Quick update: I read your post more closely and I actually still feel undecided, so I let my colleague break the tie and they voted not community, so I've removed the tag. :)

To clarify: I tried hard to apply the current definition. I expect we will revisit this definition and system in the near future.

I agree that I don't think it's in-practice relegating content. Many of the highest karma posts are still "Community" posts. I've heard a user tell me that they just scroll down to the "Community" section when they come to the Forum (possibly a joke but this feels like a joke that has some truth to it). I think it does mean that newcomers to the site will be less likely to see those posts, but that is intentional (we think those posts are less relevant to newcomers). 

I also agree that the intention was to essentially "correct" how much attention these kinds of posts were getting, because using only karma (plus recency) for sorting meant that they were overweighted. I believe the "Community" section is still valuable for essentially the same reasons as before (for example, I think it would be a mistake to assume that there will not be major drama/scandals discussed here in the future, and I think that would be worse without a "Community" section).

However, I don't have a strong opinion about the definition of "Community", nor even if this section should remain "Community" or if it should have some totally different criteria. I'm quite supportive of criticism so I could see the case for updating this system to put more criticism of EA in the Frontpage. It's likely our team will revisit this in the next few months.

Hi Jan, my apologies for the frustrating experience. The Forum team has reduced both our FTEs and moderation/facilitator capacity over the past year — in particular, currently the categorization of "Community" posts is done mostly by LLM judgement with a bit of human oversight. I personally think that this system makes too many mistakes, but I have not found time to prioritize fixing it.

In the meantime, if you ever encounter any issues (such as miscategorized posts) or if you have any questions for the Forum team, I encourage you to contact us, or you can message myself or @Toby Tremlett🔹 directly via the Forum. We're happy to work with you to resolve any issues.

For what it's worth, here is my (lightly-held) opinion based on the current definition^[1] of "Community" posts:

The community topic covers posts about the effective altruism community, as well as applying EA in one's personal life. The tag also applies to posts about the Forum itself, since this is a community space. You should use the community tag if one of the following things is true:

• The post is about EA as a cultural phenomenon (as opposed to EA as a project of doing good)
• The post is about norms, attitudes or practices you'd like to see more or less of within the EA community
• The post would be irrelevant to someone who was interested in doing good effectively, but NOT interested in the effective altruism community
• The post concerns an ongoing conversation, scandal or discourse that would not be relevant to someone who doesn't care about the EA community.

I agree that the two posts about uni group funding are "Community" posts because they are "irrelevant to someone who was interested in doing good effectively, but NOT interested in the effective altruism community". I've tagged them as such.

I would say that the EAG application bar post is a borderline case^[2], but I lean towards agreeing that it's "Community" because it's mostly addressed towards people in the community. I've tagged it as such.

I skimmed your post on LW and I think it was categorized as "Community" because it arguably "concerns an ongoing conversation, scandal or discourse that would not be relevant to someone who doesn't care about the EA community" (as the post references past criticisms of EA, which someone who wasn't involved in the community wouldn't have context on). I think this is not a clear cut case. Often the "Community" tag requires some judgement calls. If you wanted to post it on the Forum again, I could read it more carefully and make a decision on it myself — let me know if so.

1. ^{^}

   To be clear, I haven't put enough thought into this definition to feel confident agreeing or disagreeing with it. I'm just going to apply it as written for now. I expect that our team will revisit this within the next few months.

2. ^{^}

   Partly because I believe the intended audience is people who are not really involved with the EA community but would be valuable additions to an EA Global conference (and also I think you don't need to know anything about the EA community to find that post valuable), and so the post doesn't 100% fit any of the four criteria.

I've just updated the doc with our final OKRs of the year, was somewhat delayed due to a team retreat and Thanksgiving.

Thank you for writing this! I'm surprised at how often this take comes up in lefty spaces, and I appreciate you addressing it.

Ah sorry, I don't think there's any additions on the markdown side.

As-is it often feels like the markdown editor is a second-class citizen.

Yeah I think this is true in some sense. CKEditor does get more attention in our dev work. Partly that's because it's the default, and is used much more often (I ran a quick query to sense check this, and it looks like about 1/9 of things written on the Forum in 2024 are in markdown, 7/9 are using CKEditor, and 1/9 are other^[1]). I don't think this tells the whole story though, so I'm open to pitches for us to enhance the markdown editor. :) Though note that we have significantly less engineering capacity now.

1. ^{^}

   Mostly admin-specific or legacy things

Mini EA Forum Update

We now have a unified @mention feature in our editor! You can use it to add links to posts, tags, and users. Thanks so much to @Vlad Sitalo — both for the GitHub PR introducing this feature, and for time and again making useful improvements to our open source codebase. 💜

I think those are both good points. In my experience, different subsets of EA can vary a lot in terms of cause prioritization. Though I'm guessing that Aaron means something slightly different than you do when he says "consensus EA".

the risk that the results have been affected by off-Forum advocacy and organizing

I'm not sure if this addresses your concern, but just want to clarify that accounts can only vote if they were created before Oct 22, 2024. I think that having to have created an account prior to the announcement of the donation election is a medium bar (at least I think it's higher than Manifund's event was) — it's quite easy to use the Forum without creating an account, so people who create an account tend not to be casual readers.

I do think it would be interesting to compare the overall results with those of the subset of users who have earned at least some karma.