Edit from 2022: Consider checking the Forum user manual if you're not sure if something you're looking for might already be possible.
Hello, Forum!
This is Aaron and JP of the EA Forum team.
We spend a lot of time working on the Forum, and we’d like to hear your ideas for making it better. These can be new features or other kinds of requests.
Even if you don’t have suggestions of your own, consider upvoting ideas you like from the comments. That will have nonzero influence on the features we prioritize (though we also take many other factors into account).
If you’d rather make a suggestion privately, get in touch with us through this page.
Edit April 2022: This thread is still very live as you can see by the continual influx of suggestions. We have now synced our asana project with our public Github issues list, so you can see our recorded tasks there.[1] I'd still recommend suggesting features here so that other users can see and discuss them. — JP
- ^
Note: there's a delay between when we write tasks down and when they get triaged into a state that gets synced with Github.
I think it would make sense to exclude emoji from the audio narrations, especially now that a lot of users are adding diamond emoji to their usernames. The audio software currently reads aloud the emoji even if it is in a username, e.g. "Eevee orange diamond emoji".
Something which has come up a few times, and recently a lot in the context of Debate Week (and the reaction to Leif's post) is things getting downvoted quickly and being removed from the Front Page, which drastically drops the likelihood of engagement.[1]
So a potential suggestion for the Frontpage might be:
- Hide the vote score of all new posts if the absolute score of the post is below some threshold (I'll use 20 as an example)
- If a post hits -20, it drops off the front page
- After a post hits 20+, it's karma score is permanently revealed
- Galaxy-brain version is that Community/Non-Community grouping should only take effect once a post hits these thresholds[2]
- This will still probably leave us with too many new posts to fit on the front page, so some rules to sort which stay and which get knocked off:
- Some consideration to total karma should probably count (how much to weight it is debatable)
- Some consideration to how recent the post is should count too (e.g. I'd probably want to see a new post that got 20+ karma quickly than 100+ karma over weeks)
- Some consideration should also go to engagement - some metric related to either number of votes or comment count would probably indicate which po
... (read more)As a group organizer, I want to know how many people are following our city group on the forum and find out when a new person starts following it. E.g., how many people are following our city group on the forum now compared to before a recent EAGx event?
As a group organizer, it might be nice to be able to DM people who follow our local group, though this may have privacy implications I have not thought through.
I think the EA Forum software does a poor job at communicating the license terms of forum posts. (For context, all new forum content published on or after 1 December 2022 has been licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.)
The current license statement is buried in the forum terms of use which can be reached from the "How to use the Forum" page in the navigation sidebar, so many readers may be unaware of the license terms if they have not registered on the forum and clicked through the license agreement. By contrast, many sites that use CC licenses, ... (read more)
Hi JP,
Nice that user interests are now visible on the profile page. I think it would be good if they were sorted alphabetically.
I would like to suggest a rule/norm that people or orgs should not post the same article they are ready posted multiple times over the course of a few months, especially if there was already discussion in the comments the first time, unless they have significantly new points to make.
Hi JP,
It would be nice to have the possibility of filtering the posts of a user by a given tag. As of now, it is not possible.
Hi JP,
I think it would be nice to have the possibility of filtering content by user. As of now it is not possible.
My use case was trying to find something I said.
Hi JP,
I imported this Doc to the EA Forum editor, and noted the 2nd to 4th bullets of the section "Cost-effectiveness of the Climate Change Fund" were not imported.
Hi JP,
This comment and my personal experience (example) made me wonder whether it would be nice to have an option to hide the karma in comments or posts of others or ourselves.
Could we have a no-frontpage tag that authors can apply that would (e.g.) give -99999 karma adjustment to a post for frontpage purposes?
I think breaking up larger posts into appendices or parts (cf. the new alcoholism sequence) can be helpful but also could clog the frontpage.
Inspired by an EA Melbourne planning event yesterday, we came up with concept of having a subtle but visible visual tag for posts/replies by folks who are in the same city as you (opt in option in your profile), to help build more in-person community and potential collaboration.
Hi JP,
Minor. In the messages' page, the screen is currently broken down into 2, with my past conversations on the left, and the one I am focussing on on the right. I would rather have an option to expand the screen on the right such that I do not see the conversations pane on the left, or have an option to hide the conversations pane on the left.
Expose "voting tribes" in the comments.
We could run a similar algorithm to X's Community Notes. Then, on contentious topics, we could easily see the main axis of disagreement. We could also have a comment sorting option, that upranks those upvoted by people from both sides of the disagreement.
See this thread for discussion and corresponding post for algorithm description.
I have a feature removal suggestion.
Can the notification menu please go back to being like LW?
The LW version (which EA Forum used to have too) is more compact, which gives a better overview. I also prefer when karma and notifications are separate. I don't want to see karma updates in my notification dropdown.
I think having a separate section for community posts has greatly improved my experience of the forum. However I think there are still quite a lot of posts that stay on the front page for a long time for similar reasons to why community posts did - because they '[interest] everyone at least a little bit' and/or are 'accessible to everyone, or on topics where everyone has an opinion'.
I want to see posts that do things like present the results of significant work get more attention, and to a lesser extent posts that are topical - i.e. announcements abo... (read more)
Something that came to mind after reading recent posts by Ulrik and Sarah, along with the reaction to them - Can we do better at distinguishing downvotes and disagreevotes?
In my mind, I view downvotes as saying:
Whereas disagreevotes are saying:
I think my concern is that the first two bullet points under 'downvotes' seem very different from the bottom two.[1] It feels, to me, that we rarely see posts that are highly upvoted but also have significant disagreevotes.
So I don't have a solution for this apart from some half-baked ideas, but wonder what the Forum team's perspective was?
I think in part I'm questioning whether the last two are valid uses of the downvote button.
Hi JP,
I think it would be good if there was an option to make the interests (in terms of EA Forum tags) in one's own profile visible, as this could be an easy way to see the topics someone is into.
I quite like the summary bot, and think it would often be useful (particularly for posts without author-written summaries) to read the summary first before deciding to read the whole post. Of course, it is easy to scroll all the way down, read the summary, and then decide whether to read the post. But humans are lazy and to make the user experience as frictionless as possible, how about the AI-written summary goes at the top, above the post? Not everyone would like this, so I think there should be an option for each user whether they want the summary at th... (read more)
Hi JP,
I wonder whether it would be good to have a pop-up showing up each time one strongly downvoted a post or comment, saying something like, "Consider explaining what could be improved". If this was implemented, I also think there should be a way of disabling the pop-up in the settings.
Hi JP,
I have noted EA Forum's GitHub repository has 666 issues and 102 pull requests. I would be curious to know how you are prioritising what to develop.
Hi JP,
I have just accidentaly published one post. It was not a big deal, as I moved it to drafts, and then published it again 45 min later. Have you considered having a pop-up saying "Are you sure you want to publish?" after one clicks on the button "Publish"? Relatedly, if one moves a published post to the drafts, and then publishes it again, what determines its positition in the front page is:
Hi JP,
In recent days I've come to think I would appreciate being able to sort the posts I have saved for later (by date posted, time to read, karma, tags, etc). Is this possible?
Thanks!
Hi JP,
I think it would be nice to have an option to subscribe to sequences, such that one can be notified of new posts.
Hi JP,
Have you though about adding an option to filter the comments made by a given user by karma? Checking the comments from someone may be a good way of getting a better understanding about their worldview, and sorting them by karma would facilitate this process.
What would people think of adding SummaryBot functionality to some very long comments? The emergence of a new HLI/SM thread reminds me that some comments are post-length and post-complexity contributions; many of them would benefit from a summary. That can be particularly valuable where the original poster and commenter start a dialogue, with long replies to each other's comments. Those threads can take a significant time commitment to get through!
Unsure what the cutoff should be to trigger a comment summary -- maybe 500-600 words?
Has anyone ever considered adding an is-an-alt-account flag to accounts, and requiring alts to be declared? When an alt account was declared, it could either be -- at the creator's option -- blocked from voting altogether, or confidentially linked to the person's main account such that double-voting could easily be identified.
I'm wondering if this could help address the multiple-account voting situations. After a transition period in which every active account would be required to declare alt/non-alt status, using two non-alt accounts itself would establis... (read more)
If you press a footnote link in a post and the footnote is hidden in the 'View more footnotes' collapsable list the page scrolls to a footnote you can't see. I found it confusing until I realised you have to press 'view more footnotes' to expand them. It would be good if it opened automatically when you follow a footnote link
Hi. I started drafting a reply but had to stop and now a week later I cannot find where I was drafting it. I would love to be able to see all the places where I have draft comments/replies autosaved. Thank you!
April fools' day request:
I was reading the openai blog post "learning to summarize with human feedback" from the AI Safety Fundamentals course (https://openai.com/research/learning-to-summarize-with-human-feedback), especially the intriguing bit at the end about how if they try to fully optimize the model for maximum reward, they actually overfit and get lower-quality responses.
My ill-advised request is that I would just LOVE to see the EA Forum's "summaryBot" go similarly haywire for a day and start summarizing every post in the same repetitive / aggressi... (read more)
I have said this before but, I do feel like LW and the EA Forum should have ways to quickly input probability distributions to help prevent double illusion of transparency-type dynamics and help people be more concrete without making the text hard to follow.
One format that I like is people can mouse of a word and there will be a little tool tip pop-up thing with prob distribution. The UI for making it could be a cross between making a hyperlink and the metaculus prob distribution mixture creator.
Organisation Badges/Tags next to author names on posts/comments
(sent through Intercom before I remembered that this existed)
I generally dislike when people write posts from their organisation - I think that it's hard to know who exactly I'm talking to, it's difficult to know what messages are from the author vs from the org, and it generally feels a bit intimidating to talk to 'Givedirectly' as opposed to Sally who works at Givedireclty.
I do understand the desire for organisations to say things as the org - maybe when someone posts in a professional capaci... (read more)
Hi JP,
When I copy-paste a published-to-web Doc to the EA Forum editor, all bullet points are converted to 1st level bullet points, so I typically have to manually update all higher than 1 order bullets. If I copy-past the Doc (instead of its published-to-web version), the formatting of the bullets is maintained, but then I lose all the footnotes. It would be nice if both bullets formating and footnotes were maintained!
