Sarah Cheng's Quick takes

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Just a reminder that you can customize your own Frontpage feed, so if you'd like to give serious posts a chance today you can hide April Fools' Day posts.

Click on "Customize feed", add "April Fools' Day" by clicking on the + to search for the relevant tag, then click "Hidden".

Sarah Cheng 🔸

101

Some quick responses to Nuño’s article about EA Forum stewardship

I work on the CEA Online Team, which runs the Forum, but I am only speaking for myself. Others on my team may disagree with me. I wrote this relatively quickly so I wouldn’t be surprised if I changed my mind on things upon reflection.

Overall, I really appreciated Nuño’s article, and did not find it to be harsh, overly confrontational, or unpleasant to read. I appreciated the nice messages that he included to me, a person working on the Forum, at the start and end of the piece.

On the design change and addition of features:

People have different aesthetic preferences, and I personally think the current Forum design looks nicer than the 2018 version, plus I think it has better usability in various ways. I like minimalism in some contexts, but I care more about doing good than about making the Forum visually pleasing to me. To that end, I think it is correct for the Forum to have more than just a simple frontpage list of posts plus a “recent discussion” feed (which seems to be the entirety of the 2018 version).

For example, I think adding the “quick takes” and “popular comments” sections to the home page have been really successful. By making quick takes more salient, we’ve encouraged additional discussions on the site (since quick takes are intended for less polished posts). “Popular comments” helps to highlight ongoing discussions in posts that may not be visible elsewhere. I take the fact that LessWrong borrowed these sections for their site as further evidence of their value, and in fact LessWrong has had some impactful discussions happen in their quick takes section. As another example, features like the “Groups directory” and the “People directory” are not available anywhere else online, and I view them as more like “essential infrastructure for the EA community”. I think it’s reasonable for those to live on the EA Forum, where people already gather to talk about EA things and look for some EA resources.

On the costs of the Forum:

Here, I want to clarify what the actual costs are. I will focus on budgeted costs over true costs for privacy reasons.

I believe that the $2M/year was the highest ever (overall, budgeted) cost of the CEA Online Team, ~~when we were a team of 8 people, and it was only the case for approximately 6 months (between Jan 2023 and July 2023)~~ (see update below). We were probably 7 people for another ~6 months total, and less than 7 people for the rest of the time.
- Update 2024-12-09: I was just thinking about this again, and I believe actually the largest size of the team was 10 people, between Jan 2023 and Mar 2023. I don't know what the budget implications are — probably not much since we budget per year.
We are currently at 6 people, and our team’s budget for the year is close to $1.6M/year. I joined in late 2021, when the team was 5 people (including me). 6 is a more representative number for how many people have been on the Online Team in the past few years.
My understanding is that about $960K/year of the budget is staff costs, broadly construed.^[1] The rest are things such as SaaS costs (which we have made significant strides in reducing in the past year).
Our true staff costs are lower, because multiple people on the Online Team choose to reduce their take-home pay. We budget for their full salaries because CEA needs to be able to pay them that salary if they choose to take it. I think it’s reasonable to allow people to keep this information private, so we do not report the true staff costs.
The Online Team does not spend all of its time working on the Forum (although it is a majority of our time). The actual time split depends on when other projects arise, either via external partnerships or internal initiatives (such as the big EA.org redesign in 2022). I would broadly estimate that we spent 10% of Online Team staff time on other projects over the past 3 years.
Therefore, the actual average yearly cost of Forum staff time has been roughly $860K minus voluntary salary reductions.
In the future, I expect more Online Team staff time to be used for non-Forum projects, so I expect that cost to naturally decrease over time. (We spent roughly 20% of staff time on non-Forum projects in the past 3 months, for example.)

EDIT: I will also note that there are additional overheads to staff that are not captured even in the "broadly construed" figures above. For example, we have a People Ops team whose job is focused on CEA staff, so one could argue that part of the People Ops budget goes towards the Forum team. Part of the rest of the $1.6M/year is also ops overhead related to having staff. You could even argue that some of the SaaS costs are overhead on staff. I didn't want to go line by line and delay posting this quick take, but I'm adding this here to highlight that "staff costs" can vary a lot depending on what you consider part of that cost. I just picked a "staff cost" value that I thought would generally match the definition that readers would have in mind (i.e. the most direct costs to the company, which is mostly salary plus benefits). I would guess that from the CEA perspective (like if we were considering hiring another person on our team), we would take into account other overhead costs to some extent.

