A snap vote on features that people would like to see.
Upvote based on some sense of what the community should want, agreevote (the tick) to adjust for you personally.
There is a feature request thread, but I sense that old requests are getting lost. Hence, this.
Edit, I'm shifting my suggested voting rules. Agreevotes should now just be about the reasoning of the comment, as usual. They were basically entirely correlated. It was a trial and I was wrong.
@mentions
Any time you do this it sends a notification to the person.
A huge part of my model of the value of the forum is about increasing knowledge density. Saying "look here" or "talk to this person". Ideally we'd be tagging each other all over the place, so we can know who is working on what and avoid duplication.
Nudge people to write shorter posts or at least to summarize them.
For example: Have the default text of a new post be "TL;DR:"
Inline comments
Some comments should be written at the end of a piece. But some make sense embedded in context. I'd like both, with inline comments initially hidden. I'd turn them on in my own settings.
Annecdotally, a lot of busy people report visiting the Forum many times per week. Some report habitually over-consuming it. One of the biggest costs of the EA Forum might be that it reduces focussed work hours of the most talented people in the community.
So, I propose "EA Forum When Ready".
Features would be something like:
Block schedule: block forum from loading during a period you schedule.
Hide the post list on homepage by default. You have to press "Show posts" to see them. (You can still search or browse subpages, just not see the homepage list).
Time limit: you can spend X mins per day on Forum, after that it is blocked.
HackerNews famously has a similar feature called "no procrast(inate)" mode.
Lizka mentioned she goes to https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/search by default which does some of this, which I'm going to try to start doing
Polls in comments.
Any comment can have an 8-answer poll. Users click an answer and then get to see the results.
A button to allow for multiple votes instead.
Get more wiki to happen:
Wiki additions can get upvoted and karma: update -- this is already the case
New and upvoted wiki entries show up in feeds. update -- this can happen, to some extent .
Revising my comment: consider ways of making the wiki more prominent and better integrating it into the forum (I realize this is now kind of vague)
As in stackexchange: as you are posting it suggests posts that have similar content (based on ML I guess). … suggesting you make your post a comment on their post instead. (Or an edit/addition to their post if this feature is also enabled.
You can currently do this on greaterwrong.com and also there is a browser plugin that does this, I think.
I personally actually think that voting towards the karma score you think a comment should have, instead of voting independently, produces a better aggregate judgement (I.e. I downvote 200 karma posts if I think they should only have 150 karma, and I upvote comments at -5 if I think they should only be at -2). This of course requires seeing the current vote, and so am a bit hesitant to have too large of a population to a different thing instead (and to have a UI that makes it feel like people are supposed to vote independently).
That said, we don't have any super clear guidance on this topic, and there is a decent amount of disagreement in the user base on what style of voting (independent or relative) is better.
Link articles in text by typing [[ and then it brings up a search box of all forum articles.
Turns out this already exists using "@"
A human "epistemic spot checker" who tries to find flaws in verifiable claims made in EA Forum posts
The epistemic spot checker could also notice flaws in reasoning; I think Rohin Shah has done this well.
This would be awesome!
I could imagine some people not liking this as it might make the forum a more intimidating place to post to. I imagine that the kind of person who says this would have less of an issue with:
* people opting in by making the post a non-personal post
* people opting in by adding a "check-me" tag
Another mechanism could be for the forum team to pay out $25 bounties when people falsify claims (as a way to incentivise this kind of checking), and maybe take some of the authors karma.
One worry is that if there's negative feedback for making clearly falsifiable claims, people will stop making clear claims. Another worry is that the service is inaccurate, like sometimes happened with Facebook fact-checkers.
Anyone can summarise: anyone can write a summary of anyone else's post, and the original author can choose whether to feature one of them at the top, visible by default.
The other summaries are accessible at the top of post but with a click required to view them. The summaries accumulate karma in usual way, low karma ones are hidden.
There's also some mechanism by which the author is prompted to write their own summary, either inline on the post or in a separate box, to compete with other people's summaries.
(Spitballing here, can easily imagine coming to think this is a pretty bad idea all things considered)
A way of sharing and upvoting external content along the lines of HackerNews.
There are linkposts already but people don't post linkposts in the way people do on HN.
YouTube and TikTok.
The literal boss of CEA online suggested a video format and there's basically an EA TikTok account with 50K followers.
Let's go!
