I'd say a big problem with trying to make the forum a community space is that it's just not a lot of fun to post here. The forum has a dry and serious tone and voice that emulates that of academic papers, which communicates that this is a place for posting Serious and Important articles, while attempts at levity or informality often get downvoted, and god forbid you don't write in perfect grammatically correct English. Sometimes when I'm posting here I feel a pressure to act like a robot, which is not exactly conducive to community bonding. 

Something I've noticed more in the EA Forum is the increase in drive-by professional posts. Organizations will promote a idea, a job posting, or something else. Then they'll engage as long as they're on the front page before bouncing.

That's fine in small amounts or if the author is a regular contributor. But if the author is just stopping by to do their public engagement, then it breaks the illusion of a community.

And for me, that is the aesthetic draw of the forum. It's a place where expects and amateurs alike coexist in the same space, say things that are too rough for professional publication, and then respond to each other in real time.

It's magical and unreal that I can develop these (admittedly shallow and sometimes parasocial) relationships with people. It's cool that I have some chance of getting a leading expert to respond to my quarter-baked comment. It's cool that people sometimes recognize me in real life from what I wrote online.

And that feeling has been decreasing over time, which has made me lean more towards Slack, Discord, or even Twitter for real-time engagement. Meanwhile, I treat the Forum more as a searchable repository for EA-style research

I don't know to what extent that this can be addressed by the EA Forum team at all, but I have been pretty disappointed by the lack of new, interesting ideas about how to better the world. It does not seem that there is really much incentive to share such ideas on the forum, because most people will only look at articles on subject matters that they are already familiar or on meta-level conversations regarding community or norms or expectations around being in the EA world. I find myself pretty frequently logging in to the EA forum hoping to find new, interesting ideas for changing the world, but just finding a bunch of banal or naval-gazing content. I think EA, and resultantly, the world, would benefit from being a more vibrant, open-minded, and creative space, but I'm not sure what would help us move in this direction.

Over the course of 2024 (and indeed, since early 2023), Forum usage metrics have steadily gone down^[1]. My subjective opinion was that the Forum did not meet my (perhaps too high) expectations in terms of producing valuable discussions that enable collective intellectual progress on the world’s most pressing problems^[2]. 

I would start with the assumption that this had a lot more to do with the larger zeitgeist vs. anything to do with what the Forum team did / didn't do. For instance:

• In the era with fairly accessible and expanding financial & human resources, people might have been more motivated to devote time to proposing novel and exciting stuff because they assessed a higher probability of launch feasibility;
• In the immediate post-FTX era, critical voices might have felt that the kettle was hot and that they had a better chance of getting desired reforms through vs. now;
• And so on.

Some of this is normal, inevitable, and even necessary as a social movement develops. I don't have any clear opinion on whether what you're identifying here fits into the normal/necessary bucket or the something-to-be-addressed bucket. My low-confidence guess is that there is something in both?

All that is to say that I would be cautious about weighing raw quantitative or qualitative data about the quality of Forum discussions too heavily in the Forum team's feedback loops. There is likely to be a lot of noise.

More on tech vs community building

I think that in all my time working on the Forum, it’s felt more like being on a typical software product team than being on a team of community builders or organizers. For example, when our team grew around late 2022, we primarily hired product and engineering capacity. (Though this feeling is at least partly because I was hired as a software engineer; I could imagine it was less the case for our various content managers.) Our success metrics tend to be things like MAUs (monthly active users), clicks, and time on page / engagement hours.

IMO, focusing on the software made more sense when the community was growing organically, and when it was growing for reasons outside of our control (like via comms/marketing around What We Owe The Future). That’s not our current situation. While I still think there are a lot of valuable improvements we can make on the tech side, right now I believe that the community side is more neglected so we should be focusing our efforts there.

Going down to 1 FTE of engineering on the Forum has been difficult. We’ve let bugs exist for longer on the site, been worse at addressing customer service requests, and have very little capacity for longer-term investments (both in terms of improving the codebase and doing feature work). These things make me personally sad, and I’m sorry to any readers who have been affected by this. As of January, we’re starting to shift capacity back towards Forum engineering, so it will probably settle closer to 1.5 FTE. Even with the focus on community building, I think that the space that holds the community matters quite a lot and we don’t want it to start hindering our work.^[1]

1. ^{^}

   For more on this point, see this LW comment from Habryka.

