This post is my personal perspective. I’m sure that my colleagues on the Forum Team and at CEA disagree with parts of this. However, since I am the Interim EA Forum Project Lead, I recognize that my opinions and beliefs carry extra weight. I’m very happy to receive feedback and push back from others, since I believe that my decisions matter a fair amount. You’re welcome to reply to this post, DM me, find me at EAG Bay Area, contact our team, or leave our team anonymous feedback here.
When I took the role of Interim EA Forum Project Lead in late August 2024, I spent some time investigating where the Forum was at and thinking about what (if anything) our team should prioritize working on. Over the course of 2024 (and indeed, since early 2023), Forum usage metrics have steadily gone down[1]. My subjective opinion was that the Forum did not meet my (perhaps too high) expectations in terms of producing valuable discussions that enable collective intellectual progress on the world’s most pressing problems[2]. I felt that our team was focusing on the Forum software to the detriment of the Forum community, so since then our team has made some major shifts.
The Forum Team as community builders
Is it worthwhile for us to continue allocating our resources towards working on the Forum? If so, what should our team be prioritizing? The answers to these questions were not obvious to me. Eventually, after talking with others and reflecting on these questions, I’ve become more convinced that it is worthwhile. Here’s the main structure of my thinking[3]:
- My baseline assumption is that EA’s influence will be net good for the world[4].
- Broadly, everyone on our team wants to do the most good with our careers. Since we currently work at CEA, for simplicity I’m limiting our ways of doing good to work that supports EA.
- In order for the EA community/field/project to reach its future potential, it needs to grow in size/influence and continue to make collective intellectual progress while staying true to EA principles.
- In other words: our team can do good by moving EA towards its most impactful version.
- Developing/sustaining a central online space for EA seems like a strong bet to enable that.
- This point can use lots of additional defending, but IMO the strongest supporting argument is the one about building common knowledge. That seems extremely hard to replace with in-person community building alone.
- A related data point from the 2022 EA Survey is that 36% of highly-engaged respondents selected “The online EA community” as an important factor for getting involved with EA.
- From a software product perspective, I’m not making any arguments here about what the ideal central online space looks like, nor to what extent the EA Forum fits that role.
- I haven’t thought deeply enough about whether the Forum is clearly the best of all possible options. If the EA Forum, the EA subreddit, EA Twitter, etc all started today with 0 users, I would not be confident that the EA Forum is the right place to centralize.
- However, the EA Forum is currently the closest project to being that central online space, and I believe it’s easier to improve an existing space than it is to build a new one.
- Possibly excepting if the existing space is really actively bad, which I don’t think the Forum is.
- Any central EA online space will be a key face of EA, and will be an important lever on the future of the EA community overall.
- Meaning, it will come to represent “what EA is” to a pretty significant degree, in some global sense.
- Because of this, building and maintaining a strong community[5] on the Forum, one whose representation of EA we are proud of, should be the Forum Team’s highest priority.
- Essentially, you can think of building the Forum community as a smaller version of building the EA community. The mandate is similar.
- Since I think the quality of the community (at least sometimes, not sure how often but I would guess quite often) naturally goes down with time if our team doesn’t do proactive work maintaining it, it’s not clear to me what the smallest number of FTEs the Forum Team needs to sustain the site’s value. My (low confidence) guess is that we are currently below that number[6].
- This doesn't mean that all team members should work towards this goal, and in fact sometimes the community will be in good shape and our team will mostly be working towards other goals.
- Basically all the rest of the value that comes from the Forum (more on this in the appendix) is downstream of having a strong community of people contributing/writing on the Forum.
- For example, I think the Forum creates a significant amount of good in the world by helping people find impactful work (ex. job postings) and improve their donations (ex. by reading about work from organizations). However, I believe that is not typically why people come to the Forum, and so this value is downstream of having a strong core community of individuals writing posts and comments.
Therefore, my strategy for the Forum Team has been to think of us more as community builders than as a tech team (more on this in my comment). I believe that this framing more accurately describes what our goals should be, and it highlights the fact that our team has a responsibility to actually try to make the Forum the best community that it can be[7].
What does the best version of the Forum community[5] look like?
Here are some qualities I think we should be aiming for. This list is neither exhaustive nor final.
- Discourse on the Forum sets a strong example for people in the EA community overall and is a good representation of EA to external visitors (i.e. it stays true to EA principles)
- Discussions on the Forum meet our high standards of epistemic legibility and truth-seeking, in addition to high standards of kindness and respect
- The Forum enables collective intellectual progress on the interdisciplinary field of EA — experts in different areas collaborate in a public space where people around the world can learn and deeply engage with arguments, and subsequently feel empowered take informed and thoughtful action
- The cruxy and action-guiding discussions that “EA should” have[8], happen on the Forum, led by a combination of Forum users and our team
- Novel or fringe ideas that are relevant and communicated clearly are welcome, and users take these ideas seriously and engage with them
- The Forum has a stronger sense of community and “being on the same team”, so users act in a way that is generous and collaborative with each other to make conversations more productive
- People feel free to disagree with each other and criticize work, even to criticize things that are common knowledge in the community — this is vital for making collective progress
- There is enough new accessible content so that non-experts can get some value from reading and don’t feel alienated
- Writing on the Forum is so high quality and relevant that it often gets republished and quoted elsewhere
We’re not there yet
The Forum as it exists does do a lot of these things, but it could be better.
Perhaps past versions of the Forum Team have prioritized community building more heavily, but I feel that our current team has not done that enough. I am working on rectifying that. We still have a ways to go and much work ahead of us.