Unclear: arguably deleted comments should not provide positive karma (e.g. this user, who has deleted almost all of her comments).
When I tried publishing a draft of this post with the cross-post to LW option, it didn't work, saying something about being able to cross-post to LW. (I instead posted directly to LW and used to the option cross-post to EA Forum.)
Hi,
Michael Aird suggested some time ago:
I do not think this ended up being implemented, but it sounds like a good idea. Currently, it is already possible to say in the user profile whether one has attended EA virtual programs, and conferences.
In comment threads, I often am much more interested in the repeated back-and-forth between the two primary interlocutors than interjections from third parties. Would it be possible to somehow prioritize replies from the author of the grandparent to promote this 'conversation' style reading?
On the wiki:
It seems like 'topics' are trying to serve at least two purposes: linking to wiki articles with info to orient people, and classifying/tagging forum posts. These purposes don't need to be so tied together as they currently are.
One could want to have e.g. 3 classification labels to help subdivide a topic (I think we currently have 'AI safety', 'AI risks', and 'AI alignment'), but that seems like a bad reason to write 3 separate similar articles, which duplicates effort in cases where the topics have a lot of overlap.
A lot of writing time could be saved if tags and wiki articles were split out such that closely related tags could point to the same wiki article.
Can my profile karma total be two numbers, one for community and one for other stuff? I don't want a reader to think my actual work is valuable to people in proportion to my EA Forum karma, as far as I can tell I think 3-5x my karma is community sourced compared to my object-level posts. People should look at my profile as "this guy procrastinates through PVP on social media like everyone else, he should work harder on things that matter".
We investigated how much karma from Community posts was distorting how much karma users had relative to what would happen if the Community section karma hadn't been there, and relative to our personal "overrated-vs-underrated commenter" ratings. There was somewhat surprisingly not that much improvement from changing the weighting, so we decided to stop working on the project.
Ultimately, you shouldn't take a user's Forum karma has much correlation with their impact. It's quite easy to have a lot of impact with low karma, or to be mostly a terminally online person who doesn't get much object-level work done.
Hi there,
I think links to Google Doc sections are not automatically converted to links to EA Forum sections when one copy-pastes a published-to-web Doc to the EA Forum editor. It would be great if the links updated automatically, instead of continuing to point to the original Doc sections.
Currently, the EA Forum editor has 3 levels of headers, and a 4th one using bold. Google Doc has 6 levels of headers. It would be nice if the EA Forum editor also had 6 levels of headers, such that the structure of the Doc is not broken when there are 4th to 6th level headers (I have never used 5th nor 6th level, but 4th sometimes, and 5th seems possible).
Add a 😂 emoji reply!
1)
In links to tags, like this:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/HqxvGsczdf4yLB9FG
Also add a human-readable (slug) part to the url, similarly to what you do with posts:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NhSBgYq55BFs7t2cA/ea-forum-feature-suggestion-thread
2)
If someone enters a link that doesn't have the human-readable part, like
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NhSBgYq55BFs7t2cA
then redirect to a url that does have the human readable part
P.S
I really can't think of anything lower priority than this :P but thought I'd write... (read more)
Didn't read through all comments so unsure if this was suggested already, but could the karma / agree votes be located at the bottom of comments rather than at the top (or both)? For very long comments (especially in gnarly threads) it's a pain to scroll up to agree/disagree vote, and it incentivises liking based on the author or first few lines rather than reading through.
Within the community tab 'New and Upvoted' seems to still be the same posts, month after month. Perhaps new should gain more weight, given the current posting frequency and upvoting?
Within-post bookmarks
I often start posts but they are too long to read them in one go and the fact that I have to do that (or forever forget where I am) creates a big ugh field for me. Solution: Within-post bookmarks! I think it would be amazing if we could mark where we are in a post and the next time, we can just click to get ourselves back there!
(FWIW, I think that's a major feature of printed media, which I have much less ugh feelings about reading. You can always put it away without it being annoying later on.)
The "hover over a username to see their profile preview" feature is neat. There appears to be a minor bug, however, wherein 5-digit levels of karma don't always display correctly in these previews (because the third digit gets omitted). Here's an example of an incorrect display:
And here's an example of a correct display:
I would love an option to switch off the total karma count from one's profile. I've found myself noticing that it can occasionally create perverse incentives.
It would be great to have some way to filter for multiple topics.
Example: Suppose I want to find posts related to the cost-effectiveness of AI safety. Instead of just filtering for "AI safety", or for just "Forecasting and estimation", I might want to find posts only at the intersection of those two. I attempted to do this by customizing my frontpage feed, but this doesn't really work (since it heavily biases to new/upvoted posts)
There appears to be a bug where a question post cross-posted from LessWrong goes up on this Forum as a regular post, as happened here.
I'd expect clicking on my profile picture to take me to my profile (currently the click doesn't do anything) (but it does have a pretty animation)
The default generated slugs for posts with non-Latin script titles are absolutely useless:
私たちは毎日、毎秒、トリアージに直面している - https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WvikY6ixzcwKtKveN/unicode-52
Generally, the slug should match the post title in some human-readable way, so that it is possible to see what the post is about based on the URL alone, without a title or link preview. A sensible way to do this would be to romanize the title if it is not in Latin script, producing something like:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WvikY6ixzcwKtKveN/watashi-tachi-wa-ma... (read more)
Linking Jason’s feature request. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GMnbdDYoEJiXcsGpp/jws-s-shortform?commentId=hDCodcW9jANNbTDHj
We should be able to add tags to sequences and have them cascade to the posts in those sequences.
It would be useful to be able to have a change log add-on that shows up as a banner on the top of a post (and ideally but this might be a bit spammy, notifies people who have read, or maybe upvoted or commented on the post) so that they know when a correction has been made.
Many people may not go back to a post after reading, or notice the change-log (if the authors even include one) - and the changes can often be really important.
Quick solution: Have a box where people can add their change log and make it a pinned comment (but only for the purp... (read more)
Wasn't sure where else to mention this – the search feature on the forum is pretty bad. I tried finding a post from Claire Zabel by searching "Claire Zabel". I couldn't find it because her username is actually "ClaireZabel"
it would be nice to exclude text e.g. the appendix / pre-amble / introduction from the "time to read" estimate.
E.g. in our upcoming post the time to read the core pieces is 22 minutes, but the total read time is showing 39 minutes (almost double) because of our lenghty appendix and some introductory context.
I would like to be able to subscribe to notifications for sequences like this one: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/FxFwhFG227F6FgnKk
There are some posts, for example this "EA Forum feature suggestion thread", the "List of EA funding opportunities", and "Propose and vote on potential EA Wiki articles / tags", which I think could be pages in their own right, findable via the home page's left menu. I make this suggestion because:
- These posts are harder to find, in my opinion, than they should be given that they're essentially living documents that'd benefit from having more contributors.[1]
- A comments section seems like not the best interface for handling suggestions/contributions.
- For insta
... (read more)The "Library" page, accessible from the home page's left menu, appears to be a list of all(?) the sequences on the Forum. But the order in which the sequences are listed—I think it's just recency—isn't very friendly, in my opinion. My vision for this page has the sequences listed in order of (some combination of) importance and quality. This ordering could be determined by a site admin, or maybe it could be automated (e.g., based on the combined karma of each sequence's posts). Sequences are also filterable by topic in my vision: for this, sequence pages would probably need to be taggable.
Also, sequence pages don't appear to show up in the top right search bar. I think sequences should be searchable.
Suggestion: Integrated search in LessWrong, EA Forum, Alignment Forum and perhaps Progress Forum posts.
[I was inspired to suggest this by the downvotes on this comment, but it's a problem I've seen more generally.]
The agree/disagree voting dimension is amazing, but it seems to me like people haven't properly uncoupled it from karma yet. One way to help people understand the differences could be to introduce a confirmation box that pops up whenever you try to vote, that you can opt out of from your profile settings.
This box could contain something like the following guidelines:
... (read more)Add the option to disable comments on your posts.
I was going to write a short suggestion about profile wikis, but it ended up long so I made it into a post. In a picture:
This is my current frontpage, logged in and logged out
It would be nice to have a way to post sequences without having all the posts show up on the frontpage, we would definitely use it for EA Italy
How long until we can bring Anthropic's Claude on as a moderator?
I'm finding him to be very good at demonstrating cognitive and emotional empathy for views that are in disagreement with his own, updating accordingly, and then gently proposing ways forward that incorporate both perspectives.
(Maybe a little too deferential at this point, although I expect there's less of that when he's moderating human discussion rather than talking to one human, plus of course it's a live debate in EA how much epistemic integrity to sacrifice for the sake of keeping the pea... (read more)
I'm planning to write a piece on animal welfare, as part of that post it will help to post a picture of a dead animal. I'd like to have it blurred until users choose to see it, is there a way to do that?
Side note: I can't see anything about this circumstance in the user manual or guide to norms.
Several serious posts are drowned out on April 1st each year. I half intended to write a round up of these to help them avoid being drowned out, but didn’t get around to it before the work week; now I’m requesting that the EA Forum team consider doing this. In future years (assuming your timelines are that long) I would also be in favour of having a separate section for April fools (like the community section) even though this dampens the humour.
We’re trying out moving our Italian translation of the EA Handbook to the forum, to see if participants of the next round of our virtual program prefer it that way compared to google docs. (most of the first chapter is now here)
Thanks
One feature I really like on forums like Hacker News is the ability to traverse comments by having options to jump to a comment's parent, or next or previous sibling.
When you are deep in a gnarly comment thread, I find it useful to be able to hop up a couple of levels and then minimise a comment and its children
This is what comments looks like on Hacker News for example:
On https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts, clicking on a shortform expands it, but there is no way to unexpand/contract it
This is not the case with topic page edit and discussion, where clicking on the topic title toggles between expanding it and unexpanding it
Ideally shortforms could be toggled unexpanded in a similar way
Up/downvoting a post shouldn’t be possible within 30 seconds of opening a (not very short) post (prevent upvoting based on title only), or should be weighted less
The link from linkposts like this one, don't work, I assume because the link needs to be prefixed with https://
Can this be added automatically if it is missing, or do linkposts need to go via
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/out?url=Reformat all shortforms so they have agreevotes.
