Nice piece, thanks for sharing it on here! 

Nice! I’ll be there, see you then :)

Great stuff, congrats on launching! Curious how you funded it - EA Australia’s general budget or a specific grant? Asking because we explored something similar at EAN and would love to compare notes. Happy to take it to DM if easier :)

From what I understand, Forum usage declined for a couple of years and has now stabilised. 

My guess is that, since the Forum is mostly used by fairly engaged EAs, the post-FTX slowdown in top-of-funnel growth is showing up here on a lag. People don't usually arrive on the Forum cold; my impression is there's typically a runway of a year or two between first contact with EA and posting or commenting in earnest. So a recruitment hole in 2023–24 produces a Forum hole now, even if intake has since recovered.

If that's roughly right, two things should follow: the share of activity from accounts under ~12 months old will have dropped more than overall activity has, and Forum recovery will lag whatever recovery CEA is seeing at the top of the funnel by another year or two.

And then it's probably compounded by dispersion — as you point out, a lot of the conversation that would once have happened here has migrated to LW, X, or Substack. 

Good points! I've found the book 'Change: how to make big things happen' useful in my work at EA Netherlands. I wrote up a few takeaways in a comment here.

Yup, that's a risk! I think you can mitigate it by learning how to do marketing well, but that's easier said than done! 

Thanks Vasco! 

I think it isn’t used much by EA event organisers because it probably doesn’t really measure precisely what it claims to measure. However, I do think it’s nonetheless a reasonable measure of overall quality, and because it’s widely used outside the EA bubble, you can more easily use it to benchmark (compared to likelihood to recommend scores).

Oh, this is perfect timing. I had just ordered The Goal in an effort to get better at this sort of thing. Great to see how it helped someone like yourself - a decent signal that it's a useful book to read.  

Good to know! If it doesn't get included in the EA Survey, we might consider doing it ourselves at the national level (M&E budget allowing...). 

But obviously, international data that would allow us to compare across regions would be more useful.

I think the magnitude × direction framing is really useful, and I agree the risk is real.

At EA Netherlands, I've been thinking about this through the lens of Ben Todd's notion of "community capital" — roughly, the stock of shared values, trust, human capital, coordination capacity, norm-following, and reputation that a community accumulates over time. The worry you're describing is essentially that outreach erodes community capital. And it can — if you do it carelessly.

But my ambition is to try to monitor this over time. If we surveyed relevant aspects of the community periodically — tracking its values, the degree to which people are following community norms, the actions people are taking, the degree of interconnectedness between members, and the quality of human capital coming in — we might be able to detect whether outreach efforts are degrading the direction term, and course-correct if they are.^[1]

If that's feasible, it turns a binary question ("should we grow or not?") into an empirical one ("is this particular form of growth maintaining alignment?"). Some forms of outreach might pass the test, and others might not. But you'd want to check rather than assume.

I think the implicit model in your comment is one where we have to choose — stay small and aligned, or grow and dilute. But perhaps there's a third option: invest seriously in both outreach and monitoring community capital, and course-correct over time.

1. ^{^}

   Out of interest, has this been considered, @David_Moss?