[I will skip responding to the moderation section because I have not been involved with that.]

On Forum culture evolution:

I guess I generally think things like, making the Forum more accessible and decreasing barriers to entry, are good. There are many people in the world who can do good via the broad project of effective altruism, and I want the Forum to work for them as much as is reasonable. Of course there are tradeoffs, and we do need to keep the interests of more experienced users in mind and be mindful not to lose parts of the Forum culture that are valuable, but I don’t see why that should mean we stop making the Forum more accessible. In my opinion, new Forum users are some of the most valuable contributors, and it would be to our detriment to ignore them.

On cost-effectiveness:

I think we agree that what matters is marginal cost-effectiveness. I believe that the marginal expense of the Online Team is a software engineer. Our team has done an internal marginal impact analysis to evaluate how much value the marginal engineer produces via the Forum (broadly, by looking at the software engineering work we have done in a year, BOTEC-ing how much counterfactual value it has produced, then attributing an appropriate fraction to the marginal engineer), and the resulting 90% confidence interval was above break even.^[2]

^{^}
Inclusive of benefits, travel, allowances for equipment, etc. (Not all of which is spent.)
^{^}
Multiple people within CEA red-teammed it (and there is not full agreement on the current version). The last time I looked at the Squiggle model, the analysis had over 100 factors. That doesn’t prove its accuracy but hopefully it demonstrates that we take this seriously. I hope to publish more about this publicly, but it will take a good chunk of time to extract the private information and write a version that is clear for a public audience. And, as I mentioned in another comment, I actually don’t know how to incorporate the time I spend on writing it up into the marginal impact analysis, so by default I feel like it’s a poor use of my work time (like, by spending time writing a public version, I would actually be decreasing the value of the marginal engineer, though this is slightly complicated by the fact that I’m currently technically in a non-engineering interim role).

Will Aldred

Responding to the bottom part of your second footnote:

To me, it seems pretty important for Forum Team members (especially the interim lead!) to be communicating with Forum users. I therefore think it’s a mistake for you to assign zero value to your posts and comments, relative to your other work.

How much value to assign to one of your posts or comments? I would crudely model this as:

(Size of your post’s or comment’s contribution)/(Size of all Forum contributions in a year) x (Forum’s total value per year)

You’ll have better-informed figures/estimates than I do, but I’d guess that the size of all Forum contributions, measured in karma,^[1] in a year, is around 100,000, and that the value of the Forum per year is around $10M.^[2] A thoughtful comment might get 10 karma, on average, and a thoughtful post might get 50.

I’d therefore roughly value a comment from you at (10 karma)/(100,000 karma) x $10M = $1000, and a post from you at $5000.

(My model may well be off in some way; I invite readers to improve on it.)

^{^}
I don’t take karma to be a perfect measure of value by any means—see, e.g., ‘Karma overrates some topics’—but I think it’s a reasonable-enough measure for carrying out this BOTEC.
^{^}
Why $10M? Mostly I’m working off the value of an ‘EA project’ as estimated in cell C4 of this spreadsheet by Nuño. (This was the accompanying post.)

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Thanks Will! I really appreciate this comment, and I think this is a great suggestion. I buy something in this general direction (the Forum produces a certain amount of value per year, and so contributing on the Forum is worth some value relative to the total). I think my Forum-related posts/comments tend not to be very actionable — like, I would guess a post from me is actually worth less (in value to the world) than a post about a new job opening, and probably worth less than an object-level post with the same amount of karma. But I also think that coordination/information-sharing is a key source of value for the Forum, so I'm convinced enough to dig into this further and value my comms at more than $0. (The value per hour is likely going to look less promising though, since I am pretty slow at writing...)

As a bonus, I think this is a good general pitch for everyone to write more on the Forum! ^^

Linch

Another (complementary) framing here is that I assume your "day job" is mostly improving the Forum. So you can ~directly compare how much an additional hour of commenting or post on the Forum is worth in terms of total value add to the Forum, relative to the expected marginal impact of improving the codebase by an hour of coding or other work you do^[1].

This a) sidesteps the absolute value of Forum work, which is potentially more contentious, and b) gives you a direct way to assess how valuable things are relative to the opportunity cost.

