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]:

1. My baseline assumption is that EA’s influence will be net good for the world^[4].
   1. 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.
2. 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.
   1. In other words: our team can do good by moving EA towards its most impactful version.
3. Developing/sustaining a central online space for EA seems like a strong bet to enable that.
   1. 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.
   2. 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.
4. 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.
   1. 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.
5. 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.
   1. Possibly excepting if the existing space is really actively bad, which I don’t think the Forum is.
6. 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.
   1. Meaning, it will come to represent “what EA is” to a pretty significant degree, in some global sense.
7. 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.
   1. Essentially, you can think of building the Forum community as a smaller version of building the EA community. The mandate is similar.
   2. 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].
   3. 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.
8. 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.
   1. 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.

1. 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)
2. Discussions on the Forum meet our high standards of epistemic legibility and truth-seeking, in addition to high standards of kindness and respect
3. 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
4. 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
5. Novel or fringe ideas that are relevant and communicated clearly are welcome, and users take these ideas seriously and engage with them
6. 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
7. 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
8. There is enough new accessible content so that non-experts can get some value from reading and don’t feel alienated
9. 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:

1. Meeting with people who are/were/could be strong contributors, overall spending more time creating and maintaining these connections
2. Broadly, considering ways we can produce good content and steer community discussions
   1. Putting more effort into running Forum events, primarily on the planning and author outreach side, though also on the feature development side
   2. Doing coordination between people/orgs that would not happen otherwise (the lowest-effort version being things like this thread)
3. Being more open with our work and communicating more with the community, positioning ourselves more as active community builders
4. Running workshops about writing on the Forum at conferences, and giving talks for people at EA orgs or related programs like fellowships^[11]
5. Technical work focused on making the writing experience feel better (like improving notifications)
6. Promoting some good Forum content on other platforms (Twitter, Reddit, Substack, Instagram) and promoting our Forum events more (Slack, Facebook, LinkedIn, emailing users)
   1. This helps extend the reach of the Forum, rewards Forum authors, and supports CEA’s overall goal of stewarding the EA brand^[12]
7. 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:

1. Helping people stay motivated to do good
   1. 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.
   2. Some anonymized (via ChatGPT) quotes from the survey:
      1. "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."
      2. "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."
2. Helping people donate more effectively or improving their work
   1. This includes by receiving valuable feedback, reading relevant content, and participating in discussions with others that have similar interests.
   2. Some anonymized (via ChatGPT) quotes from the survey:
      1. "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."
      2. 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."
3. Helping impactful work happen (sooner)
   1. This includes things like, individuals getting valuable career advice or applying to job opportunities, organizations finding candidates, and projects happening sooner.
   2. Some anonymized (via ChatGPT) quotes from the survey:
      1. "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."
      2. "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."
4. Scaffolding and steering the EA community
   1. This includes creating common knowledge, enabling collaboration and collective progress on important ideas, setting an example for people who are learning about EA.
   2. Some anonymized (via ChatGPT) quotes from the survey:
      1. "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."
      2. "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."
      3. "I appreciated seeing that EA is already caring about future digital minds. It makes me trust the community even more."

1. ^{^}

   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.

2. ^{^}

   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.

3. ^{^}

   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.

4. ^{^}

   Since I can’t influence the past, I only care about going forward from now. 

5. ^{^}

   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.

6. ^{^}

   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.

7. ^{^}

   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).

8. ^{^}

   And that would be most productive on the Forum, vs another medium like an in-person conversation

9. ^{^}

   For example, people who embody EA principles really well, or people who write about relevant topics on other platforms like Twitter or Substack

10. ^{^}

    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.

11. ^{^}

    Let us know if you’d like us to speak at your org or event! :)

12. ^{^}

    We encourage you to follow/like/share our stuff!

13. ^{^}

    We’re currently considering “sub-communities” as being equivalent to our core topics (i.e. Biosecurity & pandemics, AI Safety, Global Health, Building EA, etc).