I unhid community posts on the main posts section to see what would happen but now I can't rehide them. But I'd like to.
Reformat this comment section so that it has agreevotes.
(Semi-serious), since we care about the long-term future, denote years with a 10,000 year digit, so 02023 instead of 2023, like they do at longnow.org
You can subscribe to other users' new posts from their profile, but I would like to be able to subscribe to users' new comments which I don't see a way to do
I think authors of a post should be able to add the "community" tag to their post.
See also this, this, and this comments. The first comment thread includes a workaround: creating the post on the http://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/community page
On mobile, I think there's no way to remove your vote on your own comments. On desktop, I can just click my vote again, but on mobile the normal workflow is to tap to cycle between normal / strong / no vote, and I can't strong upvote my own comments, so I get "stuck" in the cycle.
edit: ok I think you can do it by just going through the cycle quickly enough, but I definitely struggled with this before, perhaps it depends on the latency of your connection to the server...
When a comment is deleted in such a way that leaves a "comment deleted" block, it has a little [+] to expand the comment, but it doesn't do anything. I would prefer if it wasn't there so I didn't feel like I had to click on it to check if there's something I missed.
Can we add agreement karma to comments on all posts?
@Matt Goodman thanks for all your suggestions. I think they all make sense or have been suggested before, and we'll have to prioritize them against our other work!
I'd like to be able to hide the amount of karma and agreement points a comment or post has. I think seeing how many people have upvoted a statement affects how likely I am to agree with or upvote that statement. I think it makes me more likely to vote in accordance with social agreement, rather than whether or not I think a statement is true or well written. I'd like to be able to turn this off from time to time. Strongly downvoted comments should probably still be hidden.
I think the UI for voting could be improved in the following ways:
The formatting toolbar doesn't appear until after you highlight text. This means you can only format text after you've written it - you can't for example, select bold and have your text appear in bold as you write it. This is something I find unintuitive. It took me a a few minutes of looking for the toolbar and googling how to do it before I realised the toolbar only appears when you highlight text. I'd like the formatting toolbar to always be on the page when I'm writing.
I'd like to be able to highlight a word or phrase in text I'm writing and Ctrl-V a URL link directly into that phrase. This is something that other platforms, like Slack do.
Yes, you can highlight a phrase and bring up the toolbar to add a link, but being able to do it immediately through a well known keyboard shortcut is easier.
Can we put this page in the sidebar?
I noticed that adding a tag to a post in draft mode now automatically adds the parent tag. But it's not clear to the user why two tags are being added at once. This also contributes to the overtagging of posts.
On Wikipedia, the guideline is to tag pages with the most specific categories they belong to. So if category B is a child of category A, then pages that belong to both A and B should only be tagged with B, whereas pages in A \ B should only be tagged with A.
In general, I think the EA Forum should be more thoughtful about tags. If we want to replicate... (read more)
When using search, the date on the search result card doesn't seem to always match up with the published date on the post itself.
For example, this post was published yesterday, 24th January, but when it appears in search it looks like:
which might be the date it was first created in draft form, and not published?
Which also leads to counter-intuitive things like:
Display a more detailed breakdown of karma and agreement karma by number of upvotes and downvotes rather than overall amount.
I think that the weighted voting system is counterproductive overall (it creates perverse incentives, it ascribes false authority to users who are more prolific or who may have expertise in one area and poor understanding in others, and it is needlessly undemocratic) and makes it harder to meaningfully understand the karma of a given post or comment, but this could go someway in making the actual impact of posts and comments more legible. I think there is a difference between how to read agreement karma for a comment that has 10 agreement karma overall from, say, 8 2 point upvotes and 2 -3 minus point downvote versus one that has 10 1-point upvotes, and the breakdown of how a comment achieved its agreement karma is not currently legible, which makes agreement karma a much less useful indicator than it could be otherwise.
P.S.: Similar suggestions have been made below on how the karma and voting system can be tinkered with to make it more meaningful, but seems different enough to warrant a new top-level comment.
Couldn't see if someone already suggested this but:
I'd like to be able to bookmark comments, in the same way you can bookmark posts. There's a lot of really, really well thought out and written comments, in some cases containing just as much value as articles, and I'd like to be able to bookmark a comment to come back to.
I'd argue this is even more important than bookmarking articles, because articles have tags and titles to search for, whereas comments don't, and it's easy to loose track of what article and what thread the one you're looking for is contained in.
It would be nice to be able to order search results by date and maybe some other features like karma.
(Probably has been suggested before but thought I'd add): A small indicator for the original poster of the top-level post in the comments. Like the microphone on Reddit.
If someone downvotes, suggest that they explain why
For Shortform:
So, proposing that we give everyone equal voting power gives those on the forum with more voting power an incentive to lessen mine (by downvoting this). So how about this: we make the agreement karma democratic. That way we can see what people actually agree or disagree on and since it doesn't affect karma we can make it democratic without affecting those with disproportionate voting power.
EDIT: Three people upvoted this suggestion, one person downvoted this suggestion, the result is negative karma. What we see is that the downvotes contain a lot more voti... (read more)
Add Agreement Karma to posts.
This comment suggesting this feature got 32 Agreement with 9 votes:
When LessWrong posts are crossposted to the EA Forum, there is a link in EA Forum comments section:
This link just goes to the top of the LessWrong version of the post and not to the comments. I think either the text should be changed or the link go to the comments section.
When a user moves a controversial post to drafts, other readers get worried of censorship. Two recent examples: https://mobile.twitter.com/erikphoel/status/1559527499188654085 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sD4kdobiRaBpxcL8M/what-happened-to-the-women-and-effective-altruism-post?commentId=GpSneam3oSwaBYDWH
It might make sense to tweak the prose. Maybe let moderators add a reason, like for deleted comments (e.g. "spam", "moved to draft after a request from the author"), and for users write "the author of this post marked it as a private draft"
We should make it harder to manipulate your own comments' karma. My favoured approach would be to deactivate all voting on one's own comments. Also fine would be if by default, you strongly upvote and strongly agree with all of your own comments.
There was a good amount of agreement about this previously.
This has now been implemented. You cannot strong upvote your own comments, nor vote along the agreement axis.
I think it would be better if agree/disagree voting didn't follow the typical karma rules where different users have different amounts of karma. As it stands I often don't know how many people expressed agreement vs. disagreement, which feels like the information I actually want, and it doesn't make intuitive sense that one forum user might be able to "agree twice as much" as another with a comment.
Make the forum available in other languages. Right now the only option is English.
Also rely less on acronyms. For example, when selecting "program participation" it shows you the acronym VP:
I happen to know that this stands for "Virtual Program" but a newcomer (especially one that isn't a native English speaker) might not know this (and might even assume it stands for something different like Vice Presidency, Virtual Profile, Video phone-call, Viewpoint, Value proposition etc).
Curated posts could resurface to the frontpage at exponentially decaying intervals.
- Counteracts recency bias. Enables longer-term discussions.
- Increases exposure (and over a more varied reader population) to the most important ideas.
- Efficiently[4] increases collective memory of the best contributions.
- We might uncover and dislodge some flawed assumptions that reached universal acceptance in the past due to information cascades.
- Given recency bias combined with the fact that people are very reluctant to write things that have been written about befor
... (read more)Quiz as a Service for posts
I stumbled upon this service:
https://quizgecko.com/
That can generate a quiz out of anything.
Having a "quiz me!" or "did you fully get the article?" button on every forum post where it would provide an AI-generated multiple-choice quiz would probably be very valuable for everyone.
I'd be happy to work on the development of this.
Embed iframes
Some use cases:
This feature is very versatile and would solve many things at once.
Co authors (second authors and later?) of posts don't appear to have their posts in the profile?
Sidhu has no post listed:
This seems mild, but could be bad if someone likes to co author a lot.
Check if information cascades / social influence bias is a problem on EA Forum.
If it is, maybe we could implement Emrik's idea to counter it, or some similar mechanism.
See here for the explanation of the potential problem.
To test it, we could do an experiment where some bot (or server-side process) randomly upvotes or downvotes new posts. We measure final karma after some fixed time, and see if that single vote snowballed.
relevant discussion
Recommend posts using collaborative filtering ("people who like the same posts as you, also like:")
MVP could be done quite easily using some of these techniques.
I have some ideas how to do better. If you consider implementing this feature, hit me up to talk!
In-line commenting.
Invisible by default so they don't distract, but you can easily switch visibility.
So the reader particularly interested in some section could dive into the comments particularly about that section.
Also, as a further feature, you could color code different comment types, like:
Also see @Emrik's comment with more rationale.
Bookmark folders.
There should still be the default one, but if you choose you could put the post in some other folder (sorta like youtube does with saving videos to playlists).
It can have many use cases, like:
Right now I'm doing something along these lines, but with an external editor and lists of links, so it's a bit awkward to use.
An optional reading time indicator, like here: working example (and that tool's description).
The bar at the right of each post is the reading time indicator. Full bar means 30 min, half bar means 15 min, and so on.
You can find the code that implements that bar here: html, css
The post length is often the deciding factor in whether I want to read something, so it's nice to have it at a glance. Also I admit I kinda want to incentivize people to write more concise posts :)
Add an option for drafts: "Anyone with a link can read", but make it really anyone, not only forum users, as it is now.
(Recently I wanted to get feedback from some people who are not on the forum, and I had to copy draft to google doc, and later copy it back, and fix all the footnotes :/ )
Next step (but probably harder), would be to let anyone comment. If they aren't logged into forum, these comments are anonymous.
Also collaborative editing in markdown mode would be useful.
Have an optional Subtitle line to add more context on forums, and have it be expandable on the front page.