^{^}
(assuming your direct counterfactual with writing comments is writing code or otherwise improving the forum)

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Interesting — I feel like I don't have good intuitions for how to compare an hour of coding with an hour of writing. But I believe you're suggesting something like, convert both of these into "hours of Forum engagement" per hour of my work (like, comparing how much engagement my post gets, divided by the hours I spent writing it, to the hours of engagement I add to the Forum for adding a feature, divided by the hours I spent building it).

If I were to do that comparison, I'm guessing that coding looks way better. My best post got ~23 hours of engagement total, and I don't expect to get significantly more than that. One of our best features wrt engagement is adding AI-narrated audio for posts. This gets us very approximately 8 hours of engagement per day, was relatively quick to do, and we expect it will last for years. If it lasts 5 years that would be 14,600 hours of engagement. Even if it took 10x as long to build as the post did to write, building the feature seems clearly better.

Perhaps this is some evidence that I should not spend more time writing on the Forum, though I think there's some value from posting that is not captured by this, so maybe converting everything into dollars is still better if it allows me to account for more factors.

RobertM

No easily summarizable comment on the rest of it, but as a LessWrong dev I do think the addition of Quick Takes to the front page of LW was very good - my sense is that it's counterfactually responsible for a pretty substantial amount of high quality discussion. (I haven't done any checking of ground-truth metrics, this is just my gestalt impression as a user of the site.)

Habryka [Deactivated]

Agree! I am a bit worried the discussion is a bit social-drama heavy on LW, since it's kind of the only outlet for that kind of stuff on the frontpage, but that in itself is also somewhat of a success (having a place for more community-oriented discussion without taking over the whole site).

Sarah Cheng 🔸

11mo*

Mini EA Forum Update

We've added two new kinds of notifications that have been requested multiple times before:

Notifications when someone links to your post, comment, or quick take
1. These are turned on by default — you can edit your notifications settings via the Account Settings page.
Keyword alerts
1. You can manage your keyword alerts here, which you can get to via your Account Settings or by clicking the notification bell and then the three dots icon.
2. You can quickly add an alert by clicking "Get notified" on the search page. (Note that the alerts only use the keyword, not any search filters.)
3. You get alerted when the keyword appears in a newly published post, comment, or quick take (so this doesn't include, for example, new topics).
4. You can also edit the frequency of both the on-site and email versions of these alerts independently via the Account Settings page (at the bottom of the Notifications list).
5. See more details in the PR

I hope you find these useful! 😊 Feel free to reply if you have any feedback or questions.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

2mo

Building EA

Sharing an overview of the CEA Online Team's Q2 OKRs (we run this Forum)

Sarah Cheng 🔸

The EA Forum moderation team is going to experiment a bit with how we categorize posts. Currently there is a low bar for a Forum post being categorized as “Frontpage” after it’s approved. In comparison, LessWrong is much more opinionated about the content they allow, especially from new users. We’re considering moving in that direction, in order to maintain a higher percentage of valuable content on our Frontpage.

To start, we’re going to allow moderators to move posts from new users from “Frontpage” to “Personal blog”^[1], at their discretion, but starting conservatively. We’ll keep an eye on this and, depending on how this goes, we may consider taking further steps such as using the “rejected content” feature (we don’t currently have that on the EA Forum).

Feel free to reply here if you have any questions or feedback.

^{^}
If you’d like to make sure you see “Personal blog” posts in your Frontpage, you can customize your feed.

NickLaing

I would be nervous about discouraging new users. There's a high bar for what gets upvoted here on the forum. Especially for VERY new users I'd be nervous about not giving the opportunity for their post to be on the frontpage - maybe it can depend on if you think the post is decent or not?

Sarah Cheng 🔸

1y*

Ah yeah sorry I was unclear! I basically meant what you said when I said "at their discretion, but starting conservatively" — so we are starting to take "quality" into account when deciding what stays in the Frontpage, because our readers' time is valuable. You can kind of think of it like: if the mod would have downvoted a post from a new user, the mod can instead decide to move it to "Personal blog". I think it's possible that this is actually less discouraging to new users than getting downvoted, since it's like you're being moved to a category with different standards. You can check our work by looking at what gets categorized as "Personal blog" via the All posts page. :)

I expect this will affect only a small proportion of new users.

