I basically agree with the observation, but I'm less sure about both diagnosis and management. I would primarily attribute forum decline to structural developments (vs. say, the 'golden age' ~10 years ago):

1. Specialisation: If the last decade or two of work has 'made progress' on EA topics, we might expect it to get progressively harder for newcomers to usefully increment the state of the art. So you might also expect something like the specialization we see in science: it takes years for someone to get up to speed on astronomy, astronomers mostly discuss their work with fellow astronomers, a little with related disciplines (e.g. sometimes physicists, very rarely oncologists), and their channel to the general public is education/comms/service rather than 'invite all comers to our conferences'. 

The price of this progress is there are fewer valuable discussions to have on a general forum. Specialized venues are more attractive to subject-matter experts as they select for a higher quality audience than a '101-space'. Perennial 'cause prio questions' have been tilled over extensively (and most old hands have resiliently made up their minds), so the prospects of the n+1th discussion of (say) the poor meat eater problem finding the consideration which settles the matter looks increasingly remote. 

So the 'evergreen' topics get tightly circumscribed to: 1) General-ish topics which are still niche enough not to inspire a funder to employ a small army of analysts to attack (perhaps my own 'epistemic self-help' oeuvre). 2) Community drama/gossip: no barrier to entry to pile in, and at least the particular gory details are novel. 3) 'Community engagement' through press-release/announcement/ad.  

2. Competing options for contributor time: Harking back to my glory days, my archetype then was shared by many other 'EA forum grandees': 20-something, early-career job outside EA, writing here as an unpaid hobby. That archetype has largely evaporated. These people are now 30-something (and the incipient-middle-age dividends of spouse/kids/ailing parents seldom grant oodles more 'free time'), are now mid-career+ (ditto), and - perhaps most importantly - are often 'doing something EA(/adjacent)' as their job. 

The latter competes with forum activity: their day job both pays much more (i.e. at all) and is better matched to whatever their strengths may be than labouring to contribute on an online forum. Even those who are especially well-suited to online writing have much easier opportunities to 'go pro' or try and monetize themselves rather than provide their surplus for free than back in times of yore.

--

If the above is most of the story, then 'intellectual culture'-style tweaks can only really help around the edges. In essence, the forum thrived at a time when amateurism was the norm, and inefficiency alongside altruism collectively generated a public surplus (e.g. 'investment banker spends their evenings on an early write-up for AI giving opportunities'). Although hopefully altruism has not faded, efficiency has improved, and so energy which was once spent on the forum now gets redirected to more effective ends.  

So much to say in response to this. First of all, thank you for caring, and for writing this appeal. 

I want to start by reassuring you that I agree. Not necessarily with all of your prescriptions (though they are all worth considering) but with the diagnosis. I agree that the Forum has been marginally too focused on 'growth'. 

As Sarah writes in another comment, CEA, or a lot of CEA work is indeed focused on community growth. We are proposing an alternative goal for the Forum - roughly 'effectiveness for engaged EAs'. In practice (I'm working on finalising metrics today) this means measuring some proxy metrics - like % of people in "EA" jobs who visit the Forum at least monthly (relevance), number of words in comments (loose proxy for quality of discussion, especially if tempered by karma and ignoring AI), and some measure of ultimate impact, probably surveys of engaged EAs to find out when posts change their donation or career decisions. We've been testing this new theory of change out over the last few months.

Unfortunately, since we've started experimenting with the new ToC, we've had a lot of capacity issues - Sarah left, Agnes is on Maternity, I had to take two months of unscheduled leave for family reasons etc... the bottom line is that right now we are one dev, and one me (who has just got back to work). Despite this we have been able to make some moves in the direction of this ToC: 

• The cluelessness critiques competition is not an event we would have run for engagement reasons - I was running it because it highlights an important crux for engaged EAs.
• The featured page is (the first draft of) an attempt to create future-proofed infrastructure to highlight the best posts on the Forum as EA undergoes growth. I appreciate that its current instantiation has some issues, which I hope to get to this quarter.
• My plans for Giving Season (to be announced tomorrow, I hope) are focused almost entirely on causing high quality conversations on important cruxes for engaged EAs. 

This new direction for the Forum came from me thinking about two things you mentioned. 

