Comments
Edit from 2022: Consider checking the Forum user manual if you're not sure if something you're looking for might already be possible.
Hello, Forum!
This is Aaron and JP of the EA Forum team.
We spend a lot of time working on the Forum, and we’d like to hear your ideas for making it better. These can be new features or other kinds of requests.
Even if you don’t have suggestions of your own, consider upvoting ideas you like from the comments. That will have nonzero influence on the features we prioritize (though we also take many other factors into account).
If you’d rather make a suggestion privately, get in touch with us through this page.
Edit April 2022: This thread is still very live as you can see by the continual influx of suggestions. We have now synced our asana project with our public Github issues list, so you can see our recorded tasks there.[1] I'd still recommend suggesting features here so that other users can see and discuss them. — JP
Note: there's a delay between when we write tasks down and when they get triaged into a state that gets synced with Github.
It's still a crime that we don't support tables and it's a second crime that no one else has mentioned this yet.
They are supported in the new editor which LessWrong has currently shipped if you op into beta features (and I expect will go live for everyone by default in the next two weeks or so).
Awesome!
I'm stopping by to mention that this is now live: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CMy2ueJ9WhZFNyBGs/ea-forum-update-new-editor-and-more
(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.
Came here to suggest this
Can we add agreement karma to comments on all posts?
Or all new comments at least.
By the way, this is now done
Footnotes are great!
One feature that would make then even greater is if I could copy paste text from a Google Doc that includes footnotes, and have them be formatted correctly.
Apparently, this is possible via a workaround explained here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y8gkABpa9R6ktkhYt/forum-user-manual#Footnotes
Strong +1 now as I actually try to insert a post with 10+ footnotes :D
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.
This has now been implemented. You cannot strong upvote your own comments, nor vote along the agreement axis.
Thank you!
As to whether voting on overall karma for one's own comment should be eliminated, I would prefer deactivating voting to a default strong-upvote, however a third option that I think might be better would be to default-normal-upvote and disable strong-upvote on one's own comment.
A fourth option (that I think I'd prefer the most) would be to retain the ability to strong upvote one's own comments while making the default for everyone normal-upvote or no-upvote (to preserve the ability to self-boost unusually important comments). Some other mechanism would be needed to prevent abuse of this.
For example, the mechanism could be that self-strong-upvoting only works if nobody else downvotes your comment.
Or it could be that you could only self-strong-upvote your comment if you strong-upvoted less than 9 in 10 (or whatever fraction) of your previous comments.
I think the key problem, both for upvoting and agreement-voting is that is that it hurts much more to have your comments in the negatives than it feels good to have your comments in the positives (and indeed, whenever I see a negative number, it feels really harsh and it does give me a sense that the community overall disapproves or disagrees with the content).
I think usually when a discussion is heated, I prefer the equilibrium where the two primary discussion partners have votes that cancel each other out, instead of an equilibrium where just all the comments are in the negatives.
This includes the case where the person you are responding to is strong-downvoting your comment, and then I think it can make sense to strong-upvote your comment, in order to not give the false impression that there is a consensus against your comment.
I don't currently know a good way to handle this. I also dislike the recent change to disagreement-voting for that reason, and would prefer a world where we also make agreement-votes automatically self-apply, since my brain definitely parses a discussion with everything in the negatives on agreement voting as "there is consensus against this" as opposed to "there are two people disagreeing".
I do think the thing where you can but don't automatically agree with your own post is confusing. Right now if I see something with one agree and one disagree vote it's ambiguous whether two other people voted, plus the comment writer surely agrees with themself, or if the one agree is from the comment writer so it's 1 to 1.
I think usually when a discussion is heated, I prefer the equilibrium where the two primary discussion partners have votes that cancel each other out, instead of an equilibrium where just all the comments are in the negatives.... This includes the case where the person you are responding to is strong-downvoting your comment, and then I think it can make sense to strong-upvote your comment, in order to not give the false impression that there is a consensus against your comment.
This problem won't arise if everyone strong-upvotes themselves by default.
The main downside to everyone strong-upvotes themselves by default in my view is that it punishes new users (or those with lower karma and thus weaker strong-upvotes) too much. Maybe this isn't that important of a factor?
Yeah, but I think the problem is then that in the case of comments the consensus seems actually too dominated by people's initial strong-vote, and arguing against Eliezer on LW with a 10 karma upvote would make it feel like consensus is heavily stacked against you in a way I also don't like.