Joseph_Chu

I would be a bit hesitant to follow Less Wrong's lead on this too closely. I find the EA Forum, for lack of a better term, feels much friendlier than Less Wrong, and I wouldn't want that sense of friendliness to go away.

Jason

I was hesitant on this one, but I looked at last month's posts and saw a lot of them with few votes and little engagement, which made me more sympathetic to the concern about the frontpage. Maybe it's a viable idea with some safeguards:

I think a limitation to application against "new users" mitigates some of the downside risk as long as that definition is operationalized well. In particular, people use throwaways to post criticisms, and the newness of an account should not necessarily establish a "new user" for purpose of this policy. I think mods are capable of figuring out if a throwaway post shows enough EA knowledge, but they should err on the side of letting throwaway criticism posts through to the frontpage. For certain critical posts, the decision to demote should be affirmed by someone independent of CEA.
The risk of being demoted to Personal Blog could be a significant demotivator for people investing the time to write posts.
1. You could mitigate this by being very clear and objective about what will trigger classification and then applying the stated criteria in a conservative fashion. But based on your stated goals, I think you may have a hard time defining the boundaries with enough objective precision.
2. You could also invite people to submit 1-2 paragraph pitches if they were concerned about demotion, and establish a safe harbor for anyone who got a thumbs-up on their pitch. But that approach risks being a little too censorious for my tastes, as the likely outcome of a decision not to pre-clear is that the author never completes their idea into a post.
If something is getting any meaningful number of upvotes or comments after being consigned to Personal Blog as lower-quality content, you probably made a mistake that should be reverted ASAP. (When thinking what the thresholds for reversal should be, the much lower visibility of Personal Blogs should carry significant weight.)
I would be hesitant to reject more content -- people selecting to show Personal Blog posts presumably know what they are getting themselves into and have implicitly decided to opt out of your filtering efforts.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Thanks Jason! Luckily, which posts get categorized as "Personal blog" is public information (I think it's easiest to skim via the All posts page), so I would be happy for people to check our work and contact us if you think we've made a mistake. If you take a look now, you'll see that very few posts have been moved there so far, and I don't expect the rate to change very much going forward.

2. My guess is that the vast majority of new users don't even know what "Personal blog" means, so I'm not sure how demotivating it will be to them. As I mentioned in another comment, my guess is that getting downvoted is more demotivating for new users.

3. I think that's a good idea, and I'd be happy for users to flag these as mistakes to the moderators, or just DM me directly and I can return a post to the Frontpage if I agree (I have the final say as head moderator).

Sarah Cheng 🔸

5mo

@Toby Tremlett🔹 and I will be repping the EA Forum Team at EAG SF in mid-Feb — stop by our office hours to ask questions, give us your hottest Forum takes, or just say hi and come get a surprise sweet! :)

Reminder: applications for EAG SF close soon (this Sunday!)

NickLaing

5mo

Unfortunately it's not a surprise sweet any more, you really messed that one up.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

5mo

The surprise is what kind of sweet! ^^

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Just wanted to share that, in addition to EA Opportunities, the CEA Online Team has also taken on EA Virtual Programs (previously it was part of the CEA Groups Team). Currently this mostly just means that @Cian M has moved over to the Online Team, but we plan to invest more resources into it than before. Keep an eye on the Forum for future updates! :)

Sarah Cheng 🔸

5mo

For those who are interested in what the CEA Online Team^[1] is up to, I've set up a new OKRs doc for 2026 and summarized our Q1 2026 plans.

^{^}
Our team runs this Forum

Ben_West🔸

5mo

Thanks Sarah! Is something written up about the CEA donation system? I'm surprised that that's a priority, but obviously know zero details.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

5mo

Thanks for the question Ben! The main reason that this is a priority is to help EA Funds (which is now part of CEA) grow and diversify their donations, by making it easier to gather info from donors^[1] and build relationships with them, and giving us more freedom to optimize the UX of the donation flow. AWF in particular has ambitious 2026 plans and a significant funding gap, and we’d be excited to help them reach their donation goal for this year! :)

^{^}
GWWC, the primary platform EA Funds has used historically, defaults to opt-out for donor data sharing. As far as I understand, this prevents us from being able to contact the majority of donors. We recently added the option of donating via every.org as well, which is opt-in by default so that’s improved the situation.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

We've set up a Substack mirror for the Forum digest! 😊

Please share and help us promote it! The primary reason we've set it up is to help with EA comms work and expand the reach of valuable Forum content.
Please give us feedback — I'm not much of a Substack user myself, so any suggestions you have for improving it would be appreciated!
We're still running the existing EA Forum Digest newsletter (via Mailchimp) for various reasons, including the fact that it's cleaner to integrate with the Forum itself. You can edit your subscription to that via the account settings page. (For example, if you prefer to read the Substack version, you can unsubscribe to the Mailchimp one.)

