Update: Jeff Kaufman posted a great and thoughtful comment, and I've now updated towards this not being actually worth doing. I'm leaving this post up because deletion is probably worse, but I no longer endorse the core recommendation of this post. I continue to endorse the third paragraph, proposing we further decrease the rate at which community posts show up on frontpage.
I want to propose a common-sense reform to the EA forum - stop any post tagged "Community" from showing up in Google searches. (I believe this to be technically implementable; this not being true would be good reason not to implement this change). I think it's probably good for EA discourse right now to be able to talk about scandals etc. openly but also have, like, minimum moats preventing some of the lowest effort bad-faith targeting by external parties.
The important parts of the EA forum to people who are Googling us are, like, the things that we object-level care about! The actual stuff that the majority of EAs in direct work do every day—distributing insecticide-treated antimalarial bednets, or doing research in AI alignment, or figuring out how to make vaccines in advance for the next pandemic. There are status and incentive gradients to write about and upvote community stuff on the EA forum, but we can counter that at least somewhat by removing it from search engines!)
[Edit: I continue to endorse this paragraph]. I also, for similar reasons, think that we should further decrease the default rate at which community posts show up on the frontpage, perhaps going as far as to mark community posts as Personal Blog by default. I think they make discourse norms worse and having the frontpage full of object-level takes about the world (which in fact actually tracks what most people doing direct EA work are actually focused on, instead of writing Forum posts!) is better for both discourse norms and, IDK, the health of the EA community. (This is not a hill that I want to die on, but feels like a relevant extension).
Finally, I find myself instinctively censoring myself on the Forum because anything I say can be adversarially quoted by a journalist attempting to take it out of context. There's not a lot I can do about that, but we could at least make it slightly harder for discussion amongst EAs that often require context about EA principles and values and community norms to be on the public internet.
I think this is worth talking about, but I think it's probably a bad idea. I should say up front that I have a pretty strong pro-transparency disposition, and the idea of hiding public things from search engines feels intuitively wrong to me.
I think this has similar problems to the proposal that some posts should be limited to logged-in users, and I see two main downsides:
Discussion of community problems on the Forum is generally more informed and even-handed than I see elsewhere. To take the example of FTX, if you look on the broader internet there was lots of uninformed EA bashing. The discussion on the forum was in many places quite negative, but usually those were places where the negativity was deserved. On most EA community issues the discussion on the Forum is something I would generally want to point interested people at, instead of them developing their perspective with only information available elsewhere.
I expect people would respond to their words being somewhat less publicly visible by starting to talk more as if they are chatting off the record among friends, and that seems very likely to backfire. The Forum has search functionality, RSS feeds, posts with public URLs, and posts and comments are indefinitely persistent. Anyone here who comes across something that rubs them the wrong way can link it to a journalist, journalists can use search, some readers here are journalists, etc. The proposal would make it harder for the lowest effort bashers, but an exchange it sets up a richer pool of material for people who are only slightly more dedicated.
I also just think it's good for people to be able to find things. If someone is considering getting into EA I do want them to be able to learn about the potential bad things as well as the stuff we're proud of, and I want them to see the discussions and see how we handle these issues.
Thanks for sharing this Jeff - your points about discussions on the Forum being more balanced and newcomers finding things that they have doubts about more easily have updated me towards this maybe not being a good idea (I've been uncertain, but overall leaned more on the pro side).
I really like this suggestion! There's also another option of having posts be visible only to logged in users - definitely not private, but at least not public.
One risk of both options is if people know it's less public they may think it's more private than it is (since anyone can make an account / use the forum search of they are really interested). So a key part of the ux would be clearly communicating the change.
(Due to Jeff's comment I'm now think it's likely that the both this and OP's suggestion have more downsides than upsides).
What does "targeting" mean? I could see it being good to have a higher karma threshold for commenting on Community posts, so it's harder for e.g. non-EAs to pretend to be EAs, people to create multiple sockpuppet accounts to skew discussion in a Community post, etc. (Not saying this has happened already on the EA Forum, just noting this as an obvious sort of thing that could happen.)
On the other hand, if "targeting" means people on other sites discussing EA Forum stuff, I disagree. IMO the goal of moats should be to make EA Forum discussion better, not to make it hide particular EA Forum posts. (As a beleaguered MIRI employee, I warn you: Beware the Streisand effect!)
No? That's the stuff that we wish were important to them. The things people actually want to know are more diverse than that, and probably do skew more toward juicy scandals than toward the things EAs wish people were more interested in.
If we want to override that preference, then we can choose to do so. But let's not lie to ourselves about why we're doing it.
I agree with this. I bid that you die on this hill instead, not on the other one. :P
That makes total sense to me. I'd suggest that rather than hiding parts of the EA Forum, we just make a new forum that's designed from the start to be more casual and insider-y. That could include search engine pessimization, as well as "only vetted EAs in good standing can post or comment", as well as "the vetting system allows EAs to post pseudonymously, have multiple accounts, etc." Heck, even small things like not having the word "EA" in the forum's name may help people feel more comfortable being candid.
(I'm not bidding that this hypothetical new forum hide the fact that it's EA-ish. I'm just imagining it serving a similar function to something like Dank EA Memes, where it's branded as a less official and important sort of thing, so people feel more comfortable just chatting casually, shitposting, being candid, etc.)
(And I'm not bidding that this thing replace the EA Forum. I just think it can be useful to try out multiple sorts of forums and see what norms, culture, rules, etc. work best. Centralizing everything on a single forum isn't actually the best approach, IMO.)
I can certainly see how this proposal has upsides.
On the flipside, not being able to easily find such musings might also backfire. E.g. in the era before the FTX crisis, a journalist wanting to write about the culture of excess wealth in EA may have felt honour-bound to give at least some credit to the fact that the community was conscious of this and concerned about it if they had easily found George's post on the EA forum.
This proposal may still be the right thing to do, I just wanted to make sure multiple perspectives were considered.
Also worth considering: the majority of people googling about a scandal will not be journalists. Some people may be googling EA because the scandal concerned them, but they want to see the EA response, and if they don't see it, they might falsely assume that EA doesn't care.
On a more practical point, I think it would be bad if this change reduced the visibility of the community health team and other efforts to mitigate bad behaviour.
This should be possible by adding noindex meta tags. That would indicate to search engines that a page shouldn’t appear in their results. They don’t have to honor that, but the major ones do, which is probably all we’d care about. I’m not sure how quickly stuff that is already in their index would be removed but there might be a way to manually trigger that.
I like the idea, but it probably wouldn’t/ shouldn’t change how much one should self-censor based on the possibility of things being quoted out of context by journalists. Any journalist worth their salt would have no trouble coming here to use the forum search, or creating an account.
Yes, noindex is the standard way to do this.
Do regular forum users / community members not sometimes use Google to find forum content, especially if they don't remember whether it was posted on the forum or somewhere else? I'm not sure how to judge the usability hit to those people, but it seems worth considering. (Perhaps we could check how often logged-in users arrive at a page via Google?)