1. "I’m a bit concerned that the EA Forum is going to die a slow death." - This keeps me up at night fairly often - I don't want the Forum to die full stop, and definitely not on my watch.
2. And this: "To me, the EA Forum was the core intellectual center of EA in the past. It was a place where there was reliably extremely high-quality discussion about difficult ideas. I think that the best version of EA maintains this, and getting the Forum to that place again is pretty important for the future of EA."

That second point is what I called in some memos the 'social reproduction of EA'. We could easily grow an EA movement that is overly attached to the current institutions and beliefs of EAs - a movement that takes current 'cause areas' as fixed, and gets a lot of people into great jobs. This would be very impactful in the short term. But if we want there to be an EA movement existing into the future (i.e. in the next decade) that is capable of coming up with new ideas, and pivoting to the new most impactful cause areas when that's what the world needs - we need to continually recreate EA as an intellectual community, as well as a practical one. This isn't a unique problem to our time, it's in the natural life cycle of a highly committed EA to be excited by a range of causes and ideas, then over time make more commitments such that it is harder, emotionally and likely fiscally, to change direction. 

I'm not sure whether the Forum has been successful in the social reproduction of EA in the past - there are some examples of people who become contributing EAs through engagement just with the Forum, but I'd guess that more people become EAs through in-person communities in concert with the Forum, and without the Forum, 'EA ideas' will by default come from orgs which have constrained charitable purposes, and are therefore more sticky and less able to pivot than individuals. 

Much more to say but the point is I agree, and I'm very interested in making and keeping the Forum as the intellectual core of EA.

Quickfire on some of your suggestions. 

• Substack crossposting: This was a very interesting point to read, I'll be thinking about it more. My current strategy with Substack has been to crosspost the best of what I see - with the ultimate aim of ensuring that an engaged EA would not need to check both the Forum and Substack. I agree that this has costs, especially in terms of having to accommodate the worse epistemics that are the norm on Substack. Your comment makes me reconsider whether we should eat that cost - I like the idea of having some way to link-post that doesn't take up the space of a full post. Perhaps the easiest test here is a weekly links and discussion thread.
• CCBY: This was a decision made before my time that has only been mentioned to me once or twice as an issue. If it's low cost for us to switch to a more flexible regime, and it would lead to more posts, even just from you, it might well be worth it. I'll check it out.
• Prizes and contests: These can be hit or miss, but we have long considered bringing back Forum comment prizes (Though Aaron did discontinue them for a reason, this reason may not hold anymore). I was pleased with how the cluelessness critiques week turned out, and I'd definitely consider running more such competitions (organisations can reach out to me if they'd like to propose sponsoring one, as Macroscopic did for that week).
  • I do also think that theme weeks and debate weeks have pretty great ROI in the same way as competitions, and as we get more capacity I plan to run more regular events. In the mean time, collaborative events can be easier to run, so if you are an individual or an org who would like to run an event with the Forum to encourage discussion of a cruxy issue for engaged EAs, message me.
• AI generated content: This is part of a broader thing we want to do when we have more mod capacity. LessWrong has a rejected content feature which lets them be more opinionated about what they want on the site. We've long planned to implement this and have been constrained by capacity (both dev and mod). The Featured Page is working somewhat to do the opposite (the carrot not the stick) but it isn't quite enough for the most engaged users (it only gets around 1 post a day). I'm keen to do something here - probably not outright banning AI content though, because I don't think that is the future-proof option.
• Ask people to apply to join the Forum: I've been thinking about this recently, especially with recent waves of time-consuming bots signing up (you guys hopefully never see this because they can't post until they are approved, but a lot of behind the scenes work, mostly from @Dane Valerie goes into checking the legitimacy of new posters). Facebook groups have that little box where you have to explain why you want to join and an admin approves you - I think something like this might work great for the Forum. I'll consider it further.
  • Overall I'm probably a bit less keen on gate-keeping than you, but also I agree more than I disagree. The Forum, as I see it, should not be positioned as a 'top of funnel' product. However I do think that it can be helpful for people who are learning how to think like EAs and I don't want it to be totally inaccessible to them. 

Thanks again for writing it, and let me know if you (or other commenters) want to find a time to chat about the Forum on a call. I'm especially keen to hear more ideas, like these, for achieving the vision of the Forum that I think we share. 

Caveat here that I'm representing only my views, as EA Forum Product Lead, and not the considered views of CEA the organisation. 

