I would like to be able to subscribe to notifications for sequences like this one: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/FxFwhFG227F6FgnKk

The "Library" page, accessible from the home page's left menu, appears to be a list of all(?) the sequences on the Forum. But the order in which the sequences are listed—I think it's just recency—isn't very friendly, in my opinion. My vision for this page has the sequences listed in order of (some combination of) importance and quality. This ordering could be determined by a site admin, or maybe it could be automated (e.g., based on the combined karma of each sequence's posts). Sequences are also filterable by topic in my vision: for this, sequence pages would probably need to be taggable.

Also, sequence pages don't appear to show up in the top right search bar. I think sequences should be searchable.

This is my current frontpage, logged in and logged out

It would be nice to have a way to post sequences without having all the posts show up on the frontpage, we would definitely use it for EA Italy

I'm planning to write a piece on animal welfare, as part of that post it will help to post a picture of a dead animal. I'd like to have it blurred until users choose to see it, is there a way to do that? 

Side note: I can't see anything about this circumstance in the user manual or guide to norms.

We’re trying out moving our Italian translation of the EA Handbook to the forum, to see if participants of the next round of our virtual program prefer it that way compared to google docs. (most of the first chapter is now here)

1. Is there a way to un-draft ~80 posts without taking over the home page for people that opted into seeing personal blogposts? For now, we’re just temporarily downvoting them
2. Is there a way to have “Chapters” in sequences, like in https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/B79ro5zkhndbBKRRX, or is that hardcoded?

Thanks

One feature I really like on forums like Hacker News is the ability to traverse comments by having options to jump to a comment's parent, or next or previous sibling.

When you are deep in a gnarly comment thread, I find it useful to be able to hop up a couple of levels and then minimise a comment and its children

This is what comments looks like on Hacker News for example:

Reformat all shortforms so they have agreevotes.

I unhid community posts on the main posts section  to see what would happen but now I can't rehide them. But I'd like to.

Reformat this comment section so that it has agreevotes. 

I think authors of a post should be able to add the "community" tag to their post.

See also this, this, and this comments. The first comment thread includes a workaround: creating the post on the http://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/community page

When a comment is deleted in such a way that leaves a "comment deleted" block, it has a little [+] to expand the comment, but it doesn't do anything. I would prefer if it wasn't there so I didn't feel like I had to click on it to check if there's something I missed.

Can we add agreement karma to comments on all posts?

I'd like to be able to highlight a word or phrase in text I'm writing and Ctrl-V a URL link directly into that phrase. This is something that other platforms, like Slack do.

Yes, you can highlight a phrase and bring up the toolbar to add a link, but being able to do it immediately through a well known keyboard shortcut is easier.

I noticed that adding a tag to a post in draft mode now automatically adds the parent tag. But it's not clear to the user why two tags are being added at once. This also contributes to the overtagging of posts.

On Wikipedia, the guideline is to tag pages with the most specific categories they belong to. So if category B is a child of category A, then pages that belong to both A and B should only be tagged with B, whereas pages in A \ B should only be tagged with A.

In general, I think the EA Forum should be more thoughtful about tags. If we want to replicate... (read more)

When using search, the date on the search result card doesn't seem to always match up with the published date on the post itself.

For example, this post was published yesterday, 24th January, but when it appears in search it looks like:

which might be the date it was first created in draft form, and not published?

Which also leads to counter-intuitive things like:

Display a more detailed breakdown of karma and agreement karma by number of upvotes and downvotes rather than overall amount. 

I think that the weighted voting system is counterproductive overall (it creates perverse incentives, it ascribes false authority to users who are more prolific or who may have expertise in one area and poor understanding in others, and it is needlessly undemocratic) and makes it harder to meaningfully understand the karma of a given post or comment, but this could go someway in making the actual impact of posts and comments more legible. I think there is a difference between how to read agreement karma for a comment that has 10 agreement karma overall from, say, 8 2 point upvotes and 2 -3 minus point downvote versus one that has 10 1-point upvotes, and the breakdown of how a comment achieved its agreement karma is not currently legible, which makes agreement karma a much less useful indicator than it could be otherwise.