I’m not confident about the best ways for us to actually accomplish these goals, so I expect that our team will do a lot of experimenting, research, and talking with people. Here are some related questions on my mind:
- Who should[9] be contributing to conversations on the Forum? Who should be, but is not?
- What are the cruxy discussions that “EA should” have that are not happening?
- Our moderation is currently very hands-off. I think it’s likely that we want moderators to be more active, relative to now. What should we ask of them? Should we adopt the “rejection” feature from LessWrong and ask moderators to help run that process?
- How can we better scaffold and sustain expertise across the wide spectrum of EA-relevant ideas? To what extent can we rely on the natural inclinations of the community, or should we put some team capacity toward managing volunteers, or should we be hiring for this?
- How can we better highlight/reward good content? I think that investing more into the weekly Forum Digest (such as by moving it to Substack where it will be more visible, and by notifying authors when they are included) will help, but perhaps we should also be doing things like contests or prizes.
- Should the Forum UX lean more in the direction of people over ideas? I’ve personally been pretty strongly on the “ideas over people” side but I now think that cuts against community building. For example, should we add visible profile pictures in comment sections or Forum post by-lines?
- Should we move posts from organizations (at least the ones that are more like news/updates) out of the Frontpage, to a separate section or tab? I believe they can discourage discussion.
- How should we think about “Community” posts? Is the “Community” posts section fulfilling its purpose, and if not then how can we improve it?
- What should our relationship be with nearby communities like LessWrong?
What is the Forum Team doing?
The Online Team is spending fewer FTE on the Forum[10] (relative to before I switched roles). Here are some more specific things we’ve been doing in our capacity as the Forum Team:
- Meeting with people who are/were/could be strong contributors, overall spending more time creating and maintaining these connections
- Broadly, considering ways we can produce good content and steer community discussions
- Putting more effort into running Forum events, primarily on the planning and author outreach side, though also on the feature development side
- Doing coordination between people/orgs that would not happen otherwise (the lowest-effort version being things like this thread)
- Being more open with our work and communicating more with the community, positioning ourselves more as active community builders
- Running workshops about writing on the Forum at conferences, and giving talks for people at EA orgs or related programs like fellowships[11]
- Technical work focused on making the writing experience feel better (like improving notifications)
- Promoting some good Forum content on other platforms (Twitter, Reddit, Substack, Instagram) and promoting our Forum events more (Slack, Facebook, LinkedIn, emailing users)
- This helps extend the reach of the Forum, rewards Forum authors, and supports CEA’s overall goal of stewarding the EA brand[12]
- Thinking about how we can improve our community-facing systems (such as improving our customer support response times, and updating our moderation/facilitation processes)
If you’d like to follow along with our work more closely, I recommend subscribing to this sequence (we try to post ~once every three months), and subscribing to our weekly Forum Digest. We also write about what our team is working on in our half-quarterly OKRs. We sometimes post quick takes about our work, so another way to keep up is to just read the Forum. :)
If there’s anything you’d like us to write about that we haven’t yet, let us know!
What are we not doing?
Broadly, I am currently more pessimistic about investments on the tech side relative to the content (in particular, the core posts/comments/quick takes) side. So here are some things that we’re not currently prioritizing (which we may have otherwise considered doing at this time):
- Improvements and bug fixes for non-core features such as the “People directory”, “Events”, and “Groups directory”
- Site performance improvements
- Personalized recommendations for jobs or other opportunities
- Improving/replacing our “Take action” topic page
- Improving the EA Handbook
- Improving the Wiki
- UX improvements for DMs
- Building an EA Forum mobile app
While these projects don’t currently fit into our main goals, the CEA Online Team is relatively agile and opportunistic so I would not be surprised if we end up doing something from this list in the next six months.
How you can help
Perhaps the most straightforward way you can help is by being more active on the Forum. I often see posts and comments that don’t receive enough upvotes (IMO), so even voting more is useful. There are only a small number of very actively posting users, and I believe that they have an outsized influence over the EA community as a whole. If you, for example, write one thoughtful comment each week, that would be a significant contribution to EA as a collective project.
Another way to help is by supporting our community building efforts. Message Toby with ideas for authors you would like to see writing here. Are there interesting writers on Substack or Twitter who you think would benefit our discussions? Are there people you’ve met who have been excellent role models for others in the community?
As a small team, we don’t currently have the capacity to maintain expertise and situational awareness in all the relevant cause areas. We’re considering deputizing others to actively support the Forum community. If you’re interested in volunteering some time to work with us to strengthen a sub-community[13] on the Forum, please let us know.
And of course, as usual, you can help by giving us feedback and sharing your thoughts. You’re welcome to comment below, DM me, or find other ways to contact our team here.
I will also be attending EAG Bay Area in late February, and I’d be happy to talk with people there about my post or anything related to the Forum. :)
Appendix: The value of the Forum
While I believe that the Forum does not yet meet the ideals that I’ve outlined above, I thought it would be helpful to balance that out by sharing how the Forum does create value. In my opinion, even just based on the data we’ve gathered from our EA Forum user survey, it’s pretty clear that the Forum generates a significant amount of positive impact, generally via:
- Helping people stay motivated to do good
- This includes direct motivation (such as by creating a sense of community) in addition to connecting them with other sources of motivation, such as local groups or task Y.
- Some anonymized (via ChatGPT) quotes from the survey:
- "I don't have any local EA groups where I live, so the EA Forum is the main way I engage with the broader EA community."