More on where I’m coming from

I joined the CEA Online Team in late 2021 as a software engineer. Most of the time I’ve been on the team, I’ve been focused on building parts of the Forum that are outside of the core reading/writing experience (such as groups and connections). I still believe in my heart that this was worth working on, and that it can be particularly valuable to build out these non-core features on the margin. I have a soft spot for making “doing good” more accessible and helping more people find ways to take concrete steps, and I think the Forum is well-placed to do that.

However, as mentioned above, I think that the value of these non-core features depends on having a strong and healthy Forum community. Faced with being actually responsible for the success of the Forum, I’ve (sadly) decided that our team needs to drop most work on non-core features, and even most of the product/engineering work on core features. We’re down to approximately 1.5 FTE of software engineering on the Online Team, and much of that is taken up by non-Forum work (such as the recent CEA.org redesign). Instead, we are focusing on increasing the amount of high-quality content on the Forum, via a combination of community building and more actively steering the Forum ourselves (such as with more themed events and revisiting our moderation processes).

Since I’m relatively new at this interim role, I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and I’m probably making some mistakes. So I will again emphasize that I am very open to and interested in feedback, especially if you have any disagreements on how/why the Forum is falling short, or disagreements on how the Online Team should be spending our time.

This was a good read - thanks for sharing. In the spirit of engaging with the invitation to comment below, here are my n = 1 thoughts. Quick background: I've been EA-adjacent for ~10 years and Forum-lurking for ?? years, but only recently really identified as an EA and joined the Forum.

Main point: I would like to use the Forum more! While EA-the-movement isn't a huge part of my life, EA-the-ideas are close to my core values. I'd like to refine my moral thinking, learn more about doing good in the world, and hang out with people who are somewhat but not excessively like-minded. I stop by the Forum ~daily, but find several barriers to engaging more (whether reading or writing). In no particular order:

• There's not as much new content as I'd hope, or at least easily discoverable content on the front page. Sometimes I stop by hoping to find a new thread that grabs me, but the front page threads are either not new or too serious (see below). Maybe Instagram/Reddit style always-something-new isn't the right niche for the Forum, but it sure is good for engagement.
• It's very serious! We have lots of posts about "did you know about this new moral catastrophe," "why you should definitely rearrange your life around doing good," "10,000 words on the nature of moral epistemics." These posts are often well written, thoughtful, and topical -- but they're also heavy. This means the Forum doesn't fit into my life as a quick break from work or a relaxing nights-and-weekends read, nor do I form the semiconscious association that Forum = fun.
• The standards are very high. Sometimes I write something EA-adjacent[-adjacent] on my blog, but it seems below the implicit quality threshold of the Forum where typical posts are long, thoughtful, and brimming with citations. I'm intimidated away from posting, especially while I'm poor in karma and general non-numerical community credibility.
  • Of course standards being high also has numerous benefits.
  • Maybe this is what quick takes is for? Do I have quick takes? Should I be writing them here? Would anybody read them given that most of my takes are variants on "yeah that seems complicated I'm unsure of the nature of morality and truth here?"
  • Even when I think I have something reasonable to say, it feels like it's probably been said better elsewhere on the forum and broadly understood by the community, because...
• There's not a lot of disagreement. The Forum community seems broadly roughly aligned on both values and what kinds of evidence are compelling, so the posts that do well tend to stand out in the strength of their claims or the depth of their evidence (both reasonable) -- not their novelty. I would be delighted to see more polite, thoughtful, good-faith disagreement. Encountering EA in the mid 2010s vaguely felt like meeting someone who always had a fresh piece of data or thought experiment for you; less so these days.

I don't really know that I have a suggestion here. Of all the online spaces I visit, the Forum has by far the most thoughtful comments, well researched posts, and mutual presumption of good faith. I cherish this! But I suspect it's not free.

Personally, I'm not using the forum as much as I could and as much as I used to, because it is a time-sink. I'm the kind of person who can easily get lost on the Internet; clicking a link here and opening another tab there, and... look where those two hours went. Because of this, I'm wary of spending too much time here.