Most people have strong upvote strength 3-7 though. Anyway, if this is a big problem, then just cap self-upvote strength around 5?
I mean, that would just make the total karma system in 90% of cases worse. For example I think it totally makes sense for posts by Eliezer to start with that much karma, since I think there is a strong prior that they are going to be pretty good.
I was thinking just for comments.
Ah, yeah, I think that's a kind of reasonable thing to do. My primary hesitation is that it's not super intuitive and adds complexity, but it seems like one of the reasonable ways forward.
I strongly agree about eliminating the ability to agree/disagree-vote on one's own comment. I expect everyone to agree with what they write by default unless e.g. they say they're playing devil's advocate. Giving people the option to agree-vote on their own comment just adds unnecessary uncertainty by making it so people can't tell if an agreement vote on a comment is coming from the author or another user.
I agree. This has been discussed for quite some time (it was first raised three years ago) so it would be good to reach a decision.
It would very dramatically improve my experience of the Forum if there were the option to hide posts. This would mean that the first page of the Forum would always be posts that were relevant to me. As it stands, whenever I visit the Forum most of the posts which I can see are not relevant to me (perhaps because I've already read them and don't want to read them again or check in on the ongoing discussion), whereas posts which are relevant to me and which I would want to visit again are invisible if they are more than a few days old.
This feature just shipped. You can hide posts from the frontpage using the triple dot menu to the right of the post item. Let us know if you have any feedback. Thanks to trialing candidate Steven R for building it.
Many thanks! This will make the Forum a lot more usable for me.
Similarly, I would like for comments I have minimised to stay minimised between visits (unless there is a new reply in thread)
Yes, agreed.
You can hide tags, like the creative writing contest, from the frontpage, but if you scroll down those posts and their comments are visible (at least they do to me; maybe there is some way to hide them). It would be good if they could be entirely hidden.
And yes, it would be good to be able to hide individual posts (along with their comments) as well.
I’d like this too.
I'd like users to be able to attach/link a profile picture to their EA Forum profile, and that these pictures would be viewable next to their usernames in posts or comments. I think this would make the forum a bit more human and friendly!
I also like this idea. In addition to the effect you describe, I think it could help your eyes track the conversation more easily. It would also add more color to the site. Here are some reasons why I currently think it’s a little too much work. First, it’s more work than it seems, because the current layout of these comments feels very unsuited for slapping in all but the tiniest of avatars. So we’d need to substantially update the comments UI as well as build the profile upload. Also it makes the experience of engaging in the comments nicer, but my current guess is most of the value comes from people writing good posts and more people reading them. I don’t see the strong causal pathway between pictures and more of that happening. — Having written that, if it caused authors to find the comment section friendlier, I could imagine them having a smaller barrier to posting. OTOH, I could imagine authors being more intimidated by the “oh crap these are real people” feeling. I’d be curious to hear thoughts from authors.
Hey JP, thanks for your thoughts! When you're saying it's a little too much work, how many weeks are we talking about? I can understand how the profile upload part might take a bit long (1-2 weeks?).
For adding in the profile pictures beside author's usernames, I would think there isn't any big UI updating that has to be done there. It's only in the comments section that things might be a bit trickier. I've made mockups for my own suggestion here, including mockups for showing these on the frontpage, post header, and two different options for how to show pictures on comments. Even just showing pictures on the frontpage and beside the author's names in a forum post page would be great, if those are easier to do than adding on the comments.
But yeah it's good that you flag that the value of the forum comes from people writing posts and more people reading them. I'm also curious about what authors think on if they would prefer to have their face in posts, as well as if they prefer to see commenters' faces!
I think this has bad effects also. It’ll make the site appeal more to “normal” people, and look less serious. It also doesn’t give us any useful information, but take up real estate and use up attention. It might make groupthink more prevalent, too; I personally have found my thinking is most honest when I am thinking alone and don’t plan to share them socially.
Related to this what does our user research say that new users think about the forum? Do they think it is minimalist or stark? I guess we could learn this, particularly if we want EA to be more representative of the global population.
Yeah I think the EA Forum team could do usability testing on users if they haven't done it yet. Maybe they could do it on people interested in EA but have never visited the forum yet. I remember the first few times I visited the forum was quite daunting - long posts, usually no pictures on posts, no faces, and no onboarding.