You can read more about this decision in Will's quick take here.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Mini EA Forum Update

We now have a unified @mention feature in our editor! You can use it to add links to posts, tags, and users. Thanks so much to @Vlad Sitalo — both for the GitHub PR introducing this feature, and for time and again making useful improvements to our open source codebase. 💜

Chris Leong

This is amazing. I expect this to noticably increase the number of links included in articles.

huw

Nice! Is there an associated Markdown syntax I can use that will trigger the same functionality?

Ben Millwood🔸

I tried to click "get notified" on this comment but I'm not sure if it did anything, so I will have to come up with something useful to contribute to make sure :P

I wish we had markdown syntax for footnotes, as well. As-is it often feels like the markdown editor is a second-class citizen.

huw

Markdown footnotes work, they’re just different to the first-class ones. This post was fully Markdown (and I couldn’t have done it without it!)

Ben Millwood🔸

oh! uhh, how?

huw

Just the normal markdown syntax:

Here's a simple footnote[^1].

[^1]: This is the first footnote.

Here's a simple footnote^[1].

This is the first footnote. ↩︎

Ben Millwood🔸

Thanks! (I slightly object to "the normal markdown syntax", since based on my quick reading neither John Gruber's original markdown spec nor the latest CommonMark spec nor GitHub Flavoured Markdown have footnotes)

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Ah sorry, I don't think there's any additions on the markdown side.

As-is it often feels like the markdown editor is a second-class citizen.

Yeah I think this is true in some sense. CKEditor does get more attention in our dev work. Partly that's because it's the default, and is used much more often (I ran a quick query to sense check this, and it looks like about 1/9 of things written on the Forum in 2024 are in markdown, 7/9 are using CKEditor, and 1/9 are other^[1]). I don't think this tells the whole story though, so I'm open to pitches for us to enhance the markdown editor. :) Though note that we have significantly less engineering capacity now.

^{^}
Mostly admin-specific or legacy things

Will Aldred

Bug report (although this could very well be me being incompetent!):

The new @mention interface doesn’t appear to take users’ karma into account when deciding which users to surface. This has the effect of showing me a bunch of users with 0 karma, none of whom are the user I’m trying to tag.^[1] (I think the old interface showed higher-karma users higher up?)

More importantly, I’m still shown the wrong users even when I type in the full username of the person I’m trying to tag—in this case, Jason. [Edit: I’ve tried @ing some other users, now, and I’ve found that most of the time there isn’t this problem. It looks like the problem occurs for users with a single word username that’s a common(-ish) name, e.g., Jason, geoffrey, Joseph.] And there doesn’t appear to be a way to ‘scroll down’ to find the right user [when there is this problem],^[2] which means that I’m unable to tag them.

(Sorry that this is a pretty critical comment. I appreciate the work you do :) )

^{^}
^{^}
Pressing my keyboard’s down arrow lets me ‘move down’ the list that’s shown in the interface, but it loops back to the top after the tenth option—user ‘JAB’, in the example above—rather than letting me go ‘further down’ to find the right user.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Building EA

Mini EA Forum Update

You can now subscribe to be notified every time a user comments (thanks to the LessWrong team for building the functionality!), and we’ve updated the design of the notification option menus. You can see more details in GitHub here.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Building EA

Mini EA Forum Update

We've updated the user menu in the site header! 🎉 I'm really excited, since I think it looks way better and is much easier to use.

We've pulled out all the "New ___" items to a submenu, except for "New question" which you can still do from the "New post" page (it's still a tab there, as is linkpost). And you can see your quick takes via your profile page. See more discussion in the relevant PR.

Let us know what you think! 😊

Bonus: we've also added Bluesky to the list of profile links, feel free to add yours!

Oscar Sykes

I love having the profile button at the top, I currently find not having that a bit disorientating

Sarah Cheng 🔸

6mo

Quick note: Forum support coverage will be lighter than usual this week and next as people are off on holiday, so you may encounter some process delays (for example, things may take longer than usual to get approved). We expect to be back to normal on Monday Jan 5.