I don't know whether my declining forum use is due to changes in my behavior or changes to the forum. Probably it's a combination. On the forum side, the home page feels a bit more cluttered than it used to be. The forum feels slightly more gamified (e.g., emoji reactions).

I don't have concrete suggestions, other than thinking about what would be an ideal time for users to spend on the forum. A time that takes both the forum quality and its user's productivity into account.

If you view the forum from a UX lens and put it in the context of different categories of online community infrastructures (e.g. Facebook/Twitter feed of short posts, Discord/Slack channel-based, Quora/StackExchange/Reddit upvote/question-based and more traditional forums with defined categories/aubcategories and threads), what do you think are the pros and cons of how the Forum is currently structured and how does that facilitate (or not facilitate) what you would like to see happen in online EA community building? Would also be curious to hear how you would compare the Forum to that of the many existing EA Slack channels.

I didn't realize it before until I read: "6. Promoting some good Forum content on other platforms", but it strikes me that there seems to be a strange lack of forum content shared elsewhere, even in other EA circles.

I don't think it content quality that is the problem (though lots of good stuff here is link-posted from elsewhere), my inclination is that content presentation just isn't amenable to sharing.

Other platforms remind you at every turn to share content, subscribe, follow, etc. The forum doesn't. Plus, maybe people aren't sharing because it doesn't have pretty pictures? Basically the norm for Substacks now is to include a nice picture at the top, even if it's just a vaguely relevant AI-generation. Substack strongly encourages writers to do this! 

So I'll just give some reporting on a vibe I've been feeling on the forum.

I feel a lot more comfortable posting on LessWrong compared to the EA forum because it feels like there's a lot more moral outrage here? Like if I go back 3 or 4 years I felt that the forum was a lot more open to discussing and exploring new ideas. There's been some controversies recently around meat-eater problem stuff and similar and I can't help but just feel uncomfortable posting stuff with how people have started to react? 

I like the different debate weeks as I think it sets up a specific context to create more content which is quite great. Maybe it's a vibe thing, maybe it's something else but I feel that the virtue of open-hearted truthseeking is missing compared to a couple of years back and it makes me want to avoid posting. 

I do believe that the post standard should be lowered at least a bit and for things to be more exploratory again. So uhhhm, more events that invite more community writing and engagement?

Thanks for writing this! Re this:

Perhaps the most straightforward way you can help is by being more active on the Forum. I often see posts and comments that don’t receive enough upvotes (IMO), so even voting more is useful.

I've noticed that comments with more disagree than agree votes often have more karma votes than karma. Whether this is good or bad depends on the quality of the comment, but sometimes the comments are productive and helpful, and so the fact that people are downvoting them seems bad for a few reasons: first, it disincentivizes commenting; second, it incentivizes saying things that you think people will agree with, even at the expense of saying what is true. (Of course, it's good to try to frame things more persuasively when this doesn't come at the cost of speaking honestly.) The edit here provides an example of how I think this threatens to undermine epistemic and discursive norms on the Forum. 

I'm not sure what the solution is here—I've suggested this previously, but am not sure it'd be helpful or effective. And it may turn out that this issue—how does the Forum incentivize making/promote helpful comments that people disagree with?—is relatively intractable, or hard to solve without making sacrifices in other domains. (Another thought that occurred to me is doing what websites like the NYT do: having "NYT recommended comments" and "reader recommended comments," but I assume the mods don't want to be in the business of weighing in on the merits of particular comments.) 

Thanks for writing this Sarah; nice to have leaders sharing thinking/requesting feedback!

My quick ‘off-the-cuff’ thoughts in response: 

I definitely agree the Forum is critical as a “space” in EA, particularly for those of us who aren’t living in a hub, have access to conferences, nor work directly in an organization. It can often feel at times like being a buoy at sea without that direct connection - the handful of times I’ve drifted from EA over the years it has been the Forum pulling me back in (by helping me get up to speed on what’s going on especially in cases like the FTX stuff … and contests are often one of the few ways I feel I can participate - i.e. open phil’s worldview prize, red teaming, future fund RFP). 