I'm thinking that for users not logged in (which presumably means they're new to the forum?), they could be pointed to this article (maybe with some edits to make it a better first-read for new users): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/about, and then they're encouraged to sign up in the end. A link to a short 2-5 minute video on the homepage about what the forum is and how to use the forum could work too.
I think some gamification for guided onboarding could work too, i.e. upvote your first article, upvote your first comment, message an author, write your first comment, write your first post, acquire x much karma (and get a badge)
Now that we have tags, tags could be part of onboarding and a more central part of the experience too. Similar to how Medium.com encourages you to follow or subscribe to certain topics.
But yeah I wouldn't want to speak ahead too much on feature suggestions without knowing what the user research and usability testing results are first! As a UI/UX designer myself, I'd much rather see user research and usability testing be done first. My experience in using the forum might not be representative.
I do actually quite like the UX mockups for the photo idea, which I think would have the positive effects already described (friendlier impression, easier to track comments). Here are two reasons I'm less keen:
Both of these effects are arguably present even in the current, text-only medium, but I think to a far lesser extent. I'm not claiming these effects would necessarily outweigh the benefits, but I think they're real and important, and on balance would currently cause me to lean against images.
(Separately, I'm pretty strongly opposed to gamification, which has a big effect on my behaviour in a way I virtually always think is bad for me. I think it's quite unlikely that the Forum will implement badges/achievements/anything of this sort except karma, but if they did I'd be quite mad. And I think it's quite important that karma is given by users in response to the content you add to the site, not the developers for jumping through hoops.)
Hi Will, I realize I never responded to some of these. Let me respond to them now:
My turn for a slow response.
I think you're more concerned with the effect of having images on a user's feelings about the Forum generally, while I'm more concerned with its effect on user's (differential) feelings about other individual users. I think there's a bit of a disconnect there that makes your responses not feel like they quite hit what I was getting at. I think you're probably right about the warm fuzzy angle with respect to users' impression of the Forum generally, but I'm not convinced this outweighs the inequitable effects on individual users.
Concretely, I think in a discussion between an attractive person with a good-quality, well-posed & -lit photo and a weird-looking person with a bad photo (or no photo), the former will be at a very significant advantage with regard to swaying the audience. This discriminates against several groups of people: ethnic or other minorities, poorer people, people with worse intuitions about self-presentation, etc.
The current setup of the Forum discriminates on the basis of writing ability, which has various downsides, but I predict the effect of photos to be much stronger and even less well-correlated with actually being right.
A bit more grumpy than I actually endorse, but a feeling I'm having here: The world is full of places where people are evaluated based on how they look. It's no bad thing to have some places where they are evaluated based on what they write.
Preface: I hate photos of myself and have been annoyed when past employers have required they be used in email profiles, so I get where you're coming from.
I may be unusual, but this doesn't match my experience with any discussion platform that includes profile pictures (Facebook, Twitter, Slack...). Profile pictures on these platforms are small enough that you'd actually have to expend effort (clicking through to someone's profile or at least hovering over the photo) to judge someone's appearance. (Though race and gender can usually be seen even at small scale, which I guess is something.)
I also think this dynamic, such that it exists at all, breaks down quickly when people use anything other than photos of their own faces. I assume all anonymous users would avoid photos, and that at least some other named users would do the same (including me). What ends up happening when an argument involves:
I grabbed these examples from four profiles that popped up quickly when I opened Twitter. And I think this kind of scenario will be much more common than "two people having a conversation where most onlookers would agree that person A looks nicer than person B, based on what you can see at a glance from their profile pictures". You'll get some instances of the latter, but I think that the effect will be quite small compared to the overall impact of having a warmer Forum with easier-to-track conversations.
I may be unusual, but this doesn't match my experience with any discussion platform that includes profile pictures (Facebook, Twitter, Slack...). Profile pictures on these platforms are small enough that you'd actually have to expend effort (clicking through to someone's profile or at least hovering over the photo) to judge someone's appearance. (Though race and gender can usually be seen even at small scale, which I guess is something.)
My own experience of these platforms is that someone's profile picture or lack thereof has a big effect on my impression of that person. (With Twitter > Facebook > Slack in terms of both size of image and size of effect, but I remember specific examples from all three platforms.)