E.g. "Why The forum should have subtitles: an in-depth look into how subtitles help people get more context in less time"
Hi! I didn’t realize this thread existed until just now. Just wanted to make sure you were aware of my feature suggestion, “Fine-Grained Karma Voting”
The Search Page doesn't seem to show results for basic questions. Some examples:
Not sure if this is an search indexing issue, or perhaps the actual "questions" user would put in the search field, aren't part of the posts answering them. This could maybe be solved by adding a new post - which basically explains the same as other inform... (read more)
This is minor, and probably not relevant to most people, but my work (Rethink Priorities) would definitely use an RSS feed version of the Forum so we can get notifications of when things with certain tags are posted in Slack. I think we could do this now with an account / notifications to email / email to Slack, but instead are using Greater Wrong for now for simplicity (e.g. this feed goes to our comms Slack channel) https://ea.greaterwrong.com/topics/rethink-priorities?format=rss). Thanks for all you do!
"agree/disagree" for posts, not only comments.
Might reduce downvotes on posts
Allowing for selective shared list for post that may be drafts and or info hazards in a similar way in which I can do Facebook posts to close friends etc.
Allowing for photos to be smaller / in-line with text so you can have image on the left and text on the right.
I have had a request for uploading a PDF.
Maybe a feature to let Google Doc headers/internal links be switched automatically to EAF headers? This will be mildly useful to me, and considering the most common type of broken links I see from others on the forum, probably to others as well!
Hi there, as a fellow EA, developer and avid creator of Userscripts, here are my thoughts on first seeing the site.
The design is very different from other online communities. This makes for an awkward first impression, users like familiarity in their UI.
I believe the gold standard for forums are Reddit, Facebook, StackOverflow, Discourse. By gold standard I mean some of the best minds in software UX works on these site. I particularly love Discourse.
This is a forum, yet there are no topics / subtopics. It tries to do too much in one place. I don't think questions, articles and events belong in in the same listing. I am aware of the filters, my criticism still stands :-)
Everywhere I move the mouse I'm assaulted by a popup. Why do you hate me? :-D
Infinite scroll / load more adds uncertainty to the UX. It's hard to track context, I can't tell if I click somewhere all my "progress" will be lost.
Gray on gray! No gray background please!
Titles are long, yet the columns are narrow.
The comments font looks bold, it should be lighter.
Some pages have too much info. "How to use the Forum" shouldn't have a pages long comments section, specially with unrelated discussions.
Still, thank you for taking the time in trying to innovate and contribute to the OS community!
The LessWrong API does not seem to work using HTTP requests from a remote host (my machine).
To be specific, the following Python code shows an HTTP request for the GraphQL API.
... (read more)Promoting shortforms to top-level posts, preserving replies. I wanted to do that with this, because reposting it as a top-level post wouldn't preserve existing discussion.
The reading time estimates on lesswrong crossposts seem to be wrong. For example, this says 1 but should be 5-10 (I would guess):
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fH5adhXF377Bt6fWj/public-facing-censorship-is-safety-theater-causing
I would appreciate being able to answer a private message by replying to the associated email notification, like I can do with e.g. Github and Discourse.
Would it be interesting for EA Forum questions to have a feature to allow surveys and predictions? In theory, one could post a question with a link to Google Forms, but maybe some kind of integration would encourage more surveys and forecasts. Given the large number people who read the EA Forum, there is margin to collect lots of data.
We should have at least one dedicated "megathread" for EAG-related questions each year, so it's easier to ask such questions in public without creating dedicated posts for each of them.
In addition to enabling drop-down boxes for commonly used jargon, it would be great if drop-down boxes were an editable feature. I frequently try to balance my explanations so that they're able to cover the inferential gaps without being too longwinded. One way of dealing with this is to make separate articles for people with different backgrounds like what Arbital does. But I think I prefer just having drop-down boxes for deeper or alternative explanations that not everyone needs.
The lesswrong way of dealing with lost and recovered text is much more pleasant on firefox. On the EA forum I have to tick through two boxes every time I edit anything.
On lesswrong there is a little box that I can click if I want to
I'd like to be able to permanently set the front page to sort by "top (inflation adjusted) unread"
People should be notified if one of their posts is referenced in another post.
I recently realised that one of my less upvoted posts was mentioned in another post to have inspired a particular model. I then had a look at my other posts and saw more instances of having been referenced. It's nice to realise that people are using your work, but at the moment there's no easy way to know this!
Embed high impact jobs related to [the tags of] the post that the person is currently reading.
"You're reading an article about biosecurity, here are some open biosecurity jobs you might be interested in"
We can build a filter based on this, I don't consider it production-ready in that level yet, but if CEA is interested, it could be.
(I somehow don't predict you'll say "yes" to this, but I'm not sure what's the reason you'll say "no", so asking)
Allow users to embed Airtables in forum posts, such as this
When clicking on a tag, sort the post by "new" instead of by "relevant" by default. (What does "relevant" even mean? the newer posts are almost certainly more relevant)
An automatic jargon-explainer for commonly used jargon. This gets the best of both worlds, for readers and writers. People can use jargon more often,[1] and not have to worry about it not landing with readers. And readers unaware of the jargon can hover over the word to see what it means, while readers who already do know can keep reading. Makes it easier to read for people within a wider range of inferential distance.
Efficient communication without having to link to each jargony word, since that might get distracting and take attention away from links they do want to emphasise.
Ideas coming out of a discussion yesterday evening
Problem: the eventual karma of a post depends a lot on the number of upvotes it gets in the first couple of hours/days after posting it.
Problem: The quality and relevance of new posts varies a lot nowadays. Readers need to (mentally) filter very quickly what to read. We tend to filter on easily available info, such as the karma that the post already has and the author's name (If your name is "Holden Karnofsky" and I've read many good posts from you in the past, I am much more likely to read the post than if... (read more)
Some suggestions for making tags more usefwl. I say some reasons I think tags are important in the post, but these suggestions are easy to see usefwlness of anyaway.
Automatically create a bibliography with all the links in a post.
Tagging users to notify them (@[username]). People should be able to ‘authorize’ friendly tags but ‘professional’ tags should be possible by default. Users should be able to turn on-off notifications for ‘friendly’ and ‘professional’ tags. In this way, people could make and maintain connections via the Forum.
Also, orgs (or departments) could have their own tags. For example, if someone does not make a writing contest deadline, they should still be able to notify the org about an idea. Organizations could be also able to filter their tag and another set of ... (read more)
Encourage short posts:
Allow registered users to post anonymous comments and generate a unique anonymous Id to track them so we can e.g. see the thread of anon1's comments.
I think ideally this should not be visible to mods / backend so it's truly anonymous.
'Commenting sprees' - blocks of time where discussion with more immediate replies would be encouraged.
I would prefer a more failproof anti-spam system; e.g. preventing new accounts from writing Wiki entries, or enabling people to remove such spam. Right now there is a lot of spam on the page, which reduces readability.
Let co-authors access post analytics
I can get around this by asking the main coauthor to share the analytics, but I´d rather I could access them myself.
A page for current contests/prizes, just like there's a page for events. Been quite a few of them lately, and they seem to (anecdotally) generate quite a bit of interest for writing usefwl things.
The ones I know about:
Quite a few on LessWrong that recently ended too. I expect there are more that I just haven't seen.
Oh, there's a Topic for it. Another thing I didn't have the bell set to the right colour on. Black! But uh,... (read more)
For events it would be useful to get notifications a fixed amount of time before the event rather than when they are uploaded to the system. Right now I get 2-8 notifications at a time often for the same recurring event.
Ability to include a poll in when you make a question post, à la Twitter! I know this feature has been suggested before, in response to which Aaron Gertler made the Effective Altruism Polls Facebook group, but it seems to have plateaued at 578 members after 2.5 years. Response rates in the forum would probably be much higher.
An option to subscribe (notifications on email or otherwise) to search terms.
Currently I'm hesitant to even glance at the Frontpage because there are so many potentially interesting things I would eagerly read and get nerdsniped by. So looking at it predictably wastes my time when I know I should (for now) be concentrating on the topics I'm currently focusing on. But I do want to catch the forum post I'm most likely to benefit from. Hence I want to be able to customize what I get sent by email (or the bell top-right).
This is probably a better way to match ... (read more)
This is a long series of comments (~1200 words)
TLDR; The EA forum team could transform the forum by introducing high status, high activity “focus posts” that are centered on object level discussion, at the same time greatly empowering the forum moderator.
This content below is quickly written, and tries to motivate a vision, not a specific plan. Also, “focus posts” seems like a bad name, someone please come up with another?"
Motivation/Background:
There is a sense that high quality discussions and comments on the forum are briefer and don't occur ... (read more)
I would love it if I could scroll through all the comments and posts I have upvoted (so I can easily revisit/revise my own curated list of content that my past self thought was worth others seeing).
It was suggested to add the 'looking for a job' checkbox on the EA Forum (see MVP ideas 2.)
- Add a sorting option for Occlumency so people can find the posts with the most enduring value historically (sorting by total karma doesn't do it due to the sharp increase in karma allocated towards newer posts due to influx of new forum users).
- Add a tag for "outdated" that people can vote up or down, so that outdated but highly upvoted past posts don't continually mislead people (e.g. based on research that failed to replicate). I can't think of any posts atm, but if you can think of any, please mark them.
- Consider hiding authorship and karma for posts 24 h
... (read more)A emoticon or image next to someone's first post either on the homepage or when you click into the post so that people know that they are engaging with a potential newcomer and maybe are nicer / more welcoming?
Could be obvious downsides to this I haven't thought of
See this comment.
This pattern of broken link, where the intended link is appended to another, distinct URL, has appeared in many comments or posts.
This defect seems common enough that it seems to justify investigation of the root cause (or even very crude automatic fix) especially since the pattern in the defect is so simple.
Please let me search within my bookmarks.
In general, I read something and bookmark it if I liked it. Then that thing that I read comes up in conversation. I go into my bookmarks to find it so that I can share it with the other person mid-convo quickly but then I can't retrieve it from the bookmarks list as fast as I thought I could! This happens to me in almost every session as a facilitator of the EA Virtual programs!