- "I believe my regular engagement with the Forum has led to indirect benefits, such as improving my knowledge of my field and fostering a stronger sense of community. I’m confident that without the Forum, I would not have taken such concrete actions as taking the 10% pledge or starting an EA group."
- Helping people donate more effectively or improving their work
- This includes by receiving valuable feedback, reading relevant content, and participating in discussions with others that have similar interests.
- Some anonymized (via ChatGPT) quotes from the survey:
- "The 2023 donation election discussions on the Forum significantly influenced my giving decisions last year. Without it, I likely would have defaulted to donating to GiveWell without doing any additional research."
- The Forum provides great posts and comments that update my views on important topics, like cause prioritization and intervention effectiveness. I think I'd see much less of this—probably 10% or less—on other platforms like Twitter."
- Helping impactful work happen (sooner)
- This includes things like, individuals getting valuable career advice or applying to job opportunities, organizations finding candidates, and projects happening sooner.
- Some anonymized (via ChatGPT) quotes from the survey:
- "I shared a post on the Forum, and someone reached out to encourage me to apply for a role at an EA-aligned organization. I was offered the job, and I expect to start early next year."
- "The Forum has given me insights into work happening in my field and potential opportunities. For instance, one of the most significant projects I'm involved in now <a major global health initiative> caught my attention after a discussion sparked by a Forum post. I don’t think I would have pursued this without the Forum."
- Scaffolding and steering the EA community
- This includes creating common knowledge, enabling collaboration and collective progress on important ideas, setting an example for people who are learning about EA.
- Some anonymized (via ChatGPT) quotes from the survey:
- "I’ve learned a lot about how to write thoughtfully and empathetically, particularly through engaging with Forum comments. I don’t think I would have developed this skill otherwise."
- "When I have introductory calls with people for my role, they often share fresh perspectives on EA topics. I value being able to point them to Forum posts that showcase the diversity of thought within EA. It helps demonstrate that EA encourages questioning and discourse, rather than promoting a single orthodoxy. Without the Forum, I’d have far fewer resources to highlight this."
- "I appreciated seeing that EA is already caring about future digital minds. It makes me trust the community even more."
- ^
For example, this chart from the CEA dashboard:
How to interpret this is a bit complicated, and I think reasonable people can disagree. For example, our current usage is still higher than early 2022, so one might argue that the usage going down in 2024 was just “correcting” for an earlier anomaly. Personally I still think that there is enough overall evidence to be concerned.
- ^
To clarify, this is not the only way that I think the Forum produces value. See “The value of the Forum” section below for more.
- ^
To be clear, my goal here was to start from a premise about having a positive impact and see if working on the Forum would logically follow, rather than starting from the premise that “the Forum is valuable” and understanding all its sources of value. I think there are many ways the Forum produces value for the world — you can read more about that in the “The value of the Forum” section below.
Also, again, this is my own perspective and others at CEA may disagree.
- ^
Since I can’t influence the past, I only care about going forward from now.
- ^
I use the word "community" here intending to focus on the times when people contribute public writing to discussions on the Forum (via posts/comments/quick takes). IMO this is the primary way in which the Forum exists as a community in the world.
I think that being part of the Forum community in other ways (like reading, voting, updating the wiki, etc) are also valuable, and are important for the Forum to ultimately produce positive impact.
- ^
Primarily this is because I think 1 FTE of content/community building capacity is just not enough to properly cover the wide variety of topics and ideas relevant to EA, nor is it enough to maintain situational awareness of EA as a whole, while also spending time doing the day-to-day writing tasks and running of Forum events that keep our team functional.
- ^
There’s a separate question of how much our team prioritizes Forum work vs non-Forum work. In general, I’ve been encouraging team members to work on whatever they believe is most impactful, regardless of whether it involves the Forum. This has led to an overall decrease in FTE spent on the Forum. I expect this to fluctuate over time, especially as our team tends to take on one-off non-Forum projects opportunistically (hire us for your design & software needs).
- ^
And that would be most productive on the Forum, vs another medium like an in-person conversation
- ^
For example, people who embody EA principles really well, or people who write about relevant topics on other platforms like Twitter or Substack
- ^
My latest estimate is 3.5 FTE: ~1 FTE for myself and JP, ~1 FTE of content, ~1 FTE of engineering, and ~0.5 FTE of design. We’ll likely move a bit more engineering capacity towards the Forum in the next couple months, which will get us to ~1.5 FTE of engineering, so 4 FTE total.
- ^
Let us know if you’d like us to speak at your org or event! :)
- ^
We encourage you to follow/like/share our stuff!
- ^
We’re currently considering “sub-communities” as being equivalent to our core topics (i.e. Biosecurity & pandemics, AI Safety, Global Health, Building EA, etc).
I'd say a big problem with trying to make the forum a community space is that it's just not a lot of fun to post here. The forum has a dry and serious tone and voice that emulates that of academic papers, which communicates that this is a place for posting Serious and Important articles, while attempts at levity or informality often get downvoted, and god forbid you don't write in perfect grammatically correct English. Sometimes when I'm posting here I feel a pressure to act like a robot, which is not exactly conducive to community bonding.
I do get the concern about the EA forum being very serious. I myself find it intimidating to write here and very much share the sentiment of Olivia Addy's great post.
At the same time, I don't think the culture here should change.
In defense of gatekeeping:
Anecdotal examples from my n=1:
It may look this way, but I have nothing against casual communities. In fact, in the majority of communities I'm in I am the casual lurker upvoting the memes and skipping over dissertations. I think both kinds of spaces are needed, it's just that the more niche ones need some curation/protection.
