Hello Forum friends! I'm posting today to let you know that I recently left CEA to join 80,000 Hours, as a product engineer on the Career Services Team.

This means I'm no longer running the Online Team, the EA Forum, and the moderation team. I've handed the Forum and mod team to @Toby Tremlett🔹, and @Rory Fenton is leading the Online Team on an interim basis.

I sat on this draft for a while. I've been at CEA for almost 5 years and it's been a wild ride — there's a lot I could write about! I didn't want to keep putting it off, so just a warning that this post is a bit disorganized. Feel free to ask me questions if there's anything you'd like to hear more about. :)

A bit about the Forum

It's been a little over a year since my last update post, where I hinted that the CEA Online Team was spending less capacity on the Forum over time and you'd get less updates as a consequence. I estimate that the team is spending a bit over 1.5 FTE on the Forum in 2026, so that trend has continued, and may decrease more depending on whether CEA decides to backfill any of my capacity.

Working on the Forum has been both fun and challenging. I love the idea of the Forum being the best online space to discuss how to do good better, and being a model of EA thinking. Reading the Forum has been an invaluable part of my EA journey (especially as someone whose in-person community is not very EA), and I've heard many similar accounts from others (maybe even you personally! I've talked with many Forum users over the years). I felt so lucky that I got to come into work every day and do something to help such wonderful people who genuinely care about doing good. Plus, it's been inspiring to see how much the people working on the Forum Team over the years truly care about it — the Forum is key community infrastructure and a lot of thought gets put into changes.

I've also found the reality to be more complicated than my ideals. For example, one of the key metrics we track is engagement, and I feel sad that drama is both the highest driver of engagement and leads to the lowest quality comment sections. As engagement was declining following the FTX bump, I was surprised by how little the technical work we did seemed to move the needle, even things that seemed like sure bets such as varying the Frontpage algorithm "speed" based on how frequently the user visited the site.  Although the core Forum product doesn't change much over time, the people using it and the world around it change pretty noticeably year over year, and I worry we've been too slow to respond. The laissez-faire community management of 2021 no longer feels like a good fit today, as I no longer trust the community itself to be good at self-correcting.

Since I took over the team around 2 years ago, I grappled with the question of what to do with the Forum: how much to continue investing in it, and how to position it within (or outside of) a CEA that was quite different from the one that I joined. It seemed to me that our focus should be on the content side — we needed to have a more consistent stream of good quality content, primarily from a small group of strong contributors, and that was key to driving all the other value the Forum provides. This vision didn't quite fit in with CEA's goals at the time, and so we ended up focusing on growth and significantly reducing the capacity spent on the Forum.

More on the past 12 months

2025

I ran the Online Team in accordance with CEA's 2025-26 strategy, and most of our work was focused on growth^[1].

I spent an absurd number of hours in Q4 2025 writing a funding proposal doc, so allow me a few moments to brag about what we accomplished:

• Prevented a continued decline in engagement with the EA Forum even while significantly cutting resources allocated to the program (~5 FTE → ~2 FTE)

  

• Generated sustained growth in the EA Newsletter for the first time since 2022, and in mid-2025 surpassed 60K subscribers for the first time in its history

  

• Revamped the EA Opportunities Board and moved it over to effectivealtruism.org, where it's regularly the top viewed page on the site (see chart below for past 90 days)

  • Plus we recently added full-time roles, which helped us hit our annual 2026 P0 growth goal before the end of Q2

  

I started off 2025 expecting us to focus on EA Forum community building, and we ended up instead shifting to focus on growth. I personally feel mixed about this:

1. I'm really proud of my team for hitting all the 2025 growth goals that we set. It's quite satisfying to be able to quantitatively express the outcomes of our work! :)
2. Increasing the number of people working on EA causes can certainly be good and impactful. I was excited to work on Forum features to help more people get involved with EA when I first joined CEA, and I still think there is a lot of potential to make those more effective.
3. I think it makes sense to focus on the "put it into practice" half of effective altruism (which is what growth feeds into) if you feel that the "figure out how to do the most good" half is healthy, but I don't personally feel convinced that it's healthy.
4. CEA cares about not goodharting growth. However, my personal experience strayed closer to this than I was comfortable with.
5. For the Forum in particular, growth does not currently feel like the right goal to be backchaining from. It's clear that there are tradeoffs between tending the garden and aiming to grow the number of Forum users by X% each year.
   1. For example, I feel convinced that we should implement the rejected content feature that LessWrong built a few years ago. In the short term this will reduce the number of users posting on the site. In the long term this may or may not increase the number of users on the site. Personally, I would be happier with a smaller and healthier Forum community than a larger one that is more like the rest of the internet.

2026

In 2026, we have not been focusing on growth (outside of the EA Opportunities Board). @Toby Tremlett🔹 and I used our Forum capacity to explore directions for the Forum that we were most excited about and felt could be most impactful. It's been interesting seeing some relevant discussions on the Forum! :)

A lot of what's written in the above posts resonates with me. (For example, I think an ideas-first framework fits the Forum better than a careers-first framework. CEA measures talent growth via careers.) Toby and I have been honing in on a more focused direction for the Forum in the ideas space. I'm excited about it, and I'll let him say more about it when he's ready! Plus, from my recent conversations at CEA, I expect that CEA's strategy from 2027 onward will start to cover the "figure out how to do the most good" half of effective altruism^[2], which makes me personally more optimistic about its future.

On the tech side, we've mostly focused on setting better foundations by moving to a new codebase. I've been enjoying the new post page more than I expected! I love the new font and it just looks a lot more polished to me. You can read more in @Ollie Etherington's post: EA Forum Update: Migrating to a new codebase.

Thank you! 💙

Huge thanks to the Online Team who helped me run the Forum (@Toby Tremlett🔹 @Ollie Etherington @Agnes Hasselblad 🔸 @Will Howard🔹), to the Forum moderators and facilitators who take care of the space (@JP Addison🔸 @Will Aldred @Francis @Dane Valerie @OscarD🔸), and to all the Forum users who have supported us over this time — this job has been really meaningful for me and I couldn't have done it without all of you.

1. ^{^}

   For our own products at least. About half of our capacity (design & engineering) goes toward supporting other teams at CEA, which I won't cover in this post.

2. ^{^}

   To clarify a common misunderstanding: I don't mean that CEA should be doing research themselves, but something more akin to ensuring that the process of figuring out how to do the most good continues, or even improves over time.