Reading time estimates on older posts.
If I'm not mistaken, posts before a certain date do not have the estimated time in minutes to read the post near the publication date and author's name at the top.
A way to report users for deletion.
There are a few spam accounts like this one (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/msreeyaa) but I see no way of reporting them to the moderators.
Since they aren't posting or commenting the way in which they have an effect is when searching the forum. (You'll just have to take my word for it that I wasn't searching for 'escorts' when I came across that profile...)
A way to see what you have previously voted on with karma.
There's been murmurs about adjustments to the forum about voting and volume and this probably reflects broader sentiment.
Some considerations:
I think there might be a number of solutions that immediately come to mind that haven't been written about, and these solutions do account for the ... (read more)
The analytics page is great!
Add a tag: "Volunteering listing (open)"
(Just like "Job listing (open)")
In the forum main page, have a new title:
Help building our community:
This post has no comments yet: ...
This post is from a new user, help welcome them: ...
...
After editing Swapcard: "Do you want to update your EA Forum profile too?"
At least if it was done through a CEA form
"I'm open to job proposals" : Yes / Maybe / No
This will really help with EA orgs hiring, and is so easy, and CEA already asks this question for EAGx events
Categorized upvoting suggestion
Make it possible to only filter / see unread posts by default on the forum homepage.
This past month I've noticed I've missed a bunch of cool and relevant posts because they dropped off the home page too quickly for me to see them. I'd like that not to happen. Not a suggestion, but related: it seems like some good posts fall of the homepage way too quickly. It would be nice to give those posts a chance to be seen. Often if there are a couple really high popularity posts in a week then the people who happened to post less popular posts get unfairly disadvantaged, which seems suboptimal.
A chatroom
A moderated chat room that runs the whole time so you can chat to other poeple currently looking at the forum.
This might make the forum more welcoming.
I would like feedback on this idea: Community Posts
MVP: Change "create topic" to "create community post" and reframe wiki topic summaries as community written posts. Currently they are introductions, not summaries.
Full change: Allow people to create posts which can be cowritten by anyone once live. Wikis produce high quality content, but the current wiki is framed around the topic tags, rather than any kind of article being able to be written.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NxWssGagWoQWErRer/community-posts-a-new-forum-post-type-unofficial-pr-faq
Listing of “all posts I upvoted/strong upvoted”
Easy and credible way to add a bounty and prizes for questions (like this one )
I would like the ability to sort search results by date. Often, I want to know who mentioned something in the past few weeks or months, this is currently not possible. (I'm guessing the current sort order is by magic, but there is nothing indicating this.)
There should be a polis questions feature, where you can embed (or better it's a full feature) a polis question and people can write comments for it/see the visualisation. Not having to go to another page would give polis questions significantly more traction and they are a useful tool
I'm not sure if it's exactly a feature suggestion as a concern highlighted here that I agree with, which is basically: The number of Forum users seem to be growing quite a lot (congrats!), with many more posts, so some posts that might be high-effort slip under the radar or disappear quite quickly (see Ian David Moss' comment). Is there anything the Forum team is doing to mitigate this (someone suggested a higher density of posts on the front page) or other wise any thoughts on this topic?
Other possible solutions (some already mentioned and I'm not s... (read more)
(Not sure if that has been suggested before, but) you should be able to sort comments by magic (the way posts are sorted on the frontpage) or some other better way to combine top+new properties for comments. Otherwise new contributions that are good are read far too rarely, so only very few people will read and upvote them, while the first comments directly receive many upvotes and so get even more upvotes later. Still, upvotes tell a bit about what comments are good, and not everyone wants to read everything.
I would definitely use it myself, but I would strongly suggest also making it the default way comments are sorted.
(That wouldn't totally remove bad dynamics, but it would be a start.)
An option to post anonymously or non anononymously with your account (instead of having to create a new account to post anonymously, and spend hours on internet anagram server finding an anonymous account name)
Few UX suggestions for post edit:
Add a "publish" button in the options below:
Have a Save Draft / Publish button on the top (not just bottom) when in edit mode / or a "skip to bottom" to make it easier to save /publish
Meta suggestion: Could be nice to start a new features thread and/or use a feature suggestion forum at some point, this one is getting a bit difficult to navigate right now.
MVP option could be to create a copy of this thread but delete all the implemented features so that only WIP /not implemented ideas are here.
There should be a way to suggest an author cross-post a post of theirs and/or give them karma if you x post a work they've posted.
Yep that seems like the MVP.
I think if you're xposting and sharing karma you should probably get <50% but even 50% seems better than the current status quo. I do think it could be cool if the person xposting getting some kind of "finder's fee" karma (e.g. 25% or something).
Would add that if someone does create the post on your suggestion, you should get a notification when its posted / some kind of like "thank you for making the forum a better place!" kind of message.
There is an "exploit" against anonymity on LessWrong
On a recent popular LessWrong post, the OP, Gwern, receives a "anonymous" critique, and then chooses to deanonymize his critic, very likely by using a trivial API call:
The above call produces the identity of the commentor, who turns out to be Mark Friedenbach.
Technical comment for onlookers:
The reason why this happened is that LessWrong, like all websites, represents the information you see (posts, authorship) with underlying data/variables. This data pops up in a lot of places, and the ... (read more)
Suggest posts to link to when inserting a link in the rich text editor
Contest mode (random order for comments) for use cases like the Future Fund's Project Ideas Competition
Please remove Google resources, like Google fonts, from the website. It will make it easier to visit the website from certain countries.
We appreciate your feedback! We will explore how to better support users without Google access.
I'm not sure what the actual feature would be, but make it easy for people to cross-post from their personal blog (maybe just do substack to start) to the EA Forum. I recently saw the blog prize announcement and there were about 10 blogs linked there i'd never heard of. It would be great to get that content onto the forum.
Ability for OP to pin comments to the top of the comment thread
(not actually sure about this - could have bad negative consequences)
Use case: I write a post about a project and a team member makes a comment that I want to make sure people see, or I make an update comment
Ways to reduce risk:
Why not just edit the post itself? I think some... (read more)
It would be useful to schedule posts ahead of time.
I'm a mod and did not know this was a feature! But I think it would be good for users to do it themselves.
It would be great if I could link to a comment.
(And sorry if this was already suggested. I couldn't find it when I searched "link to")
Mouse over probability distributions
Likelihood qualifiers (likely, unlikely) are a common source of miscommunication. Lots of content on the forum feels pretty nuanced to me and subtle differences in priors can often be cruxes e.g. most important century.
A step in the right direction could be being able to add prob. distributions as tooltips (maybe using an elicit like interface or maybe just 'freehand') to illustrate these qualifiers better. The user can highlight a word in their draft and press a button, this will being up the prob. distribution entering... (read more)
Inline draft comments
I really like the forum editor. Unfortunately, I don't end up writing posts in it very much as I almost always ask for feedback and reviewers can not easily add their suggestions.
Google doc comments are probably the gold standard here.
HTML injections?
I wanted to write a post with color highlighting. This would have been easy to do if I could inject some HTML code into my posts. I imagine there are other use cases where people want to do something special that the code base does not support yet.
Being able to embed OWiD interactive graphs and other visualization would be a great plus too!
Any thoughts or updates on implementing "two axis" voting? This feature is described here.
I don't really want to add pressure or pull things forward, I just wanted to check if there were thoughts on this.
For more context, the post below is a situation where this was useful :
The above shows one comment chain where a good idea seems to be downvoted because of disagreement, and not content.
Basically, I didn't like (and really many others as well) how several comments in that post were treated voting wise, even if at the same time, we disagreed with the actual content.
It seems possible this could be alleviated by the two axis voting.
BTW I also really like a bunch of other features and I have ideas, but basically you don't want to get me started.
[Speaking from LessWrong here:] based on our experiments so far, I think there's a fair amount more work to be done before we'd want to widely roll out a new voting system. Unfortunately for this feature, development is paused while we work on some other stuff.
I like the post analytics thing! One thing that would be nice (maybe as an option) would be to see a time series of cumulative unique views as well as the time series of daily unique views that you already get. E.g. that would help with
Cumulative time series of all the statistics could also be pretty nice.
Footnotes are great!
One feature that would make then even greater is if I could copy paste text from a Google Doc that includes footnotes, and have them be formatted correctly.
If we had a tag called "Links" for posts that aren't displayed on the front page, then we could have a "Hackernews"/ "Reddit" style section were people can share -without comment- external links related to EA or that could be discussed in the context of EA. This would be different from current "link posts" which might have a higher (imagined) bar to posting.
Along a similar lines, there could be a low effort way for the current Shortform function to emulate Twitter, where the 'magic' sorting algorithm also takes into account the length of the post.
EA Forum single sign-on (SSO)
Rough idea: You can use your EA Forum login on other EA websites that aren't affiliated with CEA, such as EA Hub and Impact CoLabs. This would be enabled using an OAuth2 interface that any developer can integrate into their apps.
Benefits: The main advantage of SSO is that users would not have to create new logins; they'd just need to create one for the EA Forum and could then use it on other EA community websites. This would make it easier to create and scale up new digital infrastructure for the EA community.
This exists! The EA Hub has keys for an OAuth integration with the EA.org login system, but did not prioritize building the feature. I hadn't heard of Impact CoLabs before, but they're welcome to ask us for one. You can use your EA.org login to sign in to EA Funds, GWWC, and to save your application data for next time when you apply for EA Global.
Effective Animal Advocacy (EAA) forum
EDIT: I made this suggestion into an EA forum post so I deleted it from here to avoid duplication. The post contains the text that was originally here.
The ability to add links in bios would be great!
If we could make it so I can edit my bio like I would edit a post it would be even better.
EDIT: ohh the bio uses markdown, noted.
Bunch of visual accessibility stuff. In particular:
*Night mode.
*The ability to make textblocks narrower for smaller saccades and thus easier reading. (I'm not sure this is more comfortable for everybody, so a variable-width widget like Royal Road or Fanfiction dot net have at the top of their display pages might be optimal? This might require experimentation.)
*Ability to change text size.