Maybe putting a link to the EA Anywhere Slack somewhere visible would be a good idea? I only learned about its existence at the recent EAG, and I think it's the kind of space that a lot of people here are after.
I sort of think that Twitter/Bluesky is the place for that, to be honest. I’m not sure that the forum needs to be that.
I'm reminded of how certain subreddits allow you to add tags/flair your posts. These serve often as metadata about the type of post (serious, venting, question, discussion, silly, etc.), and roughly informs people on how they should engage with the post. I know that the EA Forum has 'topics,' but that is about the topic of the post rather than the style/register.
Do you think it would help if the EA forum had tags like "fun/silly," "serious discussion," "butterfly thought," and so on, as a way to specifically indicate that a post should/shouldn't be interpreted in a dry and somber manner?
Personal take: with the kind of work EA is mainly about (practice altruism, reduce suffering, tackle serious issues), it is very hard to be very "fun" about it. I don't think it is about perfect grammar (I am sure you can still have grammar mistakes while being serious), but it is more about the "boundary" of "fun" and how sometimes the non-serious tone is correlated with non-serious attitude towards certain topics, and that may not be helpful to address those topics.
I see where you're coming from, but I can't help but wonder if a more cheerful approach isn't also possible and perhaps even more conducive to impact. Julia Wise's thoughts in http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/cheerfully.html and also especially Nate Soares' https://mindingourway.com/detach-the-grim-o-meter/ would perhaps go in that direction. Basically: Being grim kind of sucks long-term. And maybe being more positive will lead to more impact.
But without further empirical data this is just speculation on my part :P
(Just as a couple of thoughts that are better than my n=1: In community building the recommendation is opportunity, rather than obligation, framing, so it probably works better? I recall there also being some studies on advertisements with negative/positive/humorous tone, and the latter two had better effects. Probably low external validity though. Also, though, comedians like John Oliver probably have a much higher reach compared to the usual by just being, well, entertaining and fun.)
I am not completely sure on the emphasizing of the community building based on fun part - that might be what fundamentally I view differently on; I believe people should best be united by passion/values and the things to do, the other stuff seems a bit for entertaining/personal/socializing purposes, less for "a community with a goal" type of organizations (which could def happen in smaller subsets/scale) - people who are passionate about the values will stick around anyways is my take/current thought
On being cheerful though- that part I agree. I like posts celebrating progress as well
I don't know to what extent that this can be addressed by the EA Forum team at all, but I have been pretty disappointed by the lack of new, interesting ideas about how to better the world. It does not seem that there is really much incentive to share such ideas on the forum, because most people will only look at articles on subject matters that they are already familiar or on meta-level conversations regarding community or norms or expectations around being in the EA world. I find myself pretty frequently logging in to the EA forum hoping to find new, interesting ideas for changing the world, but just finding a bunch of banal or naval-gazing content. I think EA, and resultantly, the world, would benefit from being a more vibrant, open-minded, and creative space, but I'm not sure what would help us move in this direction.
It does seem like EA as a movement has matured (or maybe, less charitably, ossified) in what to focus on and how to approach it. In some ways that's good, but I also see how having a less nebulous/freewheeling debate makes it easier for people to see where the focus is, and to decide it's not interesting.
Perhaps this is similar to how Obama had very high approval ratings in his earliest days, when he was a blank canvas everyone projected their hopes and dreams onto. Then as he inevitably started making policies and choosing what to focus on, his approval rating slipped as initial supporters realized he wasn't going to pursue free college, single-payer healthcare, etc.
I do feel like the issues we are addressing might not be always changing frequently as we have not solved many things yet, but what could be new is the solution to solve them
It seems that users on this forum want to upvote content which is rigorous and true. So the way to gain karma is to write 10 pages defending a thesis that is obvious, as opposed to writing half a page introducing a thesis that is revolutionary.
That's not necessarily a problem. I feel like the EA Forum wants to be the end of an idea pipeline, the last step where ideas get final scrutiny, and are stamped for epistemic rigor and community consensus. Yet the beginning and middle of the pipeline sort of don't seem to exist? At least not on the public internet.
Anyway, let me know if there's a better place to post my weird EA ideas. My general sense is that weird ideas are not super welcome here.
I would guess that weird EA ideas that were appropriately caveated would do reasonably well here, and the main negative reaction is to weird ideas that are presented overconfidently? But this is just my impression of the Forum, not a result of looking over how various posts have done.
I would start with the assumption that this had a lot more to do with the larger zeitgeist vs. anything to do with what the Forum team did / didn't do. For instance:
Some of this is normal, inevitable, and even necessary as a social movement develops. I don't have any clear opinion on whether what you're identifying here fits into the normal/necessary bucket or the something-to-be-addressed bucket. My low-confidence guess is that there is something in both?
All that is to say that I would be cautious about weighing raw quantitative or qualitative data about the quality of Forum discussions too heavily in the Forum team's feedback loops. There is likely to be a lot of noise.
I wonder if the slow resurgentce of bloggng largely via substack has pulled some better content off the forum as well (uncertain)
I didn't realize it before until I read: "6. Promoting some good Forum content on other platforms", but it strikes me that there seems to be a strange lack of forum content shared elsewhere, even in other EA circles.
I don't think it content quality that is the problem (though lots of good stuff here is link-posted from elsewhere), my inclination is that content presentation just isn't amenable to sharing.