This applies also to cartoons or other non-photo images. My clearest memories of this are from old Slate Star Codex comment threads, when almost no-one used photos but I was still very aware of my feelings about users being strongly affected by their images – and changing significantly when those images changed. As another example, my system 1 is often noticeably better-disposed toward people who use profile pictures which are nice drawings of themselves than it would be if they used the original photo.
It's possible I'm unusually impressionable here, but I currently doubt it.
Hey Will, no worries and thanks for the response! Yeah I think I updated my views a bit from some of these discussions I had with others on the Forum about whether it should have profile photos. I'm now probably just 50% in favor of the EA Forum having profile photos, whereas I was probably 80% in favor before.
I think a good compromise is maybe there are ways to make the Forum seem friendlier and more welcoming to newcomers without having to use profile photos. That's the problem I wanted to solve anyway. I see how profile photos can degrade the experience for more engaged Forum users, so maybe there are other solutions, but I won't try to talk about them here.
I think a good compromise is maybe there are ways to make the Forum seem friendlier and more welcoming to newcomers without having to use profile photos.
Definitely interested in seeing this explored more!
Dark mode.
Also seconded.
In the meantime, you can get pseudo dark mode with the dark reader extension.
I don't know if you've seen ea.greaterwrong.com - that has a dark mode (in the left hand menu).
Recently Less wrong has created this feature. C'mon EA Forum!
Co-authors on posts should also share the karma of the post. I don't know how they should, whether it's equal split, or some percentage of the whole (e.g. if there's 100 karma each person gets 75 or something).
(I noticed this on 1 account for a post the person had co-written ~6 months ago)
I suspect that many people don't post on the forum because they're worried about their post being poorly received and damaging their reputation in the EA community.
I believe this because I feel this way myself, because I've heard other people around me worrying a lot about posting to the forum, because Will MacAskill spoke on the 80,000 hours podcast of being anxious about their reputation being damaged after posting on the forum, and because of the existence of Aaron Gertler's talk "Why you (yes, you) should post on the EA Forum".
Perhaps, by default, new posts could be anonymous until a certain karma threshold (say 30 karma) is met. After that post meets the karma threshold, the true author of the post could become visible.
That way, authors could post knowing that their reputation wouldn't be damaged if their post wasn't well received, but that they would get the credit if the post was well received.
I'd expect this to increase the number of posts (both good and bad) from hesitant new users, and I think that the increase in the number of mediocre new posts would be a cost worth paying. It's good for people to contribute and feel valued for their contribution, especially if it encourages them to make more valuable contributions in the future.
I think it'd be important that the anonymous-until-threshold was the default (i.e. opt out), so that people didn't feel embarrassed about using it.
Do people not find it viable to post under a pseudonym? Is your worry about coming across as dishonest?
I do think pseudonymity is the right way to solve this. It's plausible that we might want to make name-changes easier, so if you create a pseudonymous account, you can later take ownership over it more properly, if it turns out to not have embarassed you.
Meanwhile, name changes aren't yet easy, but I'm happy to change a username if you ask! I can also transfer a pseudonymous post to your "real name" account if you have one and want to take ownership.
Inspired by an EA Melbourne planning event yesterday, we came up with concept of having a subtle but visible visual tag for posts/replies by folks who are in the same city as you (opt in option in your profile), to help build more in-person community and potential collaboration.
This is a really nice idea, thanks!
Something which has come up a few times, and recently a lot in the context of Debate Week (and the reaction to Leif's post) is things getting downvoted quickly and being removed from the Front Page, which drastically drops the likelihood of engagement.[1]
So a potential suggestion for the Frontpage might be:
Maybe some code like this already exists, but this thought popped into my head and I thought it was worth sharing on this post.
My poor little piece on gradient descent got wiped out by debate week 😭 rip
In a couple of places I've seen people complain about the use of the Community tag to 'hide' particular discussions/topics. Not saying I fully endorse this view.
This is a problem we have thought about, and personally I think it is quite bad, in that it causes a lot of randomness in which posts get past ~10 karma. We agree that essentially showing new posts to more people is the answer (even if they start to get downvoted).
The fairly standard solution in recommendation algorithms is to view this as an explore/exploit problem, and to add some randomness to tune the tradeoff between then (see Bandits for Recommender Systems). This would mean each user would get a slightly different ordering of the list (stable per user) in order to make sure each post gets an appropriate number of views (based on the quality signal we have so far).
Here's an internal doc with our plans on this. We may not get to it that soon, because of giving season and other stuff, but it is one of our priorities after that.