*Better visual distinction between widgets like the Tags, Post, Pingback, and Comments. Panel borders? Width variation?
On another note, I'm using uMatrix, and it's blockin... (read more)
The EA forum is one of the key public hubs for EA discourse (alongside, in my opinion, facebook, twitter, reddit and a couple of blogs). I respect the forum team's work in trying to build better infrastructure for its users.
The EA forum is active in attempting to improve experience for its users. This makes it easier for me to contribute with things like questions, short forms, sequences etc, etc.
I wouldn't say this post provides deep truth, but it seeks to build infrastructure which matches the way EAs are. To me, that's an analogy to articles which... (read more)
TL;DR: I'd like to have a single board where to see a summary of the analytics for all my posts.
I've been really enjoying the analytics feature!
I used it for example to notice that my post on persistence had become very popular, which led me to write a more accessible summary.
One thing I've noticed is that it is very time consuming to track the analytics of each post. That requires me to go to each post, click on analytics and have them load.
I think Medium has a much nicer interface. They have a main user board for stats, from which I can see overall engag... (read more)
Some basic functionality I would benefit a lot from:
Footnotes are a thing that I would use more often if it was easy to do so.
I love editing using the WYSIWYG editor, which does not support them. So when I want to add footnotes I would need to: 1) copy paste my article into a google doc, 2) run a plugin to turn the text to markdown, 3) change my editor settings to Markdown, 4) create a new artic... (read more)
Some suggestions regarding sequences:
Button to automatically translate posts that aren't in the reader's preferred language.
Some potential improvements to the search function:
I'd like to be able to add pinned posts or comments to my profile. Several people have asked me about my EA origin story so I've tried to refer them to this comment, but I always have a hard time finding the link.
It's quite easy to gain a lot of karma by writing questions. I think that's fair, but I thought I'd flag it cos I've been doing very well on karma for that reason.
Did we try having this post sort by magic?
Also can we have magic as an option to sort all comments and answers?
Also maybe call it "hot" or "vogue (new or highly rated)".
A text box to add your preferred pronouns to your profile in Settings (e.g. she/her or they/them). Here's an example of how to do it.
I think the user bio editor in Settings should be a bigger text area with rich text formatting (like the ones for posts). This would make them more WYSIWYG since user bios are displayed in a similar style to posts.
Having recently wrote a post that got a lot of silent downvotes, I've been thinking more about the general role of silent downvotes and how we could mitigate their downsides. (See some earlier discussion here.)
Silent downvotes are important for content ranking/visibility and providing a rough high-level signal of what the Forum community values/disvalues, but they have some pretty important disadvantages, especially when they represent a preponderance of a post's karma:
There's already a feature that allows authors to hide comment karma on selected posts. I'm not sure entirely how it works, but I think it means that if the author chooses, nobody can see karma scores on that post?
That might be what some authors want, and is maybe preferable to seeing lots of silent downvotes, but at least for me ... (read more)
Consider protections to prevent "pattern downvoting," that is, a single forum user downvoting every one of another user's comments and articles, particularly in articles and comments that have received few views.
Usually it's not the case that every comment made by a single person contains zero value and is detrimental to online discourse. However, some people seem to have a tendency to want to do so. Rather than allowing one person to suppress the views of another's right after publication, it would be better for other users to vote to ensure the content i... (read more)
Aaron, can we write forum PR FAQs too?
Pros:
nice format
Cons:
Would dilute the legitimacy of current ones
Soultion
"Unofficial PR FAQ"
But if you're okay with this could you explicitly say so. If you don't I think me writing one will feel like I'm freeriding on the current legitimacy of the concept.
A problem for me is that I don't often use the evergreen questions (like this one)
I've written feature suggestions elsewhere, but I sense people don't find them compelling, so I thought I'd just flag the problem as I see it:
- new answers get added to the bottom and are hard to find
- the question itself will never be seen for the first time again and receive the flood of interest it first did
- old questions are sometimes poorly phrased or framed
Do you think this is a problem, if so, how should we solve it?
Can this thread be tagged with the words "features" and "requests". I often struggle to find it because I can't remember what exact formulation of words are in the title.
A different default sorting on this page
I have used this page about once a month for several years and only today decided to sort by new. It showed loads of great new comments.
I suggest a sorting which balances scores and newness (like reddit's "Hot")
Spaced repetition cards
Ability to add spaced repetition cards to forum posts so that once you've read it, you can add the cards to a deck, which can either be exported or reviewed in the forum.
edit Ideally anyone could create these for any post, rather than it having to be the author
Tags for tags: We should turn the "Related entries" sections of wiki pages into native tags so we can build a crowdsourced graph of links between the wiki pages. Links can be uni- or bidirectional and specify different types of relationships such as "A is related to B" or "A is a parent of B".
Hi, sorry to be a complainer - I've just seen a new "continue reading" feature and I don't like it. If I stopped reading a sequence or article it means I'm aware of its existence and have chosen not to read it. This feature keeps reminding me of my least favourite articles (right now it's convinced I should read Aaron's placeholder post for a new sequence). I couldn't spot any way to remove it. Okay, that's all, thanks very much for your attention.
The all-posts view gives excessive prominence to shortform posts: while for both ordinary posts and Wiki entries only titles are displayed, for shortform posts one gets to see the entire content. I suggest truncating such posts so as to show only the first line.
We should add the ability to convert posts to questions (or back to regular posts, but that's tricky because answers would have to be converted to regular comments).
Also, the editor should automatically suggest converting your post to a linkpost or question post if the title or body text matches certain patterns. For example, if you write "Crossposted from X" or "This is a linkpost" at the top, it can infer that your post is most likely a linkpost. I see a lot of posts from inexperienced users that are classified as regular posts even though they're intended to be linkposts or questions, so I think this would be helpful to them.
Co-authors on posts should also share the karma of the post. I don't know how they should, whether it's equal split, or some percentage of the whole (e.g. if there's 100 karma each person gets 75 or something).
(I noticed this on 1 account for a post the person had co-written ~6 months ago)
Strongly agree with this! Having only the first author get all the karma seems unfair for the co-author(s) and doesn't provide the appropriate incentives. Maybe the first author gets 50% of the karma and the following ones share the rest.
When editing a document, it would be nice to be able to link to headings/subheadings from the main editor when writing summaries or internally linking to other sections of a post, e.g. how it's done in Google Docs (see screenshot)
It would be useful to have and easy way to tag / untag job and request listings when they become open or closed (so basically binary tags?)
Would also be good to have an icon next to those posts how there is for the AMAs.
Ability to submit questions to a monthy poll. Then everyone who has signed up gets the poll.
Option to donate to author.
Some blog articles are really good and I would pay a bit to authors I liked.
Ability to mark items in this thread as “complete”
This thread is the best place to suggest feature requests and it's pretty hard to use because you can't tell which items have been done and which haven't.
I suspect that many people don't post on the forum because they're worried about their post being poorly received and damaging their reputation in the EA community.
I believe this because I feel this way myself, because I've heard other people around me worrying a lot about posting to the forum, because Will MacAskill spoke on the 80,000 hours podcast of being anxious about their reputation being damaged after posting on the forum, and because of the existence of Aaron Gertler's talk "Why you (yes, you) should post on the EA Forum".
Perhaps, by default, new posts could be anonymous until a certain karma threshold (say 30 karma) is met. After that post meets the karma threshold, the true author of the post could become visible.
That way, authors could post knowing that their reputation wouldn't be damaged if their post wasn't well received, but that they would get the credit if the post was well received.
I'd expect this to increase the number of posts (both good and bad) from hesitant new users, and I think that the increase in the number of mediocre new posts would be a cost worth paying. It's good for people to contribute and feel valued for their contribution, especially if it encou... (read more)
A way to get an RSS feed which is filtered int he same way as the main feed.
I would consider something to reduce the karma users can get from commenting on controversial posts. Right now it seems easy to get very high scores by making not really that great comments in such places.
As an example, I think this comment I made is decent. It makes a true and relevant point that no-one else had mentioned . But it's not great; the topic of that thread is not that important, and the all the comments in it, let alone mine alone, do not resolve the issue. Most importantly, that comment is definitely not over 50% as good as this article I wrote. I would say the article is at least a thousand times more important, and took at least a thousand times longer to write.
I'm not sure how exactly you would do this though, as all the most obvious methods have significant drawbacks.
I'd like it if I could paste a link into the editor (for either comments or posts), then click or hover over it to see an option to automatically covert the text to the name of the page, similar to how that happens in Google Docs.
This would be most valuable to me in comments, since I usually copy posts from Google Docs anyway.
I use a lot of links in comments, and think it's valuable to do so (to connect conversations to other relevant work), but sometimes I feel a bit inclined to not bother or not write the actual title (just leaving the URL) since it's a ... (read more)
Vaidehi_agarwalla and I thought it might be a good idea to have sequences within sequences. For example: Vaidehi created sequences for the ea-survey results per year, because sometimes you want to only look at the survey results for that one year. Other times you want to look at all the survey results. If we add a new survey sequence every year it will clutter up the sequence page, but if you put them in one larger sequence it will take up less space and it will allow people to either read everything in one go, or select the "sub-sequence" they want to read and stop there.
When adding new posts to a sequence everytime I add a post, my search disappears and I have to type it in again to add the next one. Would be useful to just have the search not disappear.
Copying Bob Jacob's suggestion here so that people can vote:
... (read more)(I find the shortform feature really valuable, and I think these two things would make it even more valuable.)
It could be cool if the EA Forum allowed for boxes of text that start off collapsed but can be expanded, in the way that e.g. Gwern's site does (here's a random example). This could be used for long sections that the author wants to signal (a) are sort-of digressions and/or (b) may be worth skipping for some people.
There are a few things authors can already do that serve a similar purpose:
But the first two of those options seem to less clearly signal "We really think fewer people should read this than should read the rest of this post", compared to having a collapsed but expandable box of text.
And the third option might sometimes signal that too strongly, and also doesn't allow things to show up when you use the Forum's search function.