Other platforms remind you at every turn to share content, subscribe, follow, etc. The forum doesn't. Plus, maybe people aren't sharing because it doesn't have pretty pictures? Basically the norm for Substacks now is to include a nice picture at the top, even if it's just a vaguely relevant AI-generation. Substack strongly encourages writers to do this!
My guess is, but I could be wrong, EA forum content is often just difficult to share with a broader audience as it's usually not the target audience? And even when it's ideas worth sharing with a broader audience, it may still be filled with EA jargon / way of speaking that's difficult to follow for a lot of people. I am saying this assuming most people's followers aren't EAs but friends, colleagues and family. Even within EA, people are focused on different cause areas and many may not priorize reading stuff outside their cause area. I am not saying all of this is bad, I haven't thought that through, but it does make sense to me. It's similar to academic papers in a way, you generally wouldn't share those on your social media platforms. But you do send them to people you think could be interested, just like how in EA I feel like posts are shared in messages with each other all the time.
I do think encouraging to share and add a picture can help and is a good idea!
Something I've noticed more in the EA Forum is the increase in drive-by professional posts. Organizations will promote a idea, a job posting, or something else. Then they'll engage as long as they're on the front page before bouncing.
That's fine in small amounts or if the author is a regular contributor. But if the author is just stopping by to do their public engagement, then it breaks the illusion of a community.
And for me, that is the aesthetic draw of the forum. It's a place where expects and amateurs alike coexist in the same space, say things that are too rough for professional publication, and then respond to each other in real time.
It's magical and unreal that I can develop these (admittedly shallow and sometimes parasocial) relationships with people. It's cool that I have some chance of getting a leading expert to respond to my quarter-baked comment. It's cool that people sometimes recognize me in real life from what I wrote online.
And that feeling has been decreasing over time, which has made me lean more towards Slack, Discord, or even Twitter for real-time engagement. Meanwhile, I treat the Forum more as a searchable repository for EA-style research
Great comment — this gets at a lot of things that I've been thinking about. And I appreciate you sharing your personal perspective.
I like your description that "it breaks the illusion of a community", that resonates with me. I also think that posts that feel too professional discourage discussion. The flip side is that there are various ways that these kinds of posts create value:
So I'm thinking about whether we should, for example, move org posts to a separate section, but looking at the Frontpage now, it doesn't feel to me like there are too many of them. I think this fluctuates so I'll keep an eye on it.
I feel like a better long-term solution is to offset this feeling by working to increase the number of posts from individuals, and trying harder to build a community (or perhaps clusters of communities) of individuals who feel like they are in conversation with each other. Not that this is easy, but I think it's worth us trying to do, as it feels more like we are addressing the root cause and building better foundations.
Thanks for giving me a term (or perhaps a concept handle?) for this thing. I was vaguely aware of it, and it feels sort of spammy when I see it, but I didn't have a clear vocabulary to describe it previously.
I see these kind of "drive-by posts" a lot in subreddits and Slack workspaces, and even a few WhatsApp group chats that I'm in: people will join, post one advertisement/announcement, and then never be heard from again (unless they end up posting another advertisement/announcement after a few months).
More on tech vs community building
I think that in all my time working on the Forum, it’s felt more like being on a typical software product team than being on a team of community builders or organizers. For example, when our team grew around late 2022, we primarily hired product and engineering capacity. (Though this feeling is at least partly because I was hired as a software engineer; I could imagine it was less the case for our various content managers.) Our success metrics tend to be things like MAUs (monthly active users), clicks, and time on page / engagement hours.
IMO, focusing on the software made more sense when the community was growing organically, and when it was growing for reasons outside of our control (like via comms/marketing around What We Owe The Future). That’s not our current situation. While I still think there are a lot of valuable improvements we can make on the tech side, right now I believe that the community side is more neglected so we should be focusing our efforts there.
Going down to 1 FTE of engineering on the Forum has been difficult. We’ve let bugs exist for longer on the site, been worse at addressing customer service requests, and have very little capacity for longer-term investments (both in terms of improving the codebase and doing feature work). These things make me personally sad, and I’m sorry to any readers who have been affected by this. As of January, we’re starting to shift capacity back towards Forum engineering, so it will probably settle closer to 1.5 FTE. Even with the focus on community building, I think that the space that holds the community matters quite a lot and we don’t want it to start hindering our work.[1]
For more on this point, see this LW comment from Habryka.
Executive Summary:
The EA Forum Team is shifting focus toward community building over technical development, aiming to strengthen the Forum's role as a central online space for effective altruism (EA), fostering high-quality discourse, and enabling collective intellectual progress.
Key Points:
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.
More on where I’m coming from
I joined the CEA Online Team in late 2021 as a software engineer. Most of the time I’ve been on the team, I’ve been focused on building parts of the Forum that are outside of the core reading/writing experience (such as groups and connections). I still believe in my heart that this was worth working on, and that it can be particularly valuable to build out these non-core features on the margin. I have a soft spot for making “doing good” more accessible and helping more people find ways to take concrete steps, and I think the Forum is well-placed to do that.
However, as mentioned above, I think that the value of these non-core features depends on having a strong and healthy Forum community. Faced with being actually responsible for the success of the Forum, I’ve (sadly) decided that our team needs to drop most work on non-core features, and even most of the product/engineering work on core features. We’re down to approximately 1.5 FTE of software engineering on the Online Team, and much of that is taken up by non-Forum work (such as the recent CEA.org redesign). Instead, we are focusing on increasing the amount of high-quality content on the Forum, via a combination of community building and more actively steering the Forum ourselves (such as with more themed events and revisiting our moderation processes).