Hope you all get to enjoy some relaxing time off as well! :)

Sarah Cheng 🔸

11mo

The EA Forum moderation team has decided to enable the same automatic rate limits here as on LessWrong (see this post from the LW team for more info and reasoning).

Previously we had a couple automatic rate limits, and we've simply replaced those. Our codebase is open source, so you can see all the current automatic rate limits described in this file. Broadly they affect users who have low karma, or whose most recent content got downvoted by many others. In particular, we've noticed more new users who post a lot of lower-quality AI-generated content, so we hope that these automatic rate limits help to maintain a higher signal:noise ratio on the site.

Personally I think there's a good chance that we'll want to tweak the exact limits/criteria for our site, so we plan to monitor how often people hit the rate limits. Feel free to share your thoughts, concerns, and suggestions with me! :)

Jason

11mo

I appreciate the need for dealing with low-quality AI-generated content, but I worry about the risk of intentional manipulation, and of near-banning those with unpopular views, here. Some possible ways to mitigate that:

Total Downvote Percentage (or Count) versus Karma

Whatever the merits of strongvotes in other contexts, a minority view that someone's contributions are negative should not carry the day against a greater number of expressed votes and/or voters. Indeed, I would argue that ~2/3 of the votes should be negative before one could appropriately infer a community consensus that the user is detracting from the Forum. Strong downvoting by a committed group is the most obvious way to manipulate the system into silencing those with whom you disagree.

On the other hand, I am okay with requiring both specified negative karma and a specified negative downvote percentage/count, because I would be hesitant to apply a rate limit when a significant minority strongly believed that the user's activity was valuable.

Requiring Net Negative Reaction Across a Number of Posts/Comments

Otherwise decent users occasionally write a pretty bad comment that gets seriously downvoted. In my view, rate limits are appropriate when the user has a demonstrated pattern of low-quality activity (or for new users, when the information that is available suggests low quality). As written, I think there is a risk that one or two bad comments out of the last 20 have a disproportionate influence on the rate-limit decision. I'm sure people here can come up with a better weighting formula than I could, though.

Manual Review

Lower-karma users should have access to a prompt appellate process, under which a moderator manually determines whether a rate limit is warranted. The messages which convey the rate limit should inform users of their right to appeal. The appellate moderator should not presume that the automatic action was correct.
For mid+-karma users, I would prefer that the algorithm not apply automatically, but instead trigger a manual review.
Why the difference? It would be unexpected for a mid+-karma user to suddenly "post a lot of lower-quality AI-generated content." As a result, the risk of a given user being censored for unpopular views is higher when the user's karma is mid+-level. People who have a history of positive contributions deserve more process, and the downsides of their erroneous exclusion are likely more significant. Finally, at least in the absence of strategic downvoting to trip the rate limits, mid+-karma users should only rarely trigger the limits, so reviews shouldn't take much moderator time.

All that being said, I recognize there are limits to what can be done without investing too much more time into the existing codebase.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

10mo

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Jason! We'll take this into account when we review the rate limits, after we have a bit more data on its effects in practice.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

9mo

Quick warning: crossposting from here to LessWrong is currently buggy, due to some ongoing infrastructure changes on their side. If you run into any issues saving or publishing your post with "Crosspost to LessWrong" checked, that may be the reason.

We're working with LW to resolve any bugs, but they have higher priority issues right now so I'm unsure how long it will take to fix. In the meantime, you can try unchecking that box and manually posting in both places. You can help us diagnose the issue by reporting any bugs you see.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Building EA

Mini EA Forum Update

You can now subscribe to be notified when posts are added to a sequence. You can see more details in GitHub here.

We’ve also made it a bit easier to create and edit sequences, including allowing users to delete sequences they’ve made.

I've been thinking a bit about how to improve sequences, so I'd be curious to hear:

How you use them
What you'd like to be able to do with them
Any other thoughts/feedback

Lorenzo Buonanno🔸

It could be useful to have some sort of "sequence of sequences", similar to a basic version of https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/handbook

For the intro program, I used to link people to https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/ea-italy and tell them to scroll down and start from "1. La mentalità dell'efficacia" but many people got confused and started from the latest posts. (So I moved to sending the first sequence directly for the first week)

Edit: I've been told they don't use this anymore and switched to Google Docs

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Building EA

Mini EA Forum Update

We’ve updated our new user onboarding flow! You can see more details in GitHub here.