And the fourth option doesn't seem to work well for fairly long sections of text; more than a few paragraphs in a single fo... (read more)
It would be fantastic if we could set up RSS feeds for individual tags!
I worry a bit that all the suggestions are about details, whereas the macro trend is that public discourse is moving toward Twitter, and blog content linked from Twitter. One thing that could help attract new audience would be to revive the EA Forum Twitter account, automatically, or manually.
When you say "macro trend", do you mean within EA or across the internet as a whole?
Also, when you say "moving", do you mean away from Facebook? The Forum has been growing steadily since we launched the new version in late 2018, by all the metrics we measure.
(Neither of these questions takes away from the idea of having a Forum Twitter account, but I wanted to figure out where the ideas were coming from.)
There should be a feature that points out broken links when you write posts/comments!
Feature Request: Allow users to make their comments display as collapsed-past-a-certain-point by default.
Why? Sometimes I want to post a long comment, but feel that it's not one that everyone needs to see/read. I'd happily post the comment if I could write a summary of what it's about at the top and have the rest hidden/collapsed-by-default, but without this ability I'm often reluctant to post the comment. This is especially true when there are many comments on a post (or when I expect there will be), since I don't want the experience of other users who a... (read more)
As far as I can tell, it isn't possible to have line breaks in footnotes (though I may just be doing something wrong). This also precludes bulleted/numbered lists, block quotes, etc. Any chance that could be changed?
Could we get notifications if someone comments on a thread we started, but not as a direct reply to us? Currently, if I make a comment, I get a notification if Alice replies, but not if Bob replies to Alice. And I suspect Bob's replies would often relate to what I said and be interesting to me.
I've just noticed I can subscribe to comment replies on a thread, but I'm not yet sure if that captures replies to replies, and really I'd like this to be default for every comment thread I start (rather than me having to manually opt in every time).
(Apologies if someone else already mentioned this; I haven't read the other suggestions on this page.)
I like listening to articles on "Voice aloud reader." I think that the easiest way to use this is to open a PDF file. So some method of converting forum posts into PDF's might be useful, even if it stripped out images, graphs etc.
(Pretty low priority, feel free to ignore if not common. It's also possible I just haven't played around with Voice Aloud Reader and similar software enough)
I would love to have more features for the Markdown editor, since I prefer it over the WYSIWYG editor. For example, I'd like to be able to upload images while editing in Markdown (like GitHub does). Also, a syntax cheatsheet would be wonderful.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to switch between the Markdown and WYSIWYG editors while editing a document, or have a rendered preview tab in the Markdown editor.
Two consecutive hyphens should autocorrect to an em dash!
That way, a parenthetical clause in the middle of your sentence - like this one - isn't offset by "space hyphen space" on either side--or, even worse, by "hyphen hyphen". Instead, autocorrect two hyphens to a nice, clean em dash—like that.
I think this is a common feature for text editors - Microsoft Word definitely uses it.
Post and comment previews in search results!
Command + K should add a hyperlink!
I sometimes think of an idea for a forum post that I want someone other than me to write about, perhaps because I don't have the expertise or time to write it.
An idea could be to have a dedicated area to suggest posts for someone else to write. These suggestions could be upvoted or downvoted so that we can see what the community would most like to see written about.
It would be good to have a way to stop say twenty people then writing the same post at the same time. Perhaps people could put their name next to the suggestions that they are interested in... (read more)
On mobile, you could shrink the menu bars on the top and bottom of your screen (where the top has the Forum logo, and bottom has “all posts” and other navigation bars). Smaller navbars -> More screen space for reading -> easier to read and comment.
''Next" and "Previous" arrows/buttons at the bottom of a post, to move to the next/previous post - useful when you haven't read the forum for a while and want to catch up. This would obviously have to assume a certain ordering (e.g. chronological vs karma) and selection (e.g. all or excluding Community/Questions), which could perhaps be adjusted in Settings.
Double the karma weight of votes made before the new karma system was implemented. All votes used to be worth one point. For example, let's take an old post like this. It currently has 43 karma and 43 votes (probably all of them are upvotes). For comparison, my newest post has 53 karma and 16 upvotes. If you think about it, that old post is clearly more endorsed by the community. There were fewer readers when it was posted and a very high percentage of them chose to upvote it and probably many would have strongly upvoted if that was an option. Nowadays, even a regular upvote by high-karma users is worth two points. Posts like that old post do not appear in forum favourites and other places like that but they should. If you doubled the karma of such old posts, the karma for that old one would be 86 instead of 43 - a much better representation of how much the community endorses that post. Ah, maybe you should even triple the karma weight. Posts like this would then actually make forum favourites and I think they should.
Categories / sub-fora / better overview of tags
I think it would be very helpful if the forum was made easier to navigate by creating categories/sub-fora, making tags more intuitively accessible, or some other method. E.g., how do I find the most-upvoted forum posts and comments about EA investing?
I would like to promote Wei Dai's suggestion that it would be nice if it was possible to share drafts privately and then potentially make them public at a later point. (I think there's some chance that this is already possible, but the UX doesn't seem intuitive, otherwise I would have noticed already.)
Before implementing, it seems worth talking to users to find out whether this would actually make them more likely to share their internal work publicly at some point. It could also be good to find out whether there are any other ways that coul... (read more)
Have a nice format for linkpost in shortform.
With the goal of having the forum fully replace the EA subreddit at some point.
It has taken me a long time to find the EA online events calendar (thanks @EdoArad) could this be displayed more prominently
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ie5uop71imftf4ut2htbv789v8@group.calendar.google.com
Can we have a nice "Community Events" section like in LW? Can it integrate automatically with the International EA Events Calendar?
I posted some things in this comment, and then realized the feature I wanted already existed and I just hadn't noticed it - which brings to mind another issue: how come one can retract, overwrite, but not delete a comment?
Could we have better help for those whose content has been (heavily) downvoted?
I often see people plaintively saying something like: "My comment has been heavily downvoted, but I have no idea why!" Can the forum be more helpful for this scenario?
Not sure what the best solution is, but here's an idea:
- if someone's comment/post has been downvoted enough for it to have net negative status, the UI allows the user to ask for feedback (e.g. it's an option when you click on the three dots on the top right hand side)
- if they ask for feedback
... (read more)I think this could be more useful for people who are slightly downvoted, or whose posts just don't get much attention. I remember a few recent highly-downvoted posts and comments (below -10 or so), and all of them seem to have well-written feedback; sometimes more thought was put into the feedback than the original post (not necessarily a bad thing, but going even further could be a massive waste of energy).
People who provide feedback also have to want to engage. On Stack Exchange, closing a question requires a reason, but mods and high-rep users are known to close poorly-written questions for vague reasons without providing much feedback. An even worse failure mode I see is if users are disincentivized from downvoting because they don't want to be added to the feedback list.
Making it possible for people to add a bio in their profile (that supports external links) so people can get a better idea of someone's background and interests when reading posts and comments.
If I am on the main page, it might be nice if center-clicking on the 'Show Previous Comment' button opened that comment tree in a new tab. At the moment you can center-click the date to open a comment in a new tab, and then separately need to click 'Show Previous Comment'.
Is there an equivalent post on lesswrong for this discussion?
Has anyone considered a hackernews-style section? I know there is already support for posting links, but:
This links section will create a distributed content aggregator for our community. Considering finding relevant content in our current era is a hard problem, this can be very useful. I think a lot of us here are distasteful of surroundings ourselves with news outlets, for example. It’d be great if we could get a filtered important news list through the community. Adding features such as an RSS feed for links with X+ karma will be helpful in this endeavor.
Also see lobsters.
I am curious, why isn’t the greaterwrong frontend getting adopted as the primary UI? It’s much faster, much more touch-friendly, customizable, and generally rocks. Its only downpoint is that it lacks features compared to LW, which should be solved in, say, 6 months? That would be a major QoL improvement. The LW UI frequently hangs on my iPad, it’s so bloated.
Is it hard to make here and Lesswrong more compatible? I am thinking of a cross-posting feature that has comments of both forums. Linking the accounts (for subscriptions, for example. Karma maybe.) also seems nice.
I think the EA Forum should allow authors to pick one of the images they attached into their post as the "preview image" when the post is shared on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
I don't think this feature currently exists, and I think it would help drive traffic to the EA Forum whenever posts are shared. I'm assuming that the authors would link an image that is more enticing than the standard EA forum logo, which would result in slightly higher click-through rates. Medium.com and most other CMS's allow you to pick a preview image. I think Medium.com's UI for picking a "featured image" is a good example of how to design this feature.
Probably this should go on LessWrong rather than here, but: it would be great if the Markdown editor could handle basic image formatting, rather than stripping out all the HTML so all my images revert to maximum-width.
1. Could analytics be displayed on the forum? I think it'd be interesting to people to see how many people read different posts. This is also related to the question re: the forum prize - I reckon many authors would be more motivated by seeing that their posts are widely read than by a cash prize.
2. I often see very long posts that jump right into the introduction without summary. Could one introduce a field that is mandatory if a posts is more than 300 words long that forces the author to provide a 200 characters (or so) summary? Or something like this:
https://www.elsevier.com/authors/journal-authors/highlights
could even be added by the mods.
Perhaps include a short form subsection under the Forum Favorites section? It seems to me that most short form posts have very low visibility.
If the forum admins have traffic statistics, they should be able to get a better sense of the visibility issue than I can. In particular, I suspect the short form section receives a fraction of the traffic of the frontpage, but this should be verified empirically.
Can tags be linked to (this page) for easy access? How about grouping the tags into a hierarchy for ease of use and discovery, rather than just organizing them alphabetically?
When performing a search, the search results page uses "LW Search - EA Forum" as the contents of the title tag. I doubt this is an intentional reference to this forum being a fork of the lesswrong forum, so I assume the "LW" part should be removed.
By the way, I looked for 60 seconds to find where to post this small bug report, but the only options I saw was the unlisted contact us page, which seems to send a message to content people rather than the people that work on the codebase of the forum. This page is the only place where I could... (read more)
Option to reply to personal messages directly from email. Say, some form of a widget in the email notifications with a text box.
