Mini EA Forum Update

We've added two new kinds of notifications that have been requested multiple times before:

1. Notifications when someone links to your post, comment, or quick take
   1. These are turned on by default — you can edit your notifications settings via the Account Settings page.
2. Keyword alerts
   1. You can manage your keyword alerts here, which you can get to via your Account Settings or by clicking the notification bell and then the three dots icon.
   2. You can quickly add an alert by clicking "Get notified" on the search page. (Note that the alerts only use the keyword, not any search filters.)
   3. You get alerted when the keyword appears in a newly published post, comment, or quick take (so this doesn't include, for example, new topics).
   4. You can also edit the frequency of both the on-site and email versions of these alerts independently via the Account Settings page (at the bottom of the Notifications list).
   5. See more details in the PR

I hope you find these useful! 😊 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! 😅).

Ugh I agree yeah, thanks for flagging this! I re-opened the poll by manually updating it in the db, and we should increase the default duration of polls.

None of the EA Forum reacts (including agree/disagree) have a strong version, so those would just be the individual number of users.

Hey Holly, it sounds like you’re frustrated by how people in EA are engaging with the idea of a pause. I’m sure that’s really hard, and I’m sure I don’t know even a fraction of what you’ve gone through. I know you’re doing this advocacy work because you care a lot, and I really appreciate that. You know that I personally support your work.

However, I’m 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 @Denkenberger🔸 directly in a way that appears to come from nowhere. @Denkenberger🔸 doesn’t say anything about their personal views on a pause before you respond with:

But honestly all I hear are excuses. You wouldn’t want to help me if Carl said it was the right thing to do or you’d have already realized what I said yourself. You wouldn’t be waiting for Carl’s permission or anyone else’s. What you’re 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 Forum’s 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 @Denkenberger🔸, then I don’t 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):

1. Criticizing ideas or actions that you disagree with, or see flaws in
2. Accusing a person or org of doing harm when you have some evidence to back that up
3. Sharing your feelings, including feelings of hurt and frustration
4. Holding those in power accountable
5. Flagging issues about the EA community, especially those that you think others are too afraid to flag
6. Flagging when someone is potentially not being truth-seeking, or is otherwise not following Forum norms (ideally in a kind way because our norms are unusual compared to the rest of the internet)

So I’d like to suggest that you take a step back from this thread. If you find yourself getting frustrated at others on the Forum elsewhere, I’d suggest taking a break from those as well.

You’ve written some of the best posts on this Forum, and the Forum Team greatly values your contributions. At the same time, I also think it’s important that the Forum continues to be a productive discussion space.

1. ^{^}

   A relevant quote from our “Moderation principles” post:

   The Forum should be a great and safe space: we’re working on hard problems, and the internet can be rough! We don’t want arbitrary barriers to keep people from joining discussions on the Forum, we don’t 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 won’t twist your words, won’t call you names, etc.
   • Safety - if users feel unsafe on the Forum — they’re being threatened, or they’re worried that if they post, they’ll have to fend off trolls on their own, etc. — that’s our problem. We need to prevent this.

Seems right, thanks! I've moved it.

I think it does help to have a username that people recognize, but IMO it's not too hard to get to that point. There's not a ton of activity on the EA Forum and it's not that hard to read most comments, so if you write a few good comments people will probably start to recognize your username.

Thanks Jason! Luckily, which posts get categorized as "Personal blog" is public information (I think it's easiest to skim via the All posts page), so I would be happy for people to check our work and contact us if you think we've made a mistake. If you take a look now, you'll see that very few posts have been moved there so far, and I don't expect the rate to change very much going forward.

2. My guess is that the vast majority of new users don't even know what "Personal blog" means, so I'm not sure how demotivating it will be to them. As I mentioned in another comment, my guess is that getting downvoted is more demotivating for new users.

3. I think that's a good idea, and I'd be happy for users to flag these as mistakes to the moderators, or just DM me directly and I can return a post to the Frontpage if I agree (I have the final say as head moderator).

Thanks Ben! 😊

(Toby's title change was basically just the two of us trying to figure out how to better communicate his role to external people, it's not related to his level. He has a fair amount of autonomy in his role, and I thought "Content Manager" didn't properly reflect that. Also I personally could never remember which of "Content Manager" and "Content Specialist" was the more senior title... 😅)

Ah yeah sorry I was unclear! I basically meant what you said when I said "at their discretion, but starting conservatively" — so we are starting to take "quality" into account when deciding what stays in the Frontpage, because our readers' time is valuable. You can kind of think of it like: if the mod would have downvoted a post from a new user, the mod can instead decide to move it to "Personal blog". I think it's possible that this is actually less discouraging to new users than getting downvoted, since it's like you're being moved to a category with different standards. You can check our work by looking at what gets categorized as "Personal blog" via the All posts page. :)

I expect this will affect only a small proportion of new users.