Summary
The EA forum is not a forum in the traditional sense, and this difference in structure may be limiting the spread of good ideas and reducing the amount of engagement people have with EA online.
Other Forums
When looking at other forums, they usually have quite a different structure (student room, skyscrapers). The main difference is having many sub-forums, each having different posting expectations and topics. The EA forum acts more like a news feed, with highly voted content staying visible for a bit before disappearing.
Maybe there isn’t enough traffic to warrant having sub-forums but it could also be that the current design of the EA forum limits the breadth and depth of conversations that can happen here. This might be why there is a lot of EA related discussion on Facebook, Slack & Twitter. There are over 300 different Facebook groups related to EA in a variety of ways.
Problems
TL/DR bullet points
- Hard to find relevant groups/topics
- Forum can give an underwhelming impression
- Hard to find the current best knowledge about a particular cause or career
- Missing out on possible connections
- Can be intimidating to post on the forum
- Conversation is forced onto Facebook/Slack/Twitter which limits some people from engaging
When people want to see what is going on in EA, it can often be quite hard to navigate the different groups and topics, and they may be unaware of different groups, or the latest charity and career recommendations for a specific cause.
I have spoken to a few people who have been underwhelmed by the forum content, they spend a few minutes navigating, check out all posts and see a random assortment of topics that can usually be quite badly written with little engagement and decide not to come back. Also if people have a particular expertise it’s hard for them to know that a relevant post was here a month ago and they could contribute, if the only way to filter is via two tags.
If instead, an example engineer interested in biosecurity, checks out both the “careers->engineering” sub-forum and the “causes->biosecurity” sub-forum, see the top stickied posts which give an up to date landscape of both areas and scrolls down to see relevant conversations, they may be more interested in adding to the knowledge base. At the moment it can sometimes seem that even good posts can just drop off the news feed and only stick around if people create google docs with links or commit to their long term memory.
It could limit connections being made if people are unaware that there is a Schelling point space for someone in their career and don't come across the relevant Facebook group until a few years later or potentially never.
People have also mentioned that it can be intimidating to post on the EA forum, or that they are worried about getting attacked in the comments. If there were areas where people could post in a more casual way, it may encourage more conversation. At the moment this is only seen in the open thread every few months rather than a dedicated sub-forum where these kinds of questions could be asked, or an area for new people to ask questions or introduce themselves without fear of being reprimanded or wasting the time of other users.
Another disadvantage of having lots of conversation on Facebook is there is a substantial minority of people who don't use or try to limit their Facebook usage.
Possible Drawbacks
Some possible drawbacks of having a more traditional style forum could include:-
- It may be harder to connect with someone else as you can’t just click on their name and add them as a Facebook contact
- There may not be easy ways to restrict entry to certain sub-forums. At the moment there are Facebook groups with people working in specific careers or locations that can filter new members with closed groups which ask questions before joining. If this wasn’t possible it could lead to lower quality discussions with people who don’t know a topic dominating sub-forums
- People don’t use their real names as much, which may affect how people discuss
- People may check the forum less than Facebook, and conversation could be slower
- There may not be enough usage to justify many sub-forums
- To create something like this would take time/money that could be better used
- It may reduce usage of Facebook groups which are providing more value in their current set up, and end up just duplicating what already exists and splitting conversations
- There could be more visibility of off putting and idle conversations that happen on Facebook, that new people may take as representing EA
- The average post quality would likely be lower
Conclusion
I think it is at least worth spending some time to think about what you would want the EA forum to be if you were to create it from scratch. What the purpose of the forum is, and the best ways of achieving those goals.
It sounds like maybe a low-touch / low-effort way of resolving this issue would be a more robust tagging system for posts? So that you could just tag your post "careers" "biosecurity" for other people to easily find it? And anyone interested in biosecurity could browse (or even subscribe to) the "biosecurity" tag?
I do think lost content is a big issue, especially given that it seems surprisingly difficult to find EA Forum content via online search.
Reminds me of the discussion in this piece (which was ironically hard to find).
I've been searching for EA articles on some issues lately and discovered so many old posts that were made even before I knew about the EA forum, but are just as relevant today. If volunteers would add tags for old posts, they could be rediscovered by newer EAs and I think there is a lot of value in that. And I think you could easily find volunteers for this task because they would learn a lot about EA when browsing and tagging old posts.
Another option is to use topic modeling software to automatically infer & assign tags. I might be interested in working on this. An advantage of using software is that it doesn't require continuous volunteer commitment.
A recommendation system which displays related posts could also be helpful for discovery.
it wouldn't need to be a continuous volunteers commitment, they would only be needed for old posts, authors would be encouraged to add tags for new posts themselves.
As a data point, I would commit to tagging old posts for at least 1 hour if other people were also doing it or expressed interest in it happening.
People often assume that tagging is strictly better than sub-forums because it is more flexible, but categories have advantages too. For one, it is easier to filter them out, since there are less categories. Additionally, if you visit one category, then another, you are less likely to see duplicate posts.
I'm thinking clicking on a tag would show you only posts with that tag, which would basically be a subforum of sorts.
Functionally it would be similar, but from a user point of view it would probably be quite a different experience.
From my own usage I have rarely used tags on blogs or news feeds but have often interacted with different sub-forums.
But I think first and foremost it is important to be "low touch" - my guess is that the population of EA Forum readers who wants subforums is a minority and hopefully they can be satisfied enough by growing to use tags while the majority* who like the forum as-is won't have to see a big change.
"low touch" also helps minimize needed dev time - tags and browsing do not seem nearly as difficult to implement.
When you consider more relevant costs that I mention in addition to the benefits, does that change how you think of tags as a solution? Or maybe you thought of these already?
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*though again, guessing here - I don't have actual user data.
I think tags might be helpful, but would probably be used by very few people and still miss out the most important reasons for having a different structure.
Another thing to think about is that the forum as it currently is might be favoured by people who use it, but may miss out on the counterfactual people who would use an actual forum if it existed or bounce upon impact with this forum.