An option to automatically move a shortform post to a top level post
When sending a message to a user, it should open an old instance of the conversation instead of a new conversation
Groups tags which users can belong to or identify with. These can be displayed publicly in the user's bio, which would allow for automatic search of people with related interest or affiliations.
Pingbacks should include comments
Option to @mention usernames.
Should have something like an autocomplete and an opt-out-able notification/mail whenever one is mentioned.
WebMonetization - this takes about 30 minutes to add to a website, ask me how. Then anyone who has Coil would give money to this site - (maybe then just give it to charity).
Dark mode.
It would very dramatically improve my experience of the Forum if there were the option to hide posts. This would mean that the first page of the Forum would always be posts that were relevant to me. As it stands, whenever I visit the Forum most of the posts which I can see are not relevant to me (perhaps because I've already read them and don't want to read them again or check in on the ongoing discussion), whereas posts which are relevant to me and which I would want to visit again are invisible if they are more than a few days old.
This feature just shipped. You can hide posts from the frontpage using the triple dot menu to the right of the post item. Let us know if you have any feedback. Thanks to trialing candidate Steven R for building it.
On-site image hosting for posts/comments? This is mostly a minor QoL benefit, and maybe there would be challenges with storage. Another benefit would be that images would not vanish if their original source does.
Import from HTML/gdoc/word/whatever: One feature I miss from the old forum was the ability to submit HTML directly. This allowed one to write the post in google docs or similar (with tables, footnotes, sub/superscript, special characters, etc.), export it as HTML, paste into the old editor, and it was (with some tweaks) good to go.
This is how I posted my epistemic modesty piece (which has a table which survived the migration, although the footnote links no longer work). In contrast, when cross-posting it to LW2, I needed the kind help of a moderator - and even they needed to make some adjustments (e.g. 'writing out' the table).
Given such a feature was available before, hopefully it can be done again. It would be particularly valuable for the EA forum as:
- A fair proportion of posts here are longer documents which benefit from the features available in things like word or gdocs. (But typically less mathematics than LW, so the nifty LATEX editor finds less value here than there).
- The current editor has much less functionality than word/gdocs, and catching up 'most of the way' seems very labour intensive and could take a while.
- Most users are more familiar with gdocs
... (read more)Alas, I don’t think this is possible in the way you are suggesting it here. We can allow submission of a narrow subset of HTML, but indeed one of the single most common complaints that we got on the old forum was many posts having totally inconsistent formatting because people were submitting all kinds of weird HTML+CSS with differing font-sizes for each post, broken formatting on smaller devices, inconsistent text colors, garish formatting, floating images that broke text layout, etc.
Indeed just a week ago I got a bug report about the formatting of your old “Why the tails come apart” post being broken on smaller devices because of the custom HTML you submitted at the time. Indeed a very large fraction of old LW and EA Forum posts have broken formatting because of the overly permissible editor that old LessWrong and the old EA Forum both had (and I’ve probably spent at least 10 hours over the last years fixing posts with that kind of broken formatting).
If you want to import something from Google Docs, then exporting it to markdown and using the markdown editor is really as well as we can do, and we can ensure that always works reliably. I don’t t... (read more)
Footnote support in the 'standard' editor: For folks who aren't fluent in markdown (like me), the current process is switching the editor back and forth to 'markdown mode' to add these footnotes, which I find pretty cumbersome.[1]
[1] So much so I lazily default to doing it with plain text.
Sans-serif font in body text! The comments section is absolutely beautiful to read, but I find the body text of posts very difficult. Most blogs and online news sources seem to use sans-serif, probably for readability.
Alternatively, give users the option to pick their own font. Also, maybe make text black instead of a lighter grey?
The expectation that *ALL* EA resources should be in this forum. Ideally people would post books (with the tag "book") and then new users could see which resources the community thinks are worth reading first.
Soon after publishing, hide scores on comments so people aren't biased by them. Randomise the order of comments early on.
Community threads on each of impact, tractability and neglectedness of different cause areas. Would be interesting to see if their ordering agrees with 80k.
Numbers in articles which get multiplied at the end. The ability for the community to forecast these numbers and it change the overall result.
Ability to add postive or negative citations to points in an article.
The ability to request a citation on a specific point.
A portal for booking a call with an EA.
How often are poeple connected throught the EA hub? How often did poeple connect at EAGx virtual. If connections are valuable, this is a way they could happen more.
I've put some different use cases in the comments.
Link to profiles on the EA hub. How often do EAs use this website or the Hub to find people to work with? I guess someone tracks this?
Comment guidelines which suggest single points per comment to allow more effective upvoting.
Ability to split comments into multiple seperate comments. This could be limited to poeple who are higher karma.
Be able to edit the text of articles which leaves hidden suggestions. Others can turn this feature on and upvote them. Highly upvoted suggests appear as comments.
Perhaps this feature would only be available for people above a certain karma.
Make comments on specific sections of text which appear to the right of the text. And can be up and downvoted.
Icons on pages to show that other, anonymous people are reading them. I think this would increase engagement. This can be cheaply tested.
Examples, googledocs.
As assumption that there are some "evergreen" questions like this one, which periodically the community should spend time thinking on.
Please comment with other such questions
This thread should be linked in the intercom button under "feature requests".
If you click "submit a feature request" it should send you here.
Thanks so much to the team for their work. I really like the layout of this forum. It's clean and pleasant to use.
I'm not sure if such a feature would be worth the work it would involve, but: a very simple "editor" to very easily create probability distributions (or maybe more generally graphs that don't require mathematical formulas but just very rough manual sketching) and embed them into posts or comments could be useful. I'm not sure how often people would really use that though. Generally however, it would probably be a good thing to make probability estimates as explicit as possible, and being able to easily "draw" distribution... (read more)
I'd love to have a weekly/monthly open post, where everyone could ask questions and post small ideas. I imagine something similar to LessWrongs "Open & Welcome Thread". This could make some people more comfortable with starting to contribute to the forum.
While I think LaTeX is useful, it is not very intuitive or user friendly and posting long curated articles is quite tedious. It would be nice to have a feature like Elementor.
I think there would be a lot of value in a detailed how-to document for content creators explaining each step needed to go from a GDoc or WordDoc to a forum post. This would optimally include a directory for keywords like footnotes, typographical emphasis, Title/Header/Normal text functions, etc.
Level 3 headings should be supported. Unless it's changed recently, it currently jumps from Level 2 to Level 4, which makes it hard to logically format complex documents.
I think that karma can be gamified more.
In StackExchange they have an option of offering bounties for questions which can be collected by answerers. If we'd have something similar here, that could serve as a good signal that someone cares about a question and has yet to get a satisfying answer.
I'd be curious about what kinds of trades people can do if there would be a process for (probably better publicly) exchanging karma. I can imagine bets being made, offers to help editing, seeking information, a bounty on finding mistakes or whatever.
Having the option of suggesting edits easily, as in google docs.
I think that it being easy for readers to add links, explanations and corrections might improve the quality of posts and enable better participation between commenters and the OP. Specifically, I think that we should link more, especially to other posts on the forum, and it would be helpful if that could be aided by commenters.
Technically, that could work by saving a history of versions (which would perhaps be a good idea anyway), perhaps by remembering the diffs in a git-like fashion. T
... (read more)That’s actually a lot of what the LessWrong team is currently working on! I don’t know yet whether we want to allow suggesting edits on all posts, but we are planning to allow wiki-like posts that allow people to submit changes.
Can I opt out of Forum favourites? I'm sorry but I hate it
I also don't like this feature, although we should be aware that this feature is most helpful for new users, and new users are probably under-represented in this thread.
Variant of Korthon's comment:
I never look at the "forum favorites" section. It seems like it's looked the same forever and it takes up a lot of screen real estate without any use for me!
I just updated this section and it now shows randomized posts.
Can I get email updates about a specific tag?
It's still a crime that we don't support tables and it's a second crime that no one else has mentioned this yet.
They are supported in the new editor which LessWrong has currently shipped if you op into beta features (and I expect will go live for everyone by default in the next two weeks or so).
I'd like to have the option to make polls within a post. I recently wrote a short question post to see if an idea seems promising and I got a couple of upvotes and no comments. Having the option to get quick and cheap feedback from the community would've been useful.
The bucket this falls in for me is ... Widgets! I really want to make widgets. For example, making it so authors could add a button to donate. This is planned, but not concretely.
Very specific and small comment, but I'd like to see the "Reply" button for comments be bigger and more noticeable. I would prefer it to be an actual button (with padding and an outline), and with a message icon beside it. It's happened to me twice where I couldn't figure out how to reply to a comment until ~30 seconds of searching for the reply button.
I'd like users to be able to attach/link a profile picture to their EA Forum profile, and that these pictures would be viewable next to their usernames in posts or comments. I think this would make the forum a bit more human and friendly!
Hey JP, thanks for your thoughts! When you're saying it's a little too much work, how many weeks are we talking about? I can understand how the profile upload part might take a bit long (1-2 weeks?).
For adding in the profile pictures beside author's usernames, I would think there isn't any big UI updating that has to be done there. It's only in the comments section that things might be a bit trickier. I've made mockups for my own suggestion here, including mockups for showing these on the frontpage, post header, and two different options for how to show pictures on comments. Even just showing pictures on the frontpage and beside the author's names in a forum post page would be great, if those are easier to do than adding on the comments.
But yeah it's good that you flag that the value of the forum comes from people writing posts and more people reading them. I'm also curious about what authors think on if they would prefer to have their face in posts, as well as if they prefer to see commenters' faces!
+50 points for making UI mockups, makes it much more likely to get the feature.
I do actually quite like the UX mockups for the photo idea, which I think would have the positive effects already described (friendlier impression, easier to track comments). Here are two reasons I'm less keen:
Both
... (read more)i would find it helpful to establish a norm to begin posts with a short (!) 'tl;dr'-section which summarizes the main results/arguments of the article, since sometimes it is hard to tell what a post is about only from the title/the preview one gets by hovering over the link.
I'd like the Forum to support superscript and subscript.
I'd like to see the experimental sequences feature rolled out to all users.