Since I’m relatively new at this interim role, I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and I’m probably making some mistakes. So I will again emphasize that I am very open to and interested in feedback, especially if you have any disagreements on how/why the Forum is falling short, or disagreements on how the Online Team should be spending our time.
This was a good read - thanks for sharing. In the spirit of engaging with the invitation to comment below, here are my n = 1 thoughts. Quick background: I've been EA-adjacent for ~10 years and Forum-lurking for ?? years, but only recently really identified as an EA and joined the Forum.
Main point: I would like to use the Forum more! While EA-the-movement isn't a huge part of my life, EA-the-ideas are close to my core values. I'd like to refine my moral thinking, learn more about doing good in the world, and hang out with people who are somewhat but not excessively like-minded. I stop by the Forum ~daily, but find several barriers to engaging more (whether reading or writing). In no particular order:
I don't really know that I have a suggestion here. Of all the online spaces I visit, the Forum has by far the most thoughtful comments, well researched posts, and mutual presumption of good faith. I cherish this! But I suspect it's not free.
I appreciate your thoughtful reflections! :)
I agree with this, and I hope that we can improve the situation with a combination of community building and more actively steering discussions (for example via Forum events).
Yeah I agree this is true, but I'm not sure what (if anything) to do about it. At least, if this is a problem, it doesn't feel like a top priority one to address. My hypothesis is that doing more community building work will address this somewhat, like if users feel more comfortable with each other and feel like they know each other better (than right now).
Agree with this one too. :) However I do think that having high standards does have benefits, and I currently think that we should actually have higher standards on the margin. I agree that there are trade-offs, and I am sad to lose out on good content purely due to people feeling intimidated.
If you're feeling unsure about posting something, please feel free to reach out to Toby or contact the team here. We're happy to give you feedback, and help you figure out what works on the Forum. Also, quick takes are another great solution, I def recommend using them!
This one's interesting, and I feel like I don't know how to evaluate whether this is true. I think there's a related phenomenon where, when someone is first learning about EA, there are a ton of ideas that are new to them, and over time the rate of encountering novel ideas decreases (partly because there are less low-hanging fruit maybe?). I agree that having "more polite, thoughtful, good-faith disagreement" on the Forum would be great though, and I hope that our team can build up a community that encourages that. (If you have any specific people in mind who could bring that energy here, please reach out to Toby and send him suggestions!)
Reading Evan's comment and Sarah's response -- along with some other comments like @titotal's -- updates me to a mild-to-moderate degree toward the possibility that there may be a felt (and possibly real) need for two or more related spaces that call for mutually inconsistent design criteria. One might be more academic, formal, and rigorous while the other related space would be more flexible, open, and accessible. That feels like a big change from the status quo, and I'm hardly confident my update is directionally correct. But I think it's worth pondering whether different groups of users may be seeking things from the Forum experience that are valid, worthwhile, and yet incompatible.
Thanks for writing this! Re this:
I've noticed that comments with more disagree than agree votes often have more karma votes than karma. Whether this is good or bad depends on the quality of the comment, but sometimes the comments are productive and helpful, and so the fact that people are downvoting them seems bad for a few reasons: first, it disincentivizes commenting; second, it incentivizes saying things that you think people will agree with, even at the expense of saying what is true. (Of course, it's good to try to frame things more persuasively when this doesn't come at the cost of speaking honestly.) The edit here provides an example of how I think this threatens to undermine epistemic and discursive norms on the Forum.
I'm not sure what the solution is here—I've suggested this previously, but am not sure it'd be helpful or effective. And it may turn out that this issue—how does the Forum incentivize making/promote helpful comments that people disagree with?—is relatively intractable, or hard to solve without making sacrifices in other domains. (Another thought that occurred to me is doing what websites like the NYT do: having "NYT recommended comments" and "reader recommended comments," but I assume the mods don't want to be in the business of weighing in on the merits of particular comments.)
Note that the number of karma votes is not accurate, I think it gives users the impression that there are more downvotes than there actually are.
Yeah thanks for flagging this, I was going to mention the same thing. The vote count when you hover over the karma includes users who only reacted and didn't vote on the karma portion. I do think this gives people the overall impression that there are more downvotes than there actually are. :( I put up a PR to try to fix this.
EDIT: Oops sorry I should have watched the video first, it was not the same thing I was thinking of... 😅 But I think the bug I mentioned is worse in any case so hopefully we can deploy a fix.
Weird bug. But it only happens when someone votes and unvotes multiple times, and when you vote again the count resets. So this is unlikely to skew anything by much.
Thanks for flagging that! I want to acknowledge that, independent of the bug I mentioned earlier, there could still be an issue of users downvoting in a way that does not align with Forum norms. One thing we could do is update the wording of the tooltip that explains karma voting, since I think "How much do you like this overall?" is not exactly the right question to ask. I agree that asking whether the content is productive or like, contributing value to the discussion, is closer. I also agree that we don't want to disincentivize people from productively saying things that they expect others to disagree with.
We have actually considered asking moderators to highlight good comments in a way similar to what you suggest. :) I've also considered bringing back the Forum prize but just for comments (I actually currently feel quite optimistic about experimenting with a Forum prize of some kind).
Yeah, I think these are great ideas! I’d love to see the Forum prize come back; even if there was only a nominal amount of (or no) money attached, I think it would still be motivating; people like winning stuff.
Policing strong downvotes better may be a relatively low-cost way to mitigate this. The status quo risks disincentivizes making comments to which a few people who are willing to use their strongvote hammers will react negatively.
