You're great Toby, but I do worry that it will be hard to make progress without getting you more capacity for the Forum. I'm glad that we were given more freedom this year, and I hope that means CEA will invest more than the current 1.5 FTE into the Forum, at least in 2027.

With your limited time, I wonder if you should focus more on proactive community building, in the sense we discussed when I first took over the team. I think people's perceptions of the space matter a great deal to how they engage with it, as you can see from some of Nathan's comments under the parent quick take. We can chat about it when we meet tomorrow. :)

I'd be interested to hear more about why you didn't want to engage with posts like CEA's, and what you mean by "many important questions are just 'not the done thing'". Not sure if it's related, but I think people who push back on CEA tend to get lots of karma still. :)

Thanks for sharing! I mostly agree. If you read my posts from the past 2 years you can see part of the story for why the Forum is the way it is. Broadly, the Online Team has been more focused on supporting the rest of CEA and doing growth-related work, and we've been putting less and less FTE toward the Forum over time (~1.5 FTE when I left).

I feel sad that we didn't push as much on quality and community as I had originally wanted. I found it challenging to try to convince leadership of the impact of doing cultivation work on the Forum, partly because the impact is actually quite nebulous and risks being just entertainment for EAs. Ultimately I still believe that there are tipping points that would cause the Forum to lose the majority of its value, and community building on the Forum can have significant impact by preventing that.

Ah, a bit of extra context: the "stories" page views vary a lot based on the marketing happening at any given time. I bet that was a recently released one when I took the screenshot and was getting posted across social media.

Just to clarify, are you responding to the "Likely that more than 10% of your post was drafted by an LLM?" message? That's now always shown at the top of the editor, to notify users about our new policy. So that's not related to the body of your post. :) We do currently use Pangram but the results are only for internal use, and don't affect the editor.

I can see why that would be confusing, so I'll update the wording to be more clearly a question.

Sharing an overview of the CEA Online Team's Q2 OKRs (we run this Forum)

Just a reminder that you can customize your own Frontpage feed, so if you'd like to give serious posts a chance today you can hide April Fools' Day posts.

Click on "Customize feed", add "April Fools' Day" by clicking on the + to search for the relevant tag, then click "Hidden".

Oh no, thanks so much for flagging this! Toby was on holiday today unfortunately, so I've just updated it.

I do think an argument over funding allocation is importantly different from the one made in your post — for example, I think convincing EA groups to do more of this work could be an effective way to improve the situation that could also be essentially free. Although if you're trying to make a point similar to Doing Prioritization Better ("Since cross-cause prioritization work (and to a lesser extent cause prioritization) is presently rare, and has considerable benefits, the EA community may well be radically misallocating its prioritization efforts.") then I broadly agree. :)

I'm also curious whether you think CEARCH matches the solution you're thinking of?