I worked as a software/product engineer at the Centre for Effective Altruism for three years before becoming the EA Forum Project Lead. I'm also the EA Forum's head moderator. If you'd like to support our work, sign up for a 30 min user interview with someone on our team. Hearing about your experience with the Forum helps us improve the site for everyone.
In general, we'd be happy to hear any feedback you have! :) Feel free to contact us or post in this suggestion thread. You can also give us anonymous feedback via this form.
During last yearâs Giving Season, I started up an EA Forum Instagram account as an experiment to see if the Forum Team could help spread important ideas outside of the Forum. In particular, I think thereâs interesting and nuanced discussion on the Forum that is representative of EA in a way that other popular media does not capture about EA. I mostly ran it myself, and while it was fun, it took up more of my time than I could justify, so I stopped updating it earlier this year.
Now that the CEA Comms Team is larger and has hired a Marketing Manager, theyâve renamed the account to effectivealtruismofficial and will be taking it from here. Theyâll be using it as part of broader plans to share high-quality EA content across multiple platforms to grow the EA movement and brand. They're happy to hear your questions and collaboration ideas â you can reach out to the CEA Comms Team via email comms@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
The EA Forum moderation team has decided to enable the same automatic rate limits here as on LessWrong (see this post from the LW team for more info and reasoning).
Previously we had a couple automatic rate limits, and we've simply replaced those. Our codebase is open source, so you can see all the current automatic rate limits described in this file. Broadly they affect users who have low karma, or whose most recent content got downvoted by many others. In particular, we've noticed more new users who post a lot of lower-quality AI-generated content, so we hope that these automatic rate limits help to maintain a higher signal:noise ratio on the site.
Personally I think there's a good chance that we'll want to tweak the exact limits/criteria for our site, so we plan to monitor how often people hit the rate limits. Feel free to share your thoughts, concerns, and suggestions with me! :)
We've added two new kinds of notifications that have been requested multiple times before:
I hope you find these useful! đ Feel free to reply if you have any feedback or questions.
I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q3.1 (sorry this is a bit late, I just forgot! đ ).
Hey Holly, it sounds like youâre frustrated by how people in EA are engaging with the idea of a pause. Iâm sure thatâs really hard, and Iâm sure I donât know even a fraction of what youâve gone through. I know youâre doing this advocacy work because you care a lot, and I really appreciate that. You know that I personally support your work.
However, Iâm worried that this thread is becoming unproductive, and risks making the Forum feel like less of a safe space[1].
In particular, my concern is that you are criticizing @Denkenbergerđ¸ directly in a way that appears to come from nowhere. @Denkenbergerđ¸ doesnât say anything about their personal views on a pause before you respond with:
But honestly all I hear are excuses. You wouldnât want to help me if Carl said it was the right thing to do or youâd have already realized what I said yourself. You wouldnât be waiting for Carlâs permission or anyone elseâs. What youâre looking for is permission to stay on this corrupt be-the-problem strategy and it shows.
In my opinion, this sort of accusation without evidence erodes the Forumâs ability to be a safe community space for important discussions. If it's the case that I'm missing some context and you have personal beef with @Denkenbergerđ¸, then I donât think the Forum is the appropriate place to hash that out.
To be clear, I think the following are broadly fine and often good (assuming adherence to our Forum norms):
So Iâd like to suggest that you take a step back from this thread. If you find yourself getting frustrated at others on the Forum elsewhere, Iâd suggest taking a break from those as well.
Youâve written some of the best posts on this Forum, and the Forum Team greatly values your contributions. At the same time, I also think itâs important that the Forum continues to be a productive discussion space.
A relevant quote from our âModeration principlesâ post:
The Forum should be a great and safe space: weâre working on hard problems, and the internet can be rough! We donât want arbitrary barriers to keep people from joining discussions on the Forum, we donât want people to be miserable on the Forum, and we want to promote excellent discussions and content.
- Civility and charitable discussion - the Forum should feel like a breath of fresh air and a refuge of sanity. When you join a discussion on the Forum, you should be able to reasonably expect that the other people wonât twist your words, wonât call you names, etc.
- Safety - if users feel unsafe on the Forum â theyâre being threatened, or theyâre worried that if they post, theyâll have to fend off trolls on their own, etc. â thatâs our problem. We need to prevent this.
I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q3.2 (the next six weeks).