I have at times seen established EAs “punch-down” on the “extremely online” EAs and I’ve felt that to be a shallow judgement of those of us not privy to direct engagement opportunities. It definitely gave me the impression the movement and community are two separate entities not always aligned. I’d like to think the Forum could better blur that distinction to avoid hubs becoming silos with strong views (which I think contributes to the confusion around the public perception of EA). 

That aside, the Forum right now is confusing because it’s providing multiple services in one; a newspaper, an opportunities/classifieds board, a library (the wiki) and a discussion space though not as free flowing as slack/discord. Now with groups and CRM and event tracking it’s becoming a catch-all for EA information. Given this… 

 Has the forum team considered reframing the Forum as an intranet? (Note, the intranet model is often associated with corporations but it’s used in a lot of contexts for brand community sites, colleges and social groups).

 I’m thinking one of the limitations of the Forum is that the name implies one feature, but now the Forum is so much more than that - if we were to shift away from centralizing “the Forum” aspect and make it the “Hub” or “EA Online”... whatever it’s called, the idea is to step back and reframe the online space as more than just a “forum” because that’s what it’s becoming, as evidenced by CEA taking on the EA Hub and the Opps Board recently, it’s clear the goal is for CEA to manage the movement’s digital infrastructure.

I see the intranet design helping resolve issues like low engagement. If people can accomplish multiple things like search/apply for jobs, join topic threads, and chat with each other, complete surveys and more, they may be more likely to login and engage. This can help on the backend with things like surveys, community health team work (ticket system), and maybe down the road a common app or work trials. It also helps draw a boundary around community conversations that don’t need to be as public (which I think is a huge deterrent for engagement right now). 

I’d be happy to discuss more in-depth and share some examples of what I’m visualizing here but I’ve long thought the Forum was heading in the “intranet” direction and could provide a lot of benefit for both members of the movement and those running infrastructure for it. 

Love this post Sarah, and I'm excited to work more on Forum community building this year.

To add a bit to the "Message Toby with ideas for authors you would like to see writing here" CTA: 

Last year, we had some success cross-posting blogs on the Forum - for example, Lewis Bollard's Farm Animal Welfare Newsletter, Lauren Gilbert's Lauren Policy, and this post from Oliver Kim's Global Developments blog. Generally, this is a pretty ad hoc decision - a member of our team spots a great post or finds a great blog through Twitter or Substack, and then we message the author to ask if we can crosspost. I'd previously been concerned that doing too much of this might lead to a Forum with more great content, but less great conversations, especially if the authors didn't engage with the comments. So far, the results have been quite different, with authors being more keen to engage with the comments than I'd expected, and good conversations often occurring even if they don't. 

I often talk to people who use the Forum but don't see enough discussion of the particular cause they are most interested in. EA is a broad tent, and the Forum will always reflect that, but the best version of the Forum would contain vibrant sub-communities for each of the key causes. You can help make this happen by keeping the Forum in mind when you are reading substack/twitter/other sources of bloggy content. If you find someone who is writing interesting content which would work as a Forum post, let me know! I can handle the reaching out/ consent to post/ automation of crossposting on your behalf. 

To clarify, this isn't exactly a service I'm offering (I'll take suggestions as suggestions), and you are always very welcome to just linkpost a great post rather than going through me. But I don't have blog omniscience, even though I write the EA Newsletter, and there is a lot of content on the internet that would be a great addition to the discussion of particular cause areas on the Forum, but wouldn't initially register as interesting to me. 

Fwiw, I'm glad we got our own forum and not just a subreddit or Twitter community, where the algorithms would optimize for engagement and do things like push controversial content instead of pushing things that actually seems most relevant for people's ability to do the most good. Many thanks for building and maintaining this! <3

It's great how transparent you are with your reasoning and how clearly you expressed it

Two general notes on UXD: 

1) It could be worth conducting user tests of whether people find the site's landing page being the forum feed overwhelming. It’s hard to get your bearings on that page versus say the “best of the forum” page. People typically like to be guided initially in an experience and get a feel for what’s available, then explore. Or even just a pop-up with “learn about the forum” (it takes a minute to find the link for that page on the sidebar and these days people bounce within seconds). 