Hide the vote score of all new posts
I'm not that optimistic about this. For algorithm purposes the thing that matters is the number of opportunities a post gets to be voted on (~views) before dropping off the frontpage. Presumably the theory here is that seeing post has low karma makes you less likely to view it and/or biased towards also downvoting it.
Based on my own experience I don't think this is the case. If I see a 0 to negative karma post on the frontpage I think I'm more likely to click it out of morbid curiosity, and then if it's at least ok I'll upvote it because I think the current score is overly harsh. I know a lot of people apply this logic about voting (correcting the current score rather than applying a fully independent judgement), and we generally endorse this.
Some consideration should also go to engagement - some metric related to either number of votes or comment count
I think this is a good idea (thinking about comment counts specifically), although I agree it could be prone to going wrong, e.g. making doom threads even doomier. One solution I can think of is to give a boost for comments but only up to a fairly low cutoff (say, 6 comments). Thoughts on this?
For a ~20 karma post I think having 5+ comments is a good signal that its a valuable-but-niche post.
Digression but I would recommend reading about Thompson sampling :) (wikipedia, inscrutable LessWrong post). It's a good model to have for thinking about explore-exploit tradeoffs in general.
- Some consideration should also go to engagement - some metric related to either number of votes or comment count would probably indicate which posts are generating community engagement, though this could lead to bikeshedding/Matthew effect if not implemented correctly. I still think it's directionally correct though
I think number and weight of upvotes (not netted against downvotes) is an important criterion here, especially when it comes to the risk of controversial material getting buried before most users have a chance to see it. I think this may be practically much the same as what you're suggesting.
I'd like to see the experimental sequences feature rolled out to all users.
Soon™️
+1 on this, and on curated posts. (As also discussed here).
I'm stopping by to mention that this is now live: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CMy2ueJ9WhZFNyBGs/ea-forum-update-new-editor-and-more
Having recently wrote a post that got a lot of silent downvotes, I've been thinking more about the general role of silent downvotes and how we could mitigate their downsides. (See some earlier discussion here.)
Silent downvotes are important for content ranking/visibility and providing a rough high-level signal of what the Forum community values/disvalues, but they have some pretty important disadvantages, especially when they represent a preponderance of a post's karma:
There's already a feature that allows authors to hide comment karma on selected posts. I'm not sure entirely how it works, but I think it means that if the author chooses, nobody can see karma scores on that post?
That might be what some authors want, and is maybe preferable to seeing lots of silent downvotes, but at least for me it seems way worse than seeing downvotes and knowing why. I want to be able to make that update, but it's often hard to do that based on silent downvotes alone.
It would be great to get more information from people about their downvotes, but any system for doing that needs to be super quick, simple, and easy – if a silent downvoter had time/energy/interest in providing an in-depth explanation of their downvote they'd just write a comment. But I think getting even a couple of bits more information from silent downvoters would be super valuable to authors.
The solution I have in mind for this right now is to provide a little optional pop-up next to the post karma total with a few common reasons for downvoting, plus an "Other" option (with or without the option to specify). You'd probably want to iterate a few times on the options, but my first pass would be:
Then show the results to the author somehow (e.g. on the analytics tab).
You could also do this for upvotes; this might be nice and would reduce asymmetry with downvotes, but I'm not too concerned about it. You could also extend it to comment downvotes, though this seems lower priority to me.
I'm guessing a new feature like this would be a fairly significant lift code-wise, but I tentatively think it would be worth it – right now I see this as a fairly big problem with quality of discourse and community on the Forum.
You might be interested in providing feedback on this mockup from LW (which the EA Forum might implement, if they develop it)
I forgot to respond to this!
Thank you for the link. That mockup is in some ways very close to my suggestion, which is exciting, but in some ways importantly different.
Level 3 headings should be supported. Unless it's changed recently, it currently jumps from Level 2 to Level 4, which makes it hard to logically format complex documents.
Strongly agree with this, have been very frustrated in the past with how the Forum (via LessWrong) coerces my header usage.
It looks bad in the sidebar too.
It has. We no longer apply the same styling to h2 and h3. While you still can’t create h3s using the editor, you can paste in from google docs and they will appear correctly. Sorry for not mentioning this anywhere, it’s such an invisible change — I don’t know what I was thinking.
