of a dedicated job board. If the Forum frontpage was only discussion posts and had no job postings, that still seems quite valuable, and in fact feels like a reasonable state for the Forum to be in (though I don’t currently think we should separate out job postings).
Has the forum team considered reframing the Forum as an intranet?
Perhaps others on the team have, though I haven’t thought about this specific framing before. I think there is some interest from inside of CEA to move in this direction (for example, more closely integrating Swapcard/EAG and EAGxVirtual with the Forum), so I wouldn’t be surprised if we do. I think this is certainly a possible long-term goal for the Forum, but I currently feel unsure if it’s the right fit. For now, this sounds like mostly a software product-focused play, and I’m currently more optimistic about focusing on community building than focusing on the Forum as a product. But I could imagine that once the community feels like it’s in a better place, we go back to investing in the product in a way that resembles an intranet.
Thanks for sharing some data here! I think the picture is more complicated than it seems (isn’t it always), though I’m not super confident about that. A couple points:
I think one relevant factor here is that (I believe) the Events and Groups teams rely more on funding to scale, and so when funding became less available they (I think) made an explicit decision to spend less. Funding doesn’t affect Forum usage nearly as much (for example, we’ve almost always had one content manager on the Forum Team).
I mentioned in a comment I just wrote earlier that my understanding is that traffic to 80k resources has not declined.
Actually you may be interested to read my whole comment that I linked to, since I think it adds some context relevant to this thread.
Nice — I like the way you described this, and I broadly agree. It’s possible that it’s more effective for the Forum Team to be doing a lot of the work to share on external sites (like via our Twitter account) so that others can contribute by lower-effort actions like retweeting, liking, and commenting (as opposed to us trying to get individual readers to share content more).
From past user interviews, I feel like a surprising amount of Forum content gets shared. A common story is that people only really go to the Forum when a link is shared with them. However, it’s possible that that view is outdated and less sharing is happening now.
We have improved the shareability of posts in the past year or two (I forgot exactly when we did some things), like by letting authors edit the social preview image and text for their posts, and showing that image in the post hoverovers, and adding a “share” icon at the top of the post page with a dropdown of options. As far as I know those didn’t move the needle a lot, though I haven’t personally dug much into that data. I would hesitate to add more to the UI than that to encourage sharing content, because I don’t want to add clutter to the post page.
We are considering updating our default social preview image at least, so maybe that will help. :)
I feel like it’s hard to say how that impacts the Forum. Some people also crosspost their blogs onto the Forum, and our team even handles the crossposting for some authors. Some authors get more engagement on the Forum than on Substack. I’m just not sure if it overall helps or harms Forum usage.
Yeah I agree that “friendliness” and “welcomingness” are more important than “fun”, and I’m more confident that we should be prioritizing increasing those qualities.
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.