I see the extent of badness of social media platforms (for mental health or society at large) as orthogonal to the question of whether they can be used to cost-effectively attract talent to EA.

Short-form content doesn't have to sacrifice fidelity! It's going to contain less information, but the way to use it is to attract people to go onto engaging with long-form content.

I think probably most users don’t want the friction of clicking through to another platform.

There are ad formats where people don't have to leave the platform, just quickly share their contact information in an in-built form and then continue the mindless scrolling :-) Once they are in a better place mentally, they can read our follow-up email! 

There is also a whole "science" behind landing page optimisation, where if people click on your ad, you take them elsewhere but make it as low-friction as possible to sign up to your thing afterwards.

Amplify has a number of impact stories on people who ended up taking significant action, who originally "just saw an ad" on social media. I occasionally run into people who saw an 80K ad (as opposed to searching for it proactively) and are now doing impressive things.

The problem is that EA marketing is still in its infancy. We have some research (e.g. by Rethink) on what framings of EA work better, but that's really far from being able to answer the question of "How do we maximise attracting talent to EA per dollar spent?". Only now Amplify is doing some small tests on comparing the cost-effectiveness of LinkedIn vs Meta ads and measuring long-term outcomes, but there is so much more to do.

Aw, I wish I knew about it! Thanks for organising.

Thanks for the kind words, Moneer, and it was a pleasure to be working with you during those 6 months!:)

Thanks for the kind words!

Making this distinction between comms and growth is really important—thanks for writing it up.

I don’t have a strong view on the rest of the ecosystem, but at Amplify we’ve worked with a number of field-building orgs, and I’ve been genuinely surprised by how little investment— even from very well-funded ones—has gone into growth through digital media.

Strongly agree that the timing is unfortunate

I have the same impression about seniority.

For EA Connect, I know there were two "tracks", one for people who are very new (pre-intro fellowship, I believe) and the other was the regular conference experience. Sounds like a good call.