I agree with the existence of a problem, but mostly don't think the proposed solutions will lead to major wins. My guess is that, roughly, "Constellation/Anthropic Slack killed EA Forum" - in that there's been a lot of evaporative cooling of the most high context people towards private chats and docs, and also specifically towards AI safety (as Fran notes).

I am quite interested in pushing against this gradient - see https://manifund.substack.com/p/total-safety-transparency about the importance of posting in public. 

For now, I'm trying other initiatives to increase the amount of great writing and discussion - https://justwrite.club/ is one example, and I think an "EA Inkhaven" might also be pretty great if anyone wanted to facilitate that. 

With a lot of love in my heart: I'm also uncertain that CEA is the right org to steward the EA Forum. From the outside it seems like the CEA online team has been losing great people, both technical and community/cultural talent. (Also I would guess the right format of a new "forum" looks completely different from the classic internet forums, given new AI capabilities - eg maybe more moltbook, or something even more wild.)

Would be interested in disagreement, fwiw here are my misc. thoughts on the forum and my experience with it:

• Since starting to work on AI safety full-time about 10 months ago, I feel extremely hyper-focussed on AI risk. Both because I am very worried about it, and also because to work well in the field, there is a lot of information to keep up with. I don't feel like I have much brain space for other stuff right now.
• I would say the main AI risk conversations are not happening on the EA forum, I personally keep up with X, Substack. And more than anything, I gain a lot of information from just talking to researchers at my organization and seeing what articles people are sharing in Slack, also I learn a lot from in-person safety events in the Bay Area.
• I could be wrong, but I kind of feel like this has led to almost a "brain drain" dynamic where AI safety people are mostly not keeping up with the EA Forum. That approximately leaves GH&W, animal welfare, other misc. EA-related topics (e.g. forecasting) and meta-EA conversation.
• ^ I don't feel like I have a sense of where the main GH&W and animal welfare conversations happen, so someone else would need to speak to that.
• I do feel like the EA Forum is still the main place for meta-EA conversation. For "meta-EA" from a kind of underlying ideas/philosphy perspective, I don't think there's a ton happening right now, to my knowledge. From a community perspective, I also don't tend to come to the forum first. This may be down to my personal taste, but I feel like I get the most out of people being candid and speaking freely about the community & I think that is much easier and nicer to do on Substack or personal blogs.
• Specifically with meta-EA conversation, I do also personally feel the forum is rehashing many of the same convos over and over. I've been involved 8 years now so personally I just can't read about PR anymore or people's thoughts on the brand or FTX. 

Agreed that it's worth trying to improve the EA Forum. Most of your suggestions are about how to screen out low-quality posts. What I really care about is how to get more high-quality posts and comments.

Why aren't there more high-quality posts?

• Writing high-quality posts is hard in general.
• Maybe people who used to write good posts are now doing other important work, and don't have time to write.
• Maybe some high-quality posts have moved off the EA Forum and onto other places.

Why aren't there more high-quality comments?

• Engaging with other people's work is hard, and usually you don't get any benefit from it.
• ? (LessWrong gets a lot of high-quality comments, even though writing comments is hard. How can EAF comments be more like LW?)

"Get people to write more good content" is sort of a hard problem in general—there is no "good content dial" that you can turn. One answer that comes to mind is that grantmakers should pay more people to write, and especially to write comments / engage with other people's work. I don't know if anyone in history has ever gotten a grant solely for the purpose of writing forum comments, but it seems like the sort of thing that's totally worth funding under the right circumstances.

Or there could be weekly comment prizes for the top 3 comments of the week, or something like that.

Inkhaven is an attempt at getting people to write more. Few Inkhaven residents post on EAF. Why is that?

You can just do things

My experience is that people often don't post for the mundane reason that they didn't really think about it.^[1] Contests are a good way of counteracting this, but the monetary reward is usually not very motivating, it's just that it makes "posting about X" become a Thing with a Deadline etc.

An implication of this is that anyone (even you, dear reader) can solve this problem with a couple days of work:

1. Message a few people that authors would value feedback from, say "hey, if I got people to write about X, would you commit to replying?"
2. Message a few prospective authors, say "hey, I've gotten these people to commit to giving feedback, would you be willing to post something?"
3. Once you've got 5-10 people to agree, post that it's happening
4. Follow up a few times with reminders because people are disorganized

This is basically all I did for the AI Pause Debate, for example, and that seemed to go fairly well. 

