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.

The EA Forum moderation team is going to experiment a bit with how we categorize posts. Currently there is a low bar for a Forum post being categorized as “Frontpage” after it’s approved. In comparison, LessWrong is much more opinionated about the content they allow, especially from new users. We’re considering moving in that direction, in order to maintain a higher percentage of valuable content on our Frontpage.

To start, we’re going to allow moderators to move posts from new users from “Frontpage” to “Personal blog”^[1], at their discretion, but starting conservatively. We’ll keep an eye on this and, depending on how this goes, we may consider taking further steps such as using the “rejected content” feature (we don’t currently have that on the EA Forum).

Feel free to reply here if you have any questions or feedback.

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   If you’d like to make sure you see “Personal blog” posts in your Frontpage, you can customize your feed.

Yeah I would be interested in experimenting with ways we could do community-based funding for Forum things! :) You'll definitely hear about it if we give it a shot lol

Thanks for sharing! That's helpful to hear. :) This broadly matches my understanding, based on the data from our 2024 EA Forum user survey^[1]. A majority of respondents said that little to none of their Forum time would otherwise have been spent on work, but our site usage increases during work hours — that tells me that a lot of people are using the Forum in place of other media they would procrastinate take a break with during work or school hours. I guess it's good if people are replacing more addictive distractions with the Forum, since you can only really scroll the Forum so much. 😅

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   I'd like to write something publicly about the results, just haven't prioritized it yet.

I'm not sure, but I actually think the amount of content capacity put towards the Forum has been about the same for its whole lifetime (~a bit less than 1 FTE). However, I think that content capacity has been focused on different things over time (Lizka got pulled into a bunch of random non-Forum projects for example, and there were fewer "Forum events" before Toby started running them). Also the Forum community has changed a lot over time.

In the early days, the community was really small, so probably they didn't get many promotional posts because orgs didn't know about it (and there were less EA-related orgs). But we got a huge boost in awareness and users around WWOTF and FTX, so that changes how orgs relate to the Forum. In another comment I mentioned that I think online spaces naturally move toward being "bulletin board"-like after they have an established audience. Personally I occasionally get this feeling when visiting the Forum, when a lot of the Frontpage are posts from orgs. Those just tend not to invite discussion, even if the org would in fact be happy for people to comment on them. I think we need to be careful about how the Forum "feels" and what visitors perceive the space to be "about" — I think if people start to think that it would feel weird to comment on a Forum post, that's a really bad state for us to be in.

At the very least I expect the momentum could keep it going for a while.

Yup this seems right to me, but I would expect that usage would naturally go down over time. You can see this happening in the chart from my January post, for example.

I think that online spaces naturally move toward being "a place [for orgs] to promote things" once they have an established audience. For example, I feel like most Slack workspaces turn into this. Most subreddits have rules against promotion, probably for this reason. Without a Forum Team that pays attention to the distribution of content being posted, and actively works to get more good content and retain strong contributors, my guess is that the site will gradually increase in promotions and decrease in discussions, and that this is a feedback loop that will cause strong contributors to continue to leave as the site feels less and less like a place to have interesting discussions.

Though of course I don't know for sure what would happen, this is just my guess. :)

I really like and resonate with Lizka's thoughts on this as well. For example, this bit pulled out of her doc:

Suppose that about 10% of EAs regularly use the Forum. I think we need a minimal critical mass of EAs using the Forum — under that, people start thinking it’s dead, or stop remembering it in conversations, etc., and there’s a mass exit (so it basically becomes an archive of content that you can reference on Twitter or in Slack). I don’t know exactly how big this critical mass should be, and whether it’s better to think of it as a percentage of the main EA network/community or as a raw number of very-EA-aligned users. This means If we go down to 8% of EAs, we might be passing under the critical mass, which could noticeably up the chances of a mass exit of users.

Yeah I definitely have this in my head when thinking about how to run the EA Forum. But I haven't made a commitment to personally run the site for five years (I'm not a commitment sort of person in general). Maybe that means I'm not a good fit for this role?

I also hear conflicting views on whether it's good or bad to "signal that there is real investment". I think I intuitively agree with Habryka here, but then others tell me that it can look bad for us to talk about doing work that doesn't tie directly to impact — like maybe if we talk about improving the UX of the site, people will think that we are wasting charitable money, and that will decrease some people's trust in our team. So for some people, I think they would trust us more if we were doing less work on the site?

The Online Team is the current custodian of an important shared resource (the Forum). If the team can't actually commit to fulfilling its "Forum custodian" duties, e.g. because the priorities of CEA might change, then it should probably start trying to (responsibly) hand that role off to another person/group.

I agree with this, though I feel like the devil is in the details of what "Forum custodian" means. FWIW I don't think anyone at CEA is interested in shutting down the Forum, or reducing the moderation capacity.

Maybe a useful example of "new engineering work" is: we might want to start using the "rejected content" feature that LW has, but we'd need an engineer to update the codebase to enable it on the Forum. So under a strict "no new engineering work" policy, we couldn't start rejecting content, and in fact there's a lot of moderation we couldn't do. We are still doing some engineering work, but we broadly need to justify any work we do under CEA's new strategy. Maybe you think that, if we fail to justify this work under CEA's strategy, but we still think it's valuable to do, then that's the point at which we should start handing the Forum off to someone else?

I appreciate this comment a lot, thank you!

The sheer geographical coverage, and the element of in-depth intellectual engagement aren't practically replaceable by other community-building efforts.

I think that fulfilling this role is a lot more important than growing the EA community, and other goals that the EA Forum might have, and that it is worth doing until a better new venue comes along.

I broadly agree with this! :) I personally care a lot about keeping the Forum community alive. Although I ultimately care about impact, and so I think it's possible that we can do so while also spending our marginal resources on other projects (such as EA Funds).

if the online team stopped stewarding the EA Forum's content, would it really turn into a mere bulletin board?

Yeah I mentioned in my post that I don't know how likely the Forum is to turn into a bulletin board by default. I have the feeling that it was naturally moving in that direction last year, and I think that without some external push to make EA more salient, that's just what would happen to an online discussion platform by default. For example, you can see this kind of thing happening pretty often in slacks. I think if you lose enough authors, you eventually hit a threshold where the platform no longer feels like a community of people (i.e. people view it as "the place where orgs post updates"), and that change in perception heavily discourages people from discussing things. I think we need to be attentive to how visitors view "what the EA Forum is about".

Thanks! I found it helpful to hear your perspective. :)

I imagine many readers here would have little idea of what "new engineering work" would really look like

Yup this is fair — this includes work to customize the site for events (like the Donation Election voting system), and also work that is intended to be a longer-term investment that makes the site better (like updating our notification defaults, or improving site speed, or adding features like Google Docs import).