With the caveat that underlying data are unavailable, I get the sense that some users are too trigger-happy on the strong downvote button for content with which they disagree. I've suggested requiring strong downvoters to check a box or enter text justifying their vote -- which might serve as a "stop and think" moment against reflexive use of the button. The voting norms are relatively restrictive on what rises to the level of justifying a strong downvote, although these are not exclusive:
I wouldn't be opposed to giving mods the power to downgrade strong downvotes to standard ones in certain circumstances. For example, where there is a significant number of upvotes on a post or comment, that discrepancy suggests that the strong reaction of a strong downvote may be outside the range of reasonable responses to the post or comment. Requiring that kind of objective indicator would prevent mods from downgrading strong downvotes willy-nilly.
I’ve been active here for some time, but I feel like my thoughts and ideas don’t quite align with the EA community. It often seems like there’s an expectation to think, write, or approach topics in a specific way, or to focus on what’s considered “interesting,” which may have cultural influences. I’ve been contemplating stepping back from writing here, as the forum seems to work best for those whose perspectives fall within its accepted norms.
Thanks for writing this Sarah; nice to have leaders sharing thinking/requesting feedback!
My quick ‘off-the-cuff’ thoughts in response:
I definitely agree the Forum is critical as a “space” in EA, particularly for those of us who aren’t living in a hub, have access to conferences, nor work directly in an organization. It can often feel at times like being a buoy at sea without that direct connection - the handful of times I’ve drifted from EA over the years it has been the Forum pulling me back in (by helping me get up to speed on what’s going on especially in cases like the FTX stuff … and contests are often one of the few ways I feel I can participate - i.e. open phil’s worldview prize, red teaming, future fund RFP).
I have at times seen established EAs “punch-down” on the “extremely online” EAs and I’ve felt that to be a shallow judgement of those of us not privy to direct engagement opportunities. It definitely gave me the impression the movement and community are two separate entities not always aligned. I’d like to think the Forum could better blur that distinction to avoid hubs becoming silos with strong views (which I think contributes to the confusion around the public perception of EA).
That aside, the Forum right now is confusing because it’s providing multiple services in one; a newspaper, an opportunities/classifieds board, a library (the wiki) and a discussion space though not as free flowing as slack/discord. Now with groups and CRM and event tracking it’s becoming a catch-all for EA information. Given this…
Has the forum team considered reframing the Forum as an intranet? (Note, the intranet model is often associated with corporations but it’s used in a lot of contexts for brand community sites, colleges and social groups).
I’m thinking one of the limitations of the Forum is that the name implies one feature, but now the Forum is so much more than that - if we were to shift away from centralizing “the Forum” aspect and make it the “Hub” or “EA Online”... whatever it’s called, the idea is to step back and reframe the online space as more than just a “forum” because that’s what it’s becoming, as evidenced by CEA taking on the EA Hub and the Opps Board recently, it’s clear the goal is for CEA to manage the movement’s digital infrastructure.
I see the intranet design helping resolve issues like low engagement. If people can accomplish multiple things like search/apply for jobs, join topic threads, and chat with each other, complete surveys and more, they may be more likely to login and engage. This can help on the backend with things like surveys, community health team work (ticket system), and maybe down the road a common app or work trials. It also helps draw a boundary around community conversations that don’t need to be as public (which I think is a huge deterrent for engagement right now).
I’d be happy to discuss more in-depth and share some examples of what I’m visualizing here but I’ve long thought the Forum was heading in the “intranet” direction and could provide a lot of benefit for both members of the movement and those running infrastructure for it.
It's great how transparent you are with your reasoning and how clearly you expressed it
I'm sure I have some thoughts, but to begin with, it would helpful for understanding what's going on if the dashboard would tell us how 2024 went for the events and groups teams.
Agree. Although, while the Events dashboard isn’t up to date, I notice that the EAG team released the following table in a post last month, which does have complete 2024 data:
EAG applicant numbers were down 42% from 2022 to 2024,[1] which is a comparable decline to that in monthly Forum users (down 35% from November 2022’s peak to November 2024).[2]
To me, this seems like pretty strong evidence that the dropping numbers are driven by changes in the larger zeitgeist rather than by any particular thing the Events or Online team is doing (as @Jason surmises in his comment above).
(3460/5988) x 100% = 58% (2 s.f.)
(3561/5509) x 100% = 65% (2 s.f.)
Note that, in a surprising (to me) coincidence, the absolute numbers of annual EAG applicants and monthly EA Forum users are very similar.
Love this post Sarah, and I'm excited to work more on Forum community building this year.
To add a bit to the "Message Toby with ideas for authors you would like to see writing here" CTA:
Last year, we had some success cross-posting blogs on the Forum - for example, Lewis Bollard's Farm Animal Welfare Newsletter, Lauren Gilbert's Lauren Policy, and this post from Oliver Kim's Global Developments blog. Generally, this is a pretty ad hoc decision - a member of our team spots a great post or finds a great blog through Twitter or Substack, and then we message the author to ask if we can crosspost. I'd previously been concerned that doing too much of this might lead to a Forum with more great content, but less great conversations, especially if the authors didn't engage with the comments. So far, the results have been quite different, with authors being more keen to engage with the comments than I'd expected, and good conversations often occurring even if they don't.
I often talk to people who use the Forum but don't see enough discussion of the particular cause they are most interested in. EA is a broad tent, and the Forum will always reflect that, but the best version of the Forum would contain vibrant sub-communities for each of the key causes. You can help make this happen by keeping the Forum in mind when you are reading substack/twitter/other sources of bloggy content. If you find someone who is writing interesting content which would work as a Forum post, let me know! I can handle the reaching out/ consent to post/ automation of crossposting on your behalf.
