In January, I wrote about the EA Forum Team’s shift in direction. Since then, our usage metrics have been pretty stable, nice! 😊 (Compare to 2024 where the metrics were going steadily downward the whole year.)

When I wrote that post, my role was focused on the EA Forum, and I had intended to spend the majority of my effort on the EA Forum. However, my role and my team are in flux right now, primarily in order to better align with CEA’s strategy. I’m currently running the CEA Online Team, and so far in 2025 we've broadly been spending a smaller portion of our resources on the EA Forum over time^[1]. I think we need to be careful, because I still believe strongly in what I wrote in my previous post, and I have a worry that reducing the resources we spend on the EA Forum does risk losing most of its value^[2]. But there are always tradeoffs, and hopefully we can figure out the right balance between working on the EA Forum and working on other projects^[3] in service of CEA’s overall strategy.

I wanted to include this here because, if we do end up spending less capacity on the EA Forum, you may see fewer updates from us. As always, I’m happy to hear feedback and thoughts from the community.

Site improvements

Updated notifications

To summarize Will’s post from March, we’ve updated a lot of the default behavior for Forum notifications (both on-site and email), primarily to better match user expectations from using other sites.

We encourage you to check your account settings and update your notification preferences! 😊

Draft comments

As Will wrote about last week, we've implemented a simple feature to let users save comments and quick takes as a draft.

Often, Forum comments and quick takes are quite long and substantive, and can be even more valuable than posts. So we hope that this makes them easier to write, especially in the case when you start one on your phone and want to add the finishing touches on your laptop later (as happens to me).

Users can run their own polls

We've made our debate week poll widget available for all users! You can run your own poll by adding it to a post, comment, or quick take.

Tweaks to voting

We made a couple small but hopefully useful changes:

1. Neutral votes (i.e. adding a reaction) no longer count toward the vote total. Previously, this was leading to people assuming they were downvoted more than in reality, like if you saw that a comment had 3 votes but only 1 karma. Oftentimes people will react (such as agree or disagree) without voting on the karma.
2. We changed the text describing karma voting from “How much do you like this overall?” to “Is this a valuable contribution?”.

Redesigned user menu

We’ve updated the design of the user menu in our site header:

New “Made me laugh” react

We added a new react to the family, by popular demand. 🙂

Forum events

Forum events calendar

Toby set up a Google Calendar to help you keep track of Forum events:

Ways the world is getting better

The Forum tends to focus on pressing problems in the world, and it's nice to highlight some good news every once in a while. In January, we celebrated some of the ways the world is getting better.

Draft Amnesty Week

We ran another Draft Amnesty Week at the end of February, which is an event where we encourage people to publish posts that are sitting in their drafts and may never get finished. This time we got more posts than before, and more posts >50 karma. :) Check out the posts here!

Existential choices debate week

In March, we ran a debate week discussing the value of reducing the chance of extinction vs increasing the value of the future. Check out the posts and quick takes from the event here, including the primary discussion thread and a symposium with Will MacAskill and other special guests.

DIY debate week

In April, we hosted a DIY debate week to promote our new user-run polls feature. 

Team updates

• In Oct 2024 I was made Interim EA Forum Project Lead, and now I’ve dropped the “Interim”. 🙂
• JP Addison has left CEA, and I am taking over as head moderator of the Forum.
• @Toby Tremlett🔹’s title has changed from “Content Manager” to “Content Strategist”, to better reflect the work that he does on our team.

Other updates

• We’ve set up a Substack mirror for our weekly EA Forum Digest. We hope that this helps more people find and engage with valuable Forum posts!
• We’ve launched a redesigned version of effectivealtruism.org! 🎉 Our primary goal was to improve visitors’ understanding of EA, broadly as part of CEA’s goal of improving the EA brand. We’ve also aimed to humanize EA more than the previous design did, and to more clearly highlight how visitors can take action.
• We are continuing to run the EA Opportunity Board and the associated bi-weekly newsletter. Please share it with anyone who might benefit! 😊
• We built Forethought’s new website (designed by And–Now) as part of an external partnership.
• As a reminder, you can view our team’s half-quarterly OKRs via this public doc that I keep updated. I recently added our Q2.2 plans (May 20 - July 1).

Want to help the EA Forum?

We’re looking for volunteers to help us keep the Forum running smoothly, as Forum facilitators! 💙 If you already like being on the site, this is a way to give back to the community.

You can indicate your interest via this form.

Broadly, this involves:

1. Processing new users, approving non-spam accounts and messaging users who seem confused
2. Generally being helpful and welcoming to new users
3. Helping us properly categorize new posts
4. Assisting the Forum Team and moderators by flagging relevant issues to us

This is a vital role to ensure this community space continues to run smoothly. You’ll join our moderation Slack workspace, and there’s the potential to take on more responsibility if you’re interested. This post from two years ago is still a pretty good description of what the moderator vs facilitator roles are like.

The hours and the tasks are both flexible, and we can work with you to find a good fit. :)

We currently don't have any official facilitation capacity over the weekend, so sometimes new users don't get processed for multiple days. We'd be especially grateful for people who are willing to spend 30 min over the weekend clearing the short queue.

Share your feedback

Thanks for reading! :) Let us know if you have feedback or questions about these changes. You can comment on this post or reach out to us another way. You can also share feature requests in the feature suggestion thread.

@Toby Tremlett🔹 will be running a Forum workshop and office hours at the upcoming EAG London — feel free to connect with him there!

1. ^{^}

   I’d currently estimate that this is 2.5 FTE: ~0.5 FTE for running the team, ~0.75 FTE of content, ~1 FTE of engineering, and ~0.25 FTE of product design. Our budget for 2025 is ~$1.3m, and most of that was for our staff of 6 FTE, so you can estimate the current cost of the Forum team to be ~$600k per year, plus some additional overhead that CEA pays on top of this (such as flying people to retreats).

2. ^{^}

   For example, in a way similar to how Habryka describes what happened with LW 1.0 here.

   You can also see some related discussion in the comments of Three lower-cost options for running the EA Forum.

3. ^{^}

   For example, it's likely we will put capacity towards improving the online presence of the EA Opportunity Board and EA Funds in the second half of 2025.