(Unfortunately, I will need to remake this change once the new editor ships. LessWrong does not want its posts to have more than 3 levels of headings [h1, h2 and bold text]. I don’t think that’s the right choice for the EA Forum, but sometimes their updates won’t be checked for compatibility with minor features of the Forum).
The new editor has shipped (still just to beta users) but I have just reintroduced h3s.
H3s are still being converted to regular Paragraph format when I paste them in from GDocs. What am I doing wrong?
H3 headers should be available again soon; the feature broke after a recent migration.
I had the same problem when posting a few days ago.
Though I think level 3 headings work for me if I use the markdown editor (e.g., a paragraph that only has "### How often have people been wrong about such things in the past?" will show up as a level 3 heading).
And when I just put a sentence fragment in a line by itself and in bold, it at least showed up in the sidebar as if it was a level three heading. (Well, one of them didn't initially work, but then I fixed it somehow - I think the fix was simple, but can't remember.)
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"
Thanks for this suggestion and for the examples. I'm going to add this to our list, I do think something better than "this page doesn't exist" is probably better.
Any thoughts or updates on implementing "two axis" voting? This feature is described here.
I don't really want to add pressure or pull things forward, I just wanted to check if there were thoughts on this.
For more context, the post below is a situation where this was useful :
The above shows one comment chain where a good idea seems to be downvoted because of disagreement, and not content.
Basically, I didn't like (and really many others as well) how several comments in that post were treated voting wise, even if at the same time, we disagreed with the actual content.
It seems possible this could be alleviated by the two axis voting.
BTW I also really like a bunch of other features and I have ideas, but basically you don't want to get me started.
Expose "voting tribes" in the comments.
We could run a similar algorithm to X's Community Notes. Then, on contentious topics, we could easily see the main axis of disagreement. We could also have a comment sorting option, that upranks those upvoted by people from both sides of the disagreement.
See this thread for discussion and corresponding post for algorithm description.
Effective Animal Advocacy (EAA) forum
EDIT: I made this suggestion into an EA forum post so I deleted it from here to avoid duplication. The post contains the text that was originally here.
Option to @mention usernames.
Should have something like an autocomplete and an opt-out-able notification/mail whenever one is mentioned.
Something that came to mind after reading recent posts by Ulrik and Sarah, along with the reaction to them - Can we do better at distinguishing downvotes and disagreevotes?
In my mind, I view downvotes as saying:
Whereas disagreevotes are saying:
I think my concern is that the first two bullet points under 'downvotes' seem very different from the bottom two.[1] It feels, to me, that we rarely see posts that are highly upvoted but also have significant disagreevotes.
So I don't have a solution for this apart from some half-baked ideas, but wonder what the Forum team's perspective was?
I think in part I'm questioning whether the last two are valid uses of the downvote button.
I'd like the Forum to support superscript and subscript.
This is also supported in the new editor.
While these are supported in the new editor, users can't access the functionality yet. However, subscript is currently possible in Markdown:
Adding subscript to my post
You need to start the subscript with a tilde, then put a backslash after every word but the last word (the closing tilde goes after the last word).
For example, see lines 2 and 14 of this file.
An automatic jargon-explainer for commonly used jargon. This gets the best of both worlds, for readers and writers. People can use jargon more often,[1] and not have to worry about it not landing with readers. And readers unaware of the jargon can hover over the word to see what it means, while readers who already do know can keep reading. Makes it easier to read for people within a wider range of inferential distance.
Efficient communication without having to link to each jargony word, since that might get distracting and take attention away from links they do want to emphasise.
This is really a fantastic suggestion, and complete with a screenshot with the UI that I like. Thanks!
Perhaps it's not clear whether adding agreement karma to posts is positive on net; but I think perhaps it would be worth adding for a month as an experiment.
A counter-consideration is that many voters on the Forum may not understand the difference between overall karma and agreement karma still. Unconclusive weak evidence: This answer got 3 overall karma with 22 votes (at some point it was negative) and 18 agreement karma with 20 votes:
(It's unconclusive evidence because while the regular karma downvotes surprised me, people could have had legitimate reasons for not liking the meta-answer and downvoting it. My suspicion though is that at least some people down-voted this in an attempt to "Disagree" vote in the poll.)
Two notification-related suggestions:
Related to this:
Is that the intended behaviour? I find it quite jarring
Thanks for flagging these! And sorry for the delayed response. :)
For Shortform:
Thanks for the feedback! I do think we want to rethink our information architecture once we hire and onboard a designer, who is coming soon!