The literal boss of CEA online suggested a video format and there's basically an EA TikTok account with 50K followers.
should be:
The literal boss of CEA online suggested a video format and made an EA TikTok account with 50K followers.
Reminders / encouragement to do things like:
I think the StackExchange sites have automatic reminders, or maybe even checks, of similar stuff. My last post on cross-validated (stack exchange for statistics) had hints about reproducible examples, I think.
Gwern has a writing checklist. Similar checklists could be forced on the author prior to submission.
Quiet comments
The ability to submit a comment without it showing up in "Recent Discussion". Among other things, this would allow discussion of controversial content without it stealing our collective attention from good content. Moderation already helps with this, but I would still have a use for quiet comments.
Allow commenting in "tag" pages, as if they were normal posts:
And have this be the default place for an AMA, or for discussing if an AI company is net-good or net-bad, or whatever, instead of having those conversations scattered (getting lost, repeating themselves) between different posts about the org
You can actually comment on tag pages, by clicking on "Discussion" under the tag name. I don't think that feature is really a good fit for your particular use case though - for that, I would suggest creating a post to start the discussion and tagging it with the organization name.
Agreevote and disagreevote on posts. Sometimes I'd like to upvote a post without implying I agree with it.
When I interact with someone on the Forum, encourage me to follow them on Twitter.
Ways you might do this:
Everywhere a Forum username is shown, add a bird icon that links to their Twitter profile.
When I upvote, reply or send a DM, prompt me to follow the person on Twitter.
Periodically email me a list of Twitter profiles of the EA Forum users I interact with the most.
I imagine (1) would get a lot of the value, and it's cheap to test.
Generally I think it would be interesting to brainstorm on ways that EA Forum could interact with EA Twitter, and vice versa.
My User Story: As proficient markdown author and new EA Forum user, I want a reference guide for the forum's markdown, so that I can more quickly determine the correct syntax for features that vary across markdown implementations. (E.g., footnotes took me a loooong time to figure out.)
(I suspect there's an identical user story for new users who are NOT already used to writing markdown, but I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth.)
I suspect that a reference guide already exists, but my google-fu is failing me--I tried searching here, the general reference docs, github, and the code itself. As evidence that I'm not the only one, I see that the previous feature request thread has mentions a markdown cheatsheet as part of larger request for general markdown improvements. I'm hoping that adding just the syntax reference part is an easy win.
Better analytics for both authors and readers:
Remove the ability to strong upvote/agree on your own comments/posts and remove all existing such votes. (I think you can on posts - I haven't written any so can't check.)
I disagree. I like being able to sometimes say I think something is important. And the whole point is that my large amounts of karma give me this power.
I wish that some people had a lot more karma than they currently do though. I wish I could transfer some of my karma to other people.
Maybe we could just report how much people have upvoted their own comments.
I agree that personal upvoting shouldn't affect one's overall karma.
Nudge people to write shorter posts:
For example: Allow users to sort their feed by some algorithm that puts shorter posts higher up (not ignoring the karma, but also taking into account the length)
Easy way for users to blind authorship of posts. And a way to see a trending feed which is only affected by blinded karma
I've shared this one before, but felt worth sharing again on this more recent thread:
Co-authors on posts should get karma from that post.
(originally posted here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NhSBgYq55BFs7t2cA/ea-forum-feature-suggestion-thread)
Hi, I believe the team recently shipped giving karma to multiple coauthors. Is your suggestion something more specific? If not, how much of the problem you see is addressed by this change?
(I don’t think this is done already but downvote or comment if so)
Some optional/additional way to weight karma as a percentage of total users (active users? readers?) so that sorting all posts by karma doesn’t show only newer posts at the top, and older popular posts way down with newer less-popular posts.
Automatically crosspost from a variety of EA sources, with their permission. Eg LessWrong, SSC, alignment forum
Moderate importance bug, probably applies to various situations where user uploaded images are presented:
This user's thumbnail is enormous, because an image inside of it is resized to the entire window.
Also, in comments/posts, I am having trouble controlling the size of images, they just resize horizontally to fit the screen, and this isn't ideal for many situations. This should be controllable.
Regarding Copy-pasting footnotes from a Google Document, I think it would be nice if after the copy-pasting:
Automatically crosspost from a variety of EA sources, with their permission. Eg LessWrong, SSC, alignment forum
Probably, but I think it would be nice to have a discussion platform.