2) In the spirit of the intranet comment above, I’d love to see the CRM hidden behind a logged-in view; this could just be my “safety” lens but having a giant list of confirmed EAs in public view seems problematic (sadly, something to consider these days). Maybe ask community health team for their view on it? but when it rolled out I was a little irked to see it created without first asking users if they want to be placed on such a definitive, public listing. 

You could substantially increase your weekly active users, converting monthly active users (MAU) into weekly and even daily users, and increasing MAU as well, by using push notifications to inform users of replies to their posts and comments and other events that are currently only sent as in-forum notifications to most users. Many, many times, I have posted on the forum, sent a comment or reply, and only weeks later seen that there was a response. On the other hand, I will get an email from twitter or bluesky if one person likes my post, and I immediately go on to see who it was. In doing so you will draw people to the forum at the exact time their engagement will encourage others to come back, building up a positive flywheel of engagement.

These features are already built into your forum but are off by default! This surprised me greatly because most online forum--not only feedscrolling websites like X and Facebook, but also forum-style websites like Substack and Wordpress--make it easy or default to get push notifications via email. That builds engagement as I've described. Often when I post on Tyler Cowen's Wordpress-based Marginal Revolution blog, I get a tonne of email notifications of replies and discussions about that topic. It's a bit overwhelming, but it's fun!

Users who just use your notification default (notifications within the website, but no few push notifications) probably make up the vast majority of active users and passive users (if not the most active users). If it is possible to identify users who have not deliberately turned off notifications, I strongly suggest that you flip the default to affect those users who haven't deliberately set a notification policy to send push notifications. This will get a small hit from people who dislike this, but you could mitigate this by e.g., an email in your next digest to inform people of why you are making the change.

I have long thought this was a missing feature on EA Forum; now I know it exists, but is turned off.

@titotal said that it's not a lot of fun to post here. I agree, and I also think that making it more immediately rewarding to post, by informing people of others' engagement with their content as soon as it happens, would make it a lot more fun. It will make me personally very happy if you do this!

I would like to add the EA forum currently feels too insular; the type of people who post on the forum are "too EA"-like in a sense (probably due to higher standards intimidating people). Specifically, it adds to the perception of EA being a closed community, possibly even a cult.

Now of course it is good to have the forum dedicated to the most active Highly Engaged EAs, but this kind of leads to greater community homogeneity (as EA-adjacent people would just not interact). I don't know the best solution to this, but I do prefer the style to be closer to 80000 Hours which I found to be more grounded. I do like the solution of reframing the EA forum as an intranet. Or maybe have a casual EA forum space and then a more dedicated one.

I see folks talking about increasing the "fun" below, and I think that is worthwhile indeed. Fun should really be a component of anything in life. In New Orleans there's huge parades/parties after someone has passed, or even after a tragedy, because fun, connection and positivity aligns with hope and celebration.

There is also a staleness in the sense that EAs seem to want to communicate/speak/write in a very standardized way that is simply not interesting prose to grab or hold attention, therefore it's just down to the interest in the subject/context that's important. I see the same problem in live presentations in the EA space often (this is not exclusive to EA events btw)...the context is great, but if you really want to have an impact, the context is simply just one part of the formula of communicating effectively. I think seeing more personality in the writing on the forum would be beneficial. I'll take my own advice here and make it a point to consider a lesser barrier when engaging on the forum, and allow some personality through on my own posts.

As an easy and direct action that may increase exposure, here's one idea: create something that EAs that meet in whatever capacity would like to connect with. By this I mean something like a monthly ice breaker, that groups that meet either in person or online can go to on the Forum once / month say at the beginning of each of their meetings just to kick things off or potentially to close things out rather than an ice breaker. In this way you get folks who are already in the EA mindset and dedicating time to EA adjacent matters, to interact. 

Last comment is related to bringing EA into the wider world that has not heard about it, or doesn't know much about it, rather than increasing engagement by current EAs. That's obviously a huge task, maybe one question forward on it is, who are the EA forums "competitors" and why do those folks participate there but maybe not here? This is a big task I know

I'm a big fan of the forum however, including the digest emails and the highlights and the annual recap etc, so y'all are doing a great job in my mind and thank you for the work and dedication.

