Replying quickly, speaking only for myself[1]:
- I agree that the boundary between Community & non-Community posts is (and has always been) fuzzy
- You can see some guidance I wrote in early 2023: Community vs. other[2] (a "test-yourself" quiz is also linked in the doc)
- Note: I am no longer on the Online Team/an active moderator and don't actually know what the official guidance is today.[3]
- I also agree that this fuzziness is not a trivial issue, & it continues to bug me
- when I go to the Frontpage, I relatively frequently see posts that I think should be "Community" that aren't, or vice versa
- You can see some guidance I wrote in early 2023: Community vs. other[2] (a "test-yourself" quiz is also linked in the doc)
- However, the Community tag/distinction/section was not "a way to separate out FTX-scandal-related posts", IMO
- Fwiw, I was (also?) really worried about this change when I was working on it, both because I was concerned it would suppress useful criticism/reflection/etc., and because I wanted to make sure my decision-making wasn't somehow secretly tainted by various biases.
- I'm writing quickly here — not taking time to dig up my old docs or trying to really remember what was going on in early 2023[4], but I vaguely remember e.g. calling @Ben_West🔸 at some point when I was feeling particularly stressed, to double check that we endorsed how we were approaching the change
- See also footnote 7 here, and footnote 2 here
- More:
- A lot of the thinking/earlier attempts had happened before the FTX collapse
- "We’ve been hearing about the Forum fixating on certain discussions for over a year [as of Feb 2023]: this has been making a lot of people sad for a long time. [...]"
- [from here]
- And we'd already down-weighted "community" posts for new & logged-out users (before the FTX collapse); IMO this was always a pretty hacky feature that had a bunch of flaws
- The community tag itself had existed for a while before that
- "We’ve been hearing about the Forum fixating on certain discussions for over a year [as of Feb 2023]: this has been making a lot of people sad for a long time. [...]"
- And, quoting from myself here (from July 2023):
- Just a quick clarification: I don't think this was a "change to lower community engagement." Adding the community section was a change, and it did (probably[1]) lower engagement with community posts, but that wasn't the actual point (which is a distinction I think is worth making, although maybe some would say it's the same). In my view, the point was to avoid suffocating other discussions and to make the Forum feel less on-edge/anxiety-inducing (which we were hearing was at least some people's experience). In case it helps, this outlines our (or at least my) thinking about it.
- A lot of the thinking/earlier attempts had happened before the FTX collapse
- (i.e. +1 to @Lorenzo Buonanno🔸 in the comments)
- Fwiw, I was (also?) really worried about this change when I was working on it, both because I was concerned it would suppress useful criticism/reflection/etc., and because I wanted to make sure my decision-making wasn't somehow secretly tainted by various biases.
- Quick takes on where things are today:
- I would like to see more "Community" posts / discussions
- I think the Community section overall is probably still (quite) positive (but tagging could probably be improved)
- Off the top of the head, the two key things I'd probably look at /think about, if I were considering removing it (or doing something else), are (1) whether it seems like it's really tanking engagement on Community posts, or preventing them from being written (I'd maybe chat to likely/potential authors about this, look at the numbers, etc.), and (2) how active users (i.e. readers) feel about the Community section[5]
- ^
I.e. I'm not speaking for the Online/Mod teams here, and didn't run this comment by anyone.
- ^
(I vaguely remember making and linking a public version of this doc somewhere at some point, but couldn't quickly find that.)
- ^
In fact it looks like I can no longer add or remove the Community tag from posts. I'm still in the Slack; a few people sometimes flag questions about edge cases there.
Recent example - an op ed piece on the AI safety pipeline having too many researchers is labelled community, a post advocating for more AI field building by an OP grant maker is not.