I think the EA Forum should allow authors to pick one of the images they attached into their post as the "preview image" when the post is shared on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
I don't think this feature currently exists, and I think it would help drive traffic to the EA Forum whenever posts are shared. I'm assuming that the authors would link an image that is more enticing than the standard EA forum logo, which would result in slightly higher click-through rates. Medium.com and most other CMS's allow you to pick a preview image. I think Medium.com's UI for picking a "featured image" is a good example of how to design this feature.
Adding to the better preview image for twitter, I notice other sites have top quotes from the article as a cover image, which I think is pretty interesting.
(probably not worth implementing, but just for inspiration really)
Thanks! No worries about suggesting "inspirational" features.
I am reasonably confident that we use the first image that is used in a post as the preview image, so you can already mostly do this.
Hm I tried linking a recent EA Forum post with an image (image is at the bottom) just now on Facebook, and the EA forum photo is still the one showing up. I tried running it via the Facebook sharing debugger and pressing "Scrape Again", but it still shows the same photo.
Huh, you're right. I will look into it.
1. Could analytics be displayed on the forum? I think it'd be interesting to people to see how many people read different posts. This is also related to the question re: the forum prize - I reckon many authors would be more motivated by seeing that their posts are widely read than by a cash prize.
2. I often see very long posts that jump right into the introduction without summary. Could one introduce a field that is mandatory if a posts is more than 300 words long that forces the author to provide a 200 characters (or so) summary? Or something like this:
https://www.elsevier.com/authors/journal-authors/highlights
could even be added by the mods.
On (2), we've considered adding a summary field in the editor, but I don't think we'd make it mandatory unless we did so for a much larger character count. Whether or not we eventually implement that, I encourage anyone reading this to include summaries in their long posts!
Thanks for providing the Elsevier link -- I could imagine us linking to that as an example of how one might compose a summary.
On-site image hosting for posts/comments? This is mostly a minor QoL benefit, and maybe there would be challenges with storage. Another benefit would be that images would not vanish if their original source does.
I'm stopping by to mention that this is now live: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CMy2ueJ9WhZFNyBGs/ea-forum-update-new-editor-and-more
"agree/disagree" for posts, not only comments.
Might reduce downvotes on posts
The story of how it got that way is that agree/disagree was originally built as an experiment-with-voting-systems feature, with the key component of that being that different posts can have different voting systems without conflict. (See eg this thread for another voting system we tried.)
The main reason for hesitation (other ForumMagnum developers might not agree) is that I'm not really convinced that 2-axis voting is the right voting system, and expanding it from a posts-have-different-voting-systems context to a whole-site-is-2-axis context limits the options for future experimentation. In particular, there's a big unresolved fundamental issue in how votes conflate positivity with engagement, which I really want to solve some day.
On mobile, I think there's no way to remove your vote on your own comments. On desktop, I can just click my vote again, but on mobile the normal workflow is to tap to cycle between normal / strong / no vote, and I can't strong upvote my own comments, so I get "stuck" in the cycle.
edit: ok I think you can do it by just going through the cycle quickly enough, but I definitely struggled with this before, perhaps it depends on the latency of your connection to the server...
A emoticon or image next to someone's first post either on the homepage or when you click into the post so that people know that they are engaging with a potential newcomer and maybe are nicer / more welcoming?
Could be obvious downsides to this I haven't thought of
I like this idea. Lots of other Forums have it, but we don't even have it in our task tracker yet. Thanks for the suggestion!
The posts' analytics include the number of reads. Does this refer to the number of unique users who engaged with the post at least 30 s uninterruptedly? I would clarify this in the note.
I'd like to have the option to make polls within a post. I recently wrote a short question post to see if an idea seems promising and I got a couple of upvotes and no comments. Having the option to get quick and cheap feedback from the community would've been useful.
The bucket this falls in for me is ... Widgets! I really want to make widgets. For example, making it so authors could add a button to donate. This is planned, but not concretely.
In case you haven't seen it, I created the Facebook group Effective Altruism Polls for this use case. Response rates are generally pretty high!
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.
A commenter on this thread said it should have been a top-level post rather than a QT. Throwing in my vote for this feature.
Thanks for the suggestion. We've thought about this for a while, and I agree it's a good idea. Given the lack of a huge amount of use of the shortform feature, my guess is it's not winning the prioritization battle. But I've noted this as bump to the request.