P.S.: Similar suggestions have been made below on how the karma and voting system can be tinkered with to make it more meaningful, but seems different enough to warrant a new top-level comment.

Couldn't see if someone already suggested this but:

• Have a separate field for org name on profile 
• Option to select if you're writing a post on behalf of an organisation or as an individual (this is very important imo often people write posts and it's not clear who they work for) 
  • Auto-tag with org name + "org updates" or similar tag
• Organisation tag shows all the people who've listed org name on their profile 

I'd like to be able to bookmark comments, in the same way you can bookmark posts. There's a lot of really, really well thought out and written comments, in some cases containing just as much value as articles, and I'd like to be able to bookmark a comment to come back to. 

I'd argue this is even more important than bookmarking articles, because articles have tags and titles to search for, whereas comments don't, and it's easy to loose track of what article and what thread the one you're looking for is contained in.

(Probably has been suggested before but thought I'd add): A small indicator for the original poster of the top-level post in the comments. Like the microphone on Reddit.

If someone downvotes, suggest that they explain why

For Shortform:

1. The link to get here from the main page is awfully small and inconspicuous (1 of 145 individual links on the page according to a Chrome extension)
   1. I can imagine it being near/stylistically  like:
      1. "All Posts" (top of sidebar)
      2. "Recommendations" in the center
      3. "Frontpage Posts", but to the main section's side or maybe as a replacement for it you can easily toggle back and forth from
2. Would be cool to be able to sort and aggregate like with the main posts (nothing to filter by afaik)
   1. I'd really appreciate being able to see the highest-scoring Shortform posts ever, but afaik can't easily do that atm

Add Agreement Karma to posts.

This comment suggesting this feature got 32 Agreement with 9 votes:

When a user moves a controversial post to drafts, other readers get worried of censorship. Two recent examples: https://mobile.twitter.com/erikphoel/status/1559527499188654085 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sD4kdobiRaBpxcL8M/what-happened-to-the-women-and-effective-altruism-post?commentId=GpSneam3oSwaBYDWH

It might make sense to tweak the prose. Maybe let moderators add a reason, like for deleted comments (e.g. "spam", "moved to draft after a request from the author"), and for users write "the author of this post marked it as a private draft"

We should make it harder to manipulate your own comments' karma. My favoured approach would be to deactivate all voting on one's own comments. Also fine would be if by default, you strongly upvote and strongly agree with all of your own comments.

There was a good amount of agreement about this previously.

I think it would be better if agree/disagree voting didn't follow the typical karma rules where different users have different amounts of karma. As it stands I often don't know how many people expressed agreement vs. disagreement, which feels like the information I actually want, and it doesn't make intuitive sense that one forum user might be able to "agree twice as much" as another with a comment.

Make the forum available in other languages. Right now the only option is English.

Also rely less on acronyms. For example, when selecting "program participation" it shows you the acronym VP:

I happen to know that this stands for "Virtual Program" but a newcomer (especially one that isn't a native English speaker) might not know this (and might even assume it stands for something different like Vice Presidency, Virtual Profile, Video phone-call, Viewpoint, Value proposition etc).

Curated posts could resurface to the frontpage at exponentially decaying intervals.

1. Counteracts recency bias. Enables longer-term discussions.
2. Increases exposure (and over a more varied reader population) to the most important ideas.
3. Efficiently^[4] increases collective memory of the best contributions.
4. We might uncover and dislodge some flawed assumptions that reached universal acceptance in the past due to information cascades. 
5. Given recency bias combined with the fact that people are very reluctant to write things that have been written about befor

Quiz as a Service for posts

I stumbled upon this service:

https://quizgecko.com/

That can generate a quiz out of anything. 

Having a "quiz me!" or "did you fully get the article?" button on every forum post where it would provide an AI-generated multiple-choice quiz would probably be very valuable for everyone.

I'd be happy to work on the development of this.

Embed iframes

Some use cases:

• interactive visualizations
• videos
• airtables (as already suggested)
• polis questions (as already suggested)
• guesstimate models
• and many many more

This feature is very versatile and would solve many things at once.

Co authors (second authors and later?) of posts don't appear to have their posts in the profile?

Sidhu has no post listed:

This seems mild, but could be bad if someone likes to co author a lot.