To clarify, this isn't exactly a service I'm offering (I'll take suggestions as suggestions), and you are always very welcome to just linkpost a great post rather than going through me. But I don't have blog omniscience, even though I write the EA Newsletter, and there is a lot of content on the internet that would be a great addition to the discussion of particular cause areas on the Forum, but wouldn't initially register as interesting to me.
If you view the forum from a UX lens and put it in the context of different categories of online community infrastructures (e.g. Facebook/Twitter feed of short posts, Discord/Slack channel-based, Quora/StackExchange/Reddit upvote/question-based and more traditional forums with defined categories/aubcategories and threads), what do you think are the pros and cons of how the Forum is currently structured and how does that facilitate (or not facilitate) what you would like to see happen in online EA community building? Would also be curious to hear how you would compare the Forum to that of the many existing EA Slack channels.
Personally, I'm not using the forum as much as I could and as much as I used to, because it is a time-sink. I'm the kind of person who can easily get lost on the Internet; clicking a link here and opening another tab there, and... look where those two hours went. Because of this, I'm wary of spending too much time here.
I don't know whether my declining forum use is due to changes in my behavior or changes to the forum. Probably it's a combination. On the forum side, the home page feels a bit more cluttered than it used to be. The forum feels slightly more gamified (e.g., emoji reactions).
I don't have concrete suggestions, other than thinking about what would be an ideal time for users to spend on the forum. A time that takes both the forum quality and its user's productivity into account.
That's very fair! I certainly don't want anyone to use the Forum more than they believe is worthwhile. My guess is that a healthy relationship with the Forum looks different for different people, and I don't think that every single reader should engage with the Forum more than they currently do. I recommend that people customize their Forum experience and customize their Frontpage to help with them find a good balance.
Two general notes on UXD:
1) It could be worth conducting user tests of whether people find the site's landing page being the forum feed overwhelming. It’s hard to get your bearings on that page versus say the “best of the forum” page. People typically like to be guided initially in an experience and get a feel for what’s available, then explore. Or even just a pop-up with “learn about the forum” (it takes a minute to find the link for that page on the sidebar and these days people bounce within seconds).
2) In the spirit of the intranet comment above, I’d love to see the CRM hidden behind a logged-in view; this could just be my “safety” lens but having a giant list of confirmed EAs in public view seems problematic (sadly, something to consider these days). Maybe ask community health team for their view on it? but when it rolled out I was a little irked to see it created without first asking users if they want to be placed on such a definitive, public listing.
You could substantially increase your weekly active users, converting monthly active users (MAU) into weekly and even daily users, and increasing MAU as well, by using push notifications to inform users of replies to their posts and comments and other events that are currently only sent as in-forum notifications to most users. Many, many times, I have posted on the forum, sent a comment or reply, and only weeks later seen that there was a response. On the other hand, I will get an email from twitter or bluesky if one person likes my post, and I immediately go on to see who it was. In doing so you will draw people to the forum at the exact time their engagement will encourage others to come back, building up a positive flywheel of engagement.
These features are already built into your forum but are off by default! This surprised me greatly because most online forum--not only feedscrolling websites like X and Facebook, but also forum-style websites like Substack and Wordpress--make it easy or default to get push notifications via email. That builds engagement as I've described. Often when I post on Tyler Cowen's Wordpress-based Marginal Revolution blog, I get a tonne of email notifications of replies and discussions about that topic. It's a bit overwhelming, but it's fun!
Users who just use your notification default (notifications within the website, but no few push notifications) probably make up the vast majority of active users and passive users (if not the most active users). If it is possible to identify users who have not deliberately turned off notifications, I strongly suggest that you flip the default to affect those users who haven't deliberately set a notification policy to send push notifications. This will get a small hit from people who dislike this, but you could mitigate this by e.g., an email in your next digest to inform people of why you are making the change.
I have long thought this was a missing feature on EA Forum; now I know it exists, but is turned off.
@titotal said that it's not a lot of fun to post here. I agree, and I also think that making it more immediately rewarding to post, by informing people of others' engagement with their content as soon as it happens, would make it a lot more fun. It will make me personally very happy if you do this!
Great post, and thanks for the transparency, Sarah! I agree with focussing more on content over tech.
Sarah, thanks for the post, very interesting. 2 ideas:
1) Why not form a group of volunteers that will be a combination of:
- a focus group (to test new ideas or have quick surveys or something else) and
- an advisory group (to propose new ideas)?
2) Why not have a regular remote (text only or video) interview with an interesting (but maybe not so well-known) person from outside of EA? You could post a list of potential candidates (and broad topics) for such an interview (whom we may already know how to approach) and ask to vote. To add some extra weight to their votes, people could complement them with some specific questions to the "speakers" they choose. Of course, you could also choose some speakers solely at your team's discretion.
This will: (a) generate new interesting content for the users and (b) at the same time will attract more attention to EA.
Just as an example - here is a research report on the Russian funding of war that was recently widely quoted - https://navigatingrussia.substack.com/p/russias-hidden-war-debt
The author is a top expert on Russia but he is not widely known outside of Russia-focused expert community, so he is clearly undervalued from the viewpoint of publicity. And there are a lot of such interesting people.
And finally, my strong view is that if suddenly EA forum disappeared it could not be substituted by any other platform - neither Reddit, nor Twitter, nor Substack nor something else. So please continue to move on!