Sarah, thanks for the post, very interesting. 2 ideas:

1) Why not form a group of volunteers that will be a combination of:
- a focus group (to test new ideas or have quick surveys or something else) and 
- an advisory group (to propose new ideas)?

2) Why not have a regular remote (text only or video) interview with an interesting (but maybe not so well-known) person from outside of EA? You could post a list of potential candidates (and broad topics) for such an interview (whom we may already know how to approach) and ask to vote. To add some extra weight to their votes, people could complement them with some specific questions to the "speakers" they choose. Of course, you could also choose some speakers solely at your team's discretion.

This will: (a) generate new interesting content for the users and (b) at the same time will attract more attention to EA.

Just as an example - here is a research report on the Russian funding of war that was recently widely quoted - https://navigatingrussia.substack.com/p/russias-hidden-war-debt

The author is a top expert on Russia but he is not widely known outside of Russia-focused expert community, so he is clearly undervalued from the viewpoint of publicity. And there are a lot of such interesting people.

And finally, my strong view is that if suddenly EA forum disappeared it could not be substituted by any other platform - neither Reddit, nor Twitter, nor Substack nor something else. So please continue to move on!

I'm sure I have some thoughts, but to begin with, it would helpful for understanding what's going on if the dashboard would tell us how 2024 went for the events and groups teams.

why did MAUs spike in Q2 2022? something around FTX?

• 8. Basically all the rest of the value that comes from the Forum (more on this in the appendix) is downstream of having a strong community of people contributing/writing on the Forum.
  • a. For example, I think the Forum creates a significant amount of good in the world by helping people find impactful work (ex. job postings) and improve their donations (ex. by reading about work from organizations). However, I believe that is not typically why people come to the Forum, and so this value is downstream of having a strong core community of individuals writing posts and comments.

I think it would be better to focus more explicitly on how the EA Forum results in improved donations and career choices, as these are better proxies for impact than lead indicators like the number of posts, comments, or user-hours. I would also be deliberate about which areas are more cost-effective. I believe increasing donations to the best animal welfare interventions is way more valuable than to the best in human welfare^[1] (including not only global health and development, but also global catastrophic risk).

1. ^{^}

   I estimate broiler welfare and cage-free campaigns are 168 and 462 times as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charities, which are thought to be among the best human welfare interventions, and that the Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has been 64.3 k times as cost-effective as such charities.

Great post, and thanks for the transparency, Sarah! I agree with focussing more on content over tech.

Executive Summary:
The EA Forum Team is shifting focus toward community building over technical development, aiming to strengthen the Forum's role as a central online space for effective altruism (EA), fostering high-quality discourse, and enabling collective intellectual progress.

Key Points:

1. Declining Forum Metrics and Refocus on Community Building: Usage metrics have declined since 2023, prompting a strategy shift from software improvements to prioritizing community engagement and discourse quality.
2. Centrality of the EA Forum: A strong, central online platform is deemed essential for advancing EA's influence and intellectual progress, despite uncertainties about the Forum being the ideal platform.
3. Vision for the Forum Community: Goals include fostering discourse that embodies EA principles, enabling interdisciplinary collaboration, and supporting a sense of community and constructive debate.
4. Proactive Strategies and Challenges: The Forum Team is experimenting with outreach, moderating discussions, promoting high-quality content, and addressing challenges like integrating new contributors and managing adjacent online spaces.
5. Deprioritized Technical Features: The team is pausing work on non-core features like a mobile app, personalized recommendations, and certain UX improvements to focus on content and community-building efforts.
6. Call to Action for Community Support: Suggestions include increased user activity, promoting valuable contributors, and volunteering to strengthen sub-communities on the Forum.

This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.

I’ve been active here for some time, but I feel like my thoughts and ideas don’t quite align with the EA community. It often seems like there’s an expectation to think, write, or approach topics in a specific way, or to focus on what’s considered “interesting,” which may have cultural influences. I’ve been contemplating stepping back from writing here, as the forum seems to work best for those whose perspectives fall within its accepted norms.