I wanted to quickly add that you can also message @Toby Tremlett🔹 or contact the Forum Team if you have any questions (such as "do you think the Forum audience would like this?") or want feedback. We may be slower to respond and may not give as detailed feedback as Justis, but anyone is welcome to reach out to us. :)

I appreciate the suggestion! :) I've added it to our backlog. My current guess is that, given the limited resources we have to spend, this probably won't meet our bar for being cost-effective enough to implement.

Thanks for flagging these! And sorry for the delayed response. :)

1. Yeah I agree with this, I threw it in our task backlog earlier but we haven't had time to fix it yet
2. Interesting! I guess this is a weird edge case with our comment linking code, I'll record this as well

Thanks for flagging! :) I've updated that post, and I'll record this as a low-priority bug.

Thanks for the feedback! I think moderation is tricky and I'm relatively new at it myself. I'm sad at how long users can get stuck in the queue, and I'd love to improve how fast we resolve moderation questions, but where exactly we draw these lines will probably be a learning process for me, and we'll continue to iterate on that.

It looks like you submitted the comment on Dec 17, and our facilitator messaged you on Jan 6 (the delay partly being due to people being out for the holidays), and then they approved your comment a little over a week after messaging you. Yeah I agree that this was an edge case, and I don't think you were being malicious, but I think you could have made your point more productively by, for example, just using "torture".

I feel that using the rejected content feature would give our team more leeway to be opinionated about shaping the home page of our site (compared to now), and we'd feel somewhat free to reject things that don't fit the type of discussions we want to see. For example, it looks like LW rejects posts from new users that don't have a clear introduction. So I think if something is an edge case in the current system, then it would likely get rejected under the other system.

Hi! I just want to start by clarifying that a user’s first post/comment doesn’t go up immediately while our facilitators/moderators check for spam or a clear norm violation (such as posting flame bait/clear trolling). Ideally this process takes no more than a day, though we currently don’t have anyone checking new users outside of approximately US Eastern Time business hours.

However, some content (like your first comment) requires additional back and forth internally (such as checking with moderators) and/or with the new user. This process involves various non-obvious judgement calls, which is what caused a long delay between your submitting the comment and us reaching out to you (plus the fact that many people were out over the winter holidays). In the case of your comment, we asked you to edit it and you didn’t respond to us or edit the comment for over a week, and then our facilitator felt bad for keeping you in the queue for so long so they approved your comment.

We currently do not use the rejected content feature that LW uses. Instead, almost all^[1] of the content that may have been rejected under their system ends up appearing on the rest of our site, and we currently mostly rely on users voting to make content more or less visible (for example, karma affects where a post is displayed on the Frontpage). I plan to seriously consider whether we should start using the rejected content feature here soon; if so, then I expect that we’ll have the same page set up.

I think that, if we had been using the rejected content feature, the right move would have been for us to reject your comment instead of approving it.

1. ^{^}

   My guess is that there are edge cases, but in practice we keep our queue clear, so my understanding is that users are typically not in limbo for more than a few days. Things like spam are not rejected — accounts that post spam are banned.

To quickly add on to what Toby wrote: the CEA Online Team has also been redesigning effectivealtruism.org and we expect to soft launch it soon. I post quick takes when we update our half-quarterly plans, so you can follow along there. :)

For example many editions of the EA handbook spend a huge fraction of their introductions to other cause areas effectively arguing why you should work on AI instead. CEA staffers very heavily favor AI.

Just wanted to quickly add that I don't think that this is quite accurate.

My experience facilitating the Intro Fellowship using the previous version of the EA Handbook was that AI basically didn't come up until the week about longtermism, and glancing through the current version that doesn't seem to have changed. Though I welcome people to read the current version of the EA Handbook and come to their own conclusions.

The most recent relevant data on CEA staff cause prio is this post about where people are donating, and I think animal welfare is more common in that list than AI safety (though this only includes a subset of staff who were interested in participating in the post).

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q2.1 (the next six weeks).

Thanks for the suggestion! I reached out to them last week about their USAID content, and I expect to see something here from them soon. :)

If you see content you like from GiveWell in the future, I encourage you to to reach out to them and suggest that they crosspost it! You can also flag it to myself or Toby and we can reach out, though that may take longer.