1. ^{^}

   For example: I am commenting here because someone messaged me to suggest that I do so. Otherwise I likely wouldn't have seen this post.

Thanks so much for writing this. I broadly agree with your post, and I've been concerned about this ever since I took over the Forum team a little over 2 years ago. I still believe that the most important thing the Forum team should do is proactive/intentional community building, i.e. cultivating a community around a specific group of people and culture that will generate valuable discussions, which could involve many of the specific interventions in your list. Measure progress based on the value of all the discussions rather than the number of people participating.

Based on my experience as team lead I'm not that optimistic about things turning around while the Forum is still at CEA, especially while CEA is focused on growth and brand. With Rory and Amy leaving, it feels like there are fewer and fewer people in CEA leadership who "get" the Forum. I seriously considered spinning the Forum out of CEA — I left before anything came of that but there's maybe a small chance that still happens. I think it's plausible that's the only real way to preserve the intellectual community version (although who knows, maybe CEA will hire someone in a year or two who can turn things around). 

@Toby Tremlett🔹 and I worked closely on Forum strategy and I trust him to care about this as well. However, he is at a significant disadvantage relative to when I was team lead (ex. he basically has to do 3 jobs, no one was hired to backfill any loss of Forum capacity and there are no open JDs for the project) so I think it will be an uphill battle.

Because I like you and like your writing and you included yourself and you sort of paid me a reverse compliment with your subsequent bullet point, I am magnanimously choosing not to be offended by you calling my "more than 90% human-written" post "half-AI generated". 

But yes, I kind of agree with your diagnosis of the problem. 

I would also note that the incentives are still there to post on the forum even if you get no engagement or comments or karma. So even if nothing I wrote on my Substack ever generated any useful engagement here, there are still reasons to do it for GEO and a few referrals per post.

I would also note for the record that my Substack is free, so it doesn't directly affect my bottom line, but obviously traffic and cross-referrals help in other ways, and so this incentive is still there.

I haven't thought too much about your proposed solutions, but some sort of gatekeeping or rate limiting seems like a good idea. The issue is, as you say, rewarding bright new young thinkers sufficiently that they can gain a lot of karma and a following.

I would personally be fine with a world where it was somewhat hard to get something published on the forum, which would force me to create specific posts that cleared a bar, and completely discourage unedited cross-posting.

As a single data point in support of your argument, I used to read the EA Forum a few times per week. According to a data from the EA forum, I was a 98% percentile user. I commented on lots of posts and recognized the names of frequent users. I had a long list of potential posts to write (that are gathering virtual dust), at least some of which probably would have been good posts. These days, I'll visit the EA Forum once a month or less.

Why is this? In roughly descending order of importance:

• I am busy with work; I have a job that involves me working overtime almost every week. My mental energy and my motivation to read the forum is quite low after a long and stressful workday.
• I have the vague impression that I've mostly gotten what I wanted out of the EA Forum: I learned the things, and the new stuff getting posted doesn't really seem to add much. I loved visiting https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/recommendations to see the 'best ever' posts that I haven't yet read. I would literally read a few of those, refresh the page to see the next handful, and read a few of them. But when I look at the list of best posts that I haven't read yet, they just don't strike me as very interesting. Maybe they are mundane, maybe they are re-hashing something that I'm already familiar with, but for one reason or another I'm not as interested in them.
• I have the vague impression that there is more slop. There are shallowly self-promotional posts. There are personal blog posts that are basically saying I did a thing and got lucky; you should do it too. There are a lot of organizations posting updates that I think just aren't worthy of being shared on the Forum. Some posts read/feel like they are a corporate blog, or a Substack post of a person actively trying to build their reputation.^[1]

1. ^{^}

   Maybe I should be more forgiving of people trying to build their reputation through online publications. After all, I did that somewhat. I wouldn't have gotten a job in EA if I hadn't posted to the EA Forum. And it isn't a morally horrendous thing to try and get your writing discovered. I guess I can't really gesture to anything more than a hazy sense that some recent writings seem less genuine/sincere.