Check if information cascades / social influence bias is a problem on EA Forum.

If it is, maybe we could implement Emrik's idea to counter it, or some similar mechanism.

See here for the explanation of the potential problem.

To test it, we could do an experiment where some bot (or server-side process) randomly upvotes or downvotes new posts. We measure final karma after some fixed time, and see if that single vote snowballed.

relevant discussion

In-line commenting.

Invisible by default so they don't distract, but you can easily switch visibility.

So the reader particularly interested in some section could dive into the comments particularly about that section.

Also, as a further feature, you could color code different comment types, like:

• blue (default): just a comment
• yellow: fix suggestion
• brown: link to previous discussion / relevant resources
• red: critique ?

Also see @Emrik's  comment with more rationale.

Bookmark folders.

There should still be the default one, but if you choose you could put the post in some other folder (sorta like youtube does with saving videos to playlists).

It can have many use cases, like:

• prioritizing things to read
• topic specific folders
• maybe even curation, if you could also make those folders public

Right now I'm doing something along these lines, but with an external editor and lists of links, so it's a bit awkward to use.

Have an optional Subtitle line to add more context on forums, and have it be expandable on the front page.

E.g.  "Why The forum should have subtitles: an in-depth look into how subtitles help people get more context in less time"

The Search Page doesn't seem to show results for basic questions. Some examples:

• What is the difference between shortform and post?
• How to Create Posts / where is the create button
• other things explained in the forum manual
• where to write "forum feedback", this suggestions thread doesn't show up for this term

Not sure if this is an search indexing issue, or perhaps the actual "questions" user would put in the search field, aren't part of the posts answering them. This could maybe be solved by adding a new post - which basically explains the same as other inform... (read more)

This is minor, and probably not relevant to most people, but my work (Rethink Priorities) would definitely use an RSS feed version of the Forum so we can get notifications of when things with certain tags are posted in Slack. I think we could do this now with an account / notifications to email / email to Slack, but instead are using Greater Wrong for now for simplicity (e.g. this feed goes to our comms Slack channel) https://ea.greaterwrong.com/topics/rethink-priorities?format=rss). Thanks for all you do!

"agree/disagree" for posts, not only comments.

Might reduce downvotes on posts

Allowing for photos to be smaller /  in-line with text so you can have image on the left and text on the right. 

Maybe a feature to let Google Doc headers/internal links be switched automatically to EAF headers? This will be mildly useful to me, and considering the most common type of broken links I see from others on the forum, probably to others as well!

Hi there, as a fellow EA, developer and avid creator of Userscripts, here are my thoughts on first seeing the site.

The design is very different from other online communities. This makes for an awkward first impression, users like familiarity in their UI.

I believe the gold standard for forums are Reddit, Facebook, StackOverflow, Discourse. By gold standard I mean some of the best minds in software UX works on these site. I particularly love Discourse.

This is a forum, yet there are no topics / subtopics. It tries to do too much in one place. I don't think questions, articles and events belong in in the same listing. I am aware of the filters, my criticism still stands :-)

Everywhere I move the mouse I'm assaulted by a popup. Why do you hate me? :-D

Infinite scroll / load more adds uncertainty to the UX. It's hard to track context, I can't tell if I click somewhere all my "progress" will be lost.

Gray on gray! No gray background please!

Titles are long, yet the columns are narrow.

The comments font looks bold, it should be lighter.

Some pages have too much info. "How to use the Forum" shouldn't have a pages long comments section, specially with unrelated discussions.

Still, thank you for taking the time in trying to innovate and contribute to the OS community!

The LessWrong API does not seem to work using HTTP requests from a remote host (my machine).

To be specific, the following Python code shows an HTTP request for the GraphQL API.

# Python 3.9 code 
import requests

query_text = """
{
  comments {
    results {
      _id
    }
  }
}
"""

headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}

url = 'https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/graphql'
requests.post(url, json={'query': query_text}, headers=headers)
# <Response [200]>

url = 'https://www.lesswrong.com/graphql'
requests.post(url, json={'query': query_text}

Promoting shortforms to top-level posts, preserving replies. I wanted to do that with this, because reposting it as a top-level post wouldn't preserve existing discussion.