In addition to making it way prettier, we’re trying out adding some optional steps, including:

You can select topics you’re interested in, to make your frontpage more relevant to you.
1. You can also click the “Customize feed” button on the frontpage - see details here.
You can choose some authors to subscribe to. You will be notified when an author you are subscribed to publishes a post.
1. You can also subscribe from any user’s profile page.
You’re prompted to fill in some profile information to give other users context on who you are.
1. You can also edit your profile here.

I hope that these additional optional steps help new users get more out of the Forum. We will continue to iterate on this flow based on usage and feedback - feel free to reply to this quick take with your thoughts!

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Building EA

New: floating audio player for posts

You can already listen to Forum posts via the audio player on the post page and via podcast feeds, thanks to Type III Audio. Recently, we enabled their new floating audio player. Now, the player becomes fixed to the bottom of the screen when you scroll down, making it easier to read along with the audio. In addition, you can click on the play buttons next to section headings to skip directly to them.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback! Do you prefer to read or listen to posts? How can we improve the listening experience? Feel free to respond here or contact us in other ways.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

@Toby Tremlett🔹 and I will host an EA Forum Team office hours / co-working session in EA Gather this Thursday, Dec 19! We'll be in this pod between 2-3 PM UK time (9-10 AM Eastern Time). Feel free to stop by to ask us questions, work on a Forum post, or just co-work alongside us. :)

We may continue hosting these, perhaps for longer slots than just one hour. Let us know in the comments or over DM if you'd like to attend one in the future.

Toby Tremlett🔹

We're in there now! I'm working on the EA Newsletter, other people are working on posts and google docs, and we are having chats in the breaks. Feel free to join.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q2.1 (the next six weeks).

Sarah Cheng 🔸

10mo

During last year’s Giving Season, I started up an EA Forum Instagram account as an experiment to see if the Forum Team could help spread important ideas outside of the Forum. In particular, I think there’s interesting and nuanced discussion on the Forum that is representative of EA in a way that other popular media does not capture about EA. I mostly ran it myself, and while it was fun, it took up more of my time than I could justify, so I stopped updating it earlier this year.

Now that the CEA Comms Team is larger and has hired a Marketing Manager, they’ve renamed the account to effectivealtruismofficial and will be taking it from here. They’ll be using it as part of broader plans to share high-quality EA content across multiple platforms to grow the EA movement and brand. They're happy to hear your questions and collaboration ideas — you can reach out to the CEA Comms Team via email [email protected].

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Building EA

The CEA Online Team (which runs this Forum) has finalized our OKRs for the first half-quarter of 2025 — here's a link to the new doc for a new year.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

1y*

I've just updated the doc with a summary of the CEA Online Team's Q1.2 OKRs.

MvK🔸

I'm seeing lots of O's and no KR's. Is this intentional?

(My understanding is that one of the main benefits of having KPIs or OKRs is the accountability that comes from having specific and measurable (i.e. quantifiable) outcomes that you can track and evaluate, and I can't see any of those in the document.)

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Ah yeah sorry, the doc just has a summary of our OKRs, which is meant to broadly communicate what our team is working on. It's not the actual text from our OKRs. I've added a sentence to clarify that.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

7mo

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q4.2, which takes us to the end of the year.

Posting a bit late since I just got back from a long holiday — here's a bonus photo from my trip! :)

Sarah Cheng 🔸

9mo

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q4.1 (the next six weeks).

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Building EA

The CEA Online Team (which runs this Forum) has finalized our OKRs for this new half-quarter, and I've updated the public doc, so I'm reposting the link to the doc here.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

I've just updated the doc with our final OKRs of the year, was somewhat delayed due to a team retreat and Thanksgiving.

Sarah Cheng 🔸

10mo

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q3.2 (the next six weeks).

Sarah Cheng 🔸

Building EA

New: “card view” for frontpage posts

We’re testing out a new “card view” for the main post list on the home page. You can toggle the layout by clicking the dropdown circled in red below. You can see more details in GitHub here.

Let us know what you think! :)

Sarah Cheng 🔸

11mo*

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q3.1 (sorry this is a bit late, I just forgot! 😅).