I agree with most of what’s been said already. Some not-yet-mentioned (and probably half baked) thoughts:

• Community drama/gossip discussion here might have a positive flow-through effect on general Forum readership. Some people who come for the drama will stick around and engage with more impactful posts.
• Writing for a Substack audience is different from writing for the EA Forum. When I write here, I am writing to an audience of intelligent and considerate people who share a lot of EA cultural context with me. When I write on Substack, I deliberately explain foundational EA concepts and/or rehash standard arguments people here have read dozens of times, and I expect much less thoughtful responses. So I don’t crosspost from Substack to here, because I’d have to at minimum rewrite my post to be respectful to informed EA Forum readers’ time, and I don’t have the spare time to do that. Most Substack crossposts I skim here are similarly written for more general audiences, so their signal-to-noise ratio is lower than posts written for the Forum. For me, spending more time writing for Substack means spending less time writing for the EA Forum, which tells me I should write for here more at the expense of my Substack.
• I like the EA Forum debates and contests a lot. I just wish they got much more engagement.
• LessWrong has more high quality takes than the EA Forum, but it also has more low quality takes. They seem to have cultivated a “takey” culture where people’s activation energy to post takes is much lower than it is here. While I don’t love bad takes, I do love lively engagement, and there’s something to learn from LW here. Quick Takes are fun, and maybe there’s a way to lower the engagement barrier further.
• When I comment here, I’m often commenting to help out newer EAs who are posting about well-known topics most of us have settled in our minds years ago. I remember being a young whippersnapper EA being so excited to learn. Sadly, mentorship of others is much less intrinsically motivating. I wish there was a way to I could increase my motivation to mentor, but I don’t know how.

I agree that EA Forum seems to be declining.

There seems to be a problem with who is willing to pay the search costs to read and evaluate EA forum posts in the time that they would naturally be on the front page. People are naturally incentivized to free-ride on the efforts of previous readers who upvote or comment on the posts. But the initial evaluators would be spending time on less interesting/valuable posts on average. When you have a high enough readership population, you will probably get enough people who are interested to occasionally evaluate new posts, which provides enough signal to the rest of the readership to provide further evaluation, and creates virtuous cycles. But without sufficient readership, there likely will not be enough people engaging with posts that are not easily legible (and accessible and popular). Potential writers of EA forum posts then notice that it is unlikely that their forum posts will be read during the time that they are generally viewable (on the first page or two), and then either may decline to generate the writings or share it on the forum.

I notice that I have been less incentivized on the margin to do EA forum posts, simply because I find it unlikely that people will read it during the front page period where it would be generally viewable.

One solution would be to have people dedicated to performing that initial evaluation of posts function, either in a paid or volunteer capacity. That initial signal could facilitate follow on reading and engagement from the community by paying the initial discovery costs that are not adequately incentivized with our current level of readership.

"It's possible that the death of the EA Forum is downstream from other community dynamics (like a massive shift to AI safety from previously highly engaged people)."

I discovered the EA movement and specifically this forum thanks to my growing interest in AI Safety that lead me here, so my case was the other way around. Maybe this compensates the trend you described.

Anyway, your points sound quite reasonable and hope most of them land within the forum managers! I might not know much of the forum history, but most members I have read and talked with seem great. You surely are an open-minded, well intended and welcoming community. That is rare nowadays on the internet and is especially what attracted me to enter this place.

I think that running things like the EA Forum prizes, contests, and other events usually significantly improve post quality. The Forum could go back to doing way more of this!

I have really enjoyed the debate weeks, and I think the forum would benefit from having them >3x more frequently.

I found your post on "How to start a 501(c)3 nonprofit as quickly as possible" valuable and interesting, much more than most forum content.

👋 I will mull on this. Quick first response: 

1) I agree people should be posting when they have something to say rather than just to post. Perhaps I should have qualified that. I had in mind people who have things to say but who sit on their posts for a long time. 

2) I also agree that I don't want to see the EA forum filled with marketing-esque nonsense from other platforms.

3) I think the core problem for the EA forum is that interesting high-quality novel posts are inherently rare and likely to stay that way because writing a very good post is effortful and not compensated in any kind of first-order way. Four potential solutions:

• pay people for good posts
• encourage more low-quality posts to have more content
• have fewer posts and maybe give impression that forum is dying
• encourage people to post more quality stuff by giving them effusive praise and karma so they get a dopamine rush

The forum died for me around 2024. The EA Forum is a trash fire.