Sarah Cheng's Quick takes

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]

1. ^{^}

   Inclusive of benefits, travel, allowances for equipment, etc. (Not all of which is spent.)

2. ^{^}

   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).

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".

Mini EA Forum Update

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

1. 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.
2. 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.

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.

1. ^{^}

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

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

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! :)

@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!)

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

1. 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.
2. Please give us feedback — I'm not much of a Substack user myself, so any suggestions you have for improving it would be appreciated!
3. 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.

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. 💜

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.

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.

1. ^{^}

   Our team runs this Forum

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!

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:

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

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! :)

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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!

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.

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. 

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! :)

@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.

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

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].

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.

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! :)

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! :)

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.

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

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

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! 😅).