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.
I agree. I'm amazed how quickly I have gone from adding 1 Karma to adding 4 now. Maybe voting could only be enabled after a certain amount of engagement, but it does feel undemocratic.
Same here, I actually wasn't aware of weighted voting until I noticed I was able to do it. I don't think there's a problem with voting (even voting + flat rate strong voting seems perfectly reasonable to me) by weighing votes according to karma seems very high cost to very little or no gain
It could be cool if the EA Forum allowed for boxes of text that start off collapsed but can be expanded, in the way that e.g. Gwern's site does (here's a random example). This could be used for long sections that the author wants to signal (a) are sort-of digressions and/or (b) may be worth skipping for some people.
There are a few things authors can already do that serve a similar purpose:
But the first two of those options seem to less clearly signal "We really think fewer people should read this than should read the rest of this post", compared to having a collapsed but expandable box of text.
And the third option might sometimes signal that too strongly, and also doesn't allow things to show up when you use the Forum's search function.
And the fourth option doesn't seem to work well for fairly long sections of text; more than a few paragraphs in a single footnote would be unusual and might be a little annoying (due to the small text). Also, that would remove the option of the author including footnotes within that section of text.
(I originally raised this idea here, in the context of whether it'd be best to include full transcripts from 80k podcast episodes when link posting them to the EA Forum. I think it could make sense to include the transcripts as collapsed but expandable boxes of text, so that terms from the transcript will appear when doing searches on the Forum - which wouldn't happen if the transcript wasn't included at all - but people don't feel like they have to read the whole transcript before they comment on the post.)
Yeah, I generally want to have a bunch more interactive elements in posts. This was historically blocked by a bunch of improvements we were making to our editor, but that is now done, and I hope that soon we can make a bunch of improvements in this space.
Start and end time are not readable for me when creating and editing events in dark mode.
Is that just me?
Browser: Firefox, OS: Windows 11.
Couldn't see if someone already suggested this but:
I’d like this
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!
Thanks for the discussion here. Your suggestions seem to be a mix of preferences, some generally pervasive design patterns, and some content curation-type suggestions (eg with your reference to the vuejs forum). The Forum team is hoping to hire our first full time designer soon, and we're hoping this will help us bring a more specific set of opinions to various layers of design on the Forum.
Alright, here is a very crude preview
https://openuserjs.org/scripts/icetbr/Clearer_EffectiveAltruism.org_Forum
It does sadly look very broken for me:
It does look better on the all-posts page:
Some thoughts
Yeah, it messes up a few other pages as well. To be fixed.
I think the site needs a dark mode. More and more people are favoring it. I use my monitor in a nearly yellow tone, redshift -O 2800k so I like the white background just fine. I can't get behind the gray background though. I mean, how many sites does that? I find it harder to read.
The font I used could be one size larger, I did made an alternate screenshot to compare. Yet research suggests the current font size, not the one from my script, is ideal. I still favor higher density, as I can analyze the content faster.
Regarding skimming, I read titles by rows, not lines. I think we've been conditioned for this. Just look at Reddit or Medium. I find it easy to read a few words and skip to the next row. The title is too important to be trimmed away, I would sooner hide the author, date an comments count. I think it's very hard to find a site with this few characters in a title.
I haven't used the site enough to give a proper opinion on the icons. I think they either should be used more or hidden altogether. But I mix my feelings regarding topics, something I didn't touch yet. They will either be on the left of the title, on the end of the line, or below the titles, in a smaller font. I can't tell you how much I want to see 50 titles at a time and instantly know where they fit. Blue tagged AI, green tagged Animal Wellfare, etc.
I plan on enhancing my script as I spend more time here. It might take a while. I mostly wanted to take a feel if my experiences are in line with others. I'm happy to keep my preferences as a userscript and give the users another choice.
I think the site needs a dark mode. More and more people are favoring it.
The site already has one! Or more precisely LessWrong has one, and it probably wouldn't be too hard to adapt it to the EA Forum (which shares a codebase).
The font I used could be one size larger, I did made an alternate screenshot to compare. Yet research suggests the current font size, not the one from my script, is ideal. I still favor higher density, as I can analyze the content faster.
I am generally skeptical of research in this space, but yeah, the current font size is what seems to work pretty well in user tests I've done. I do also think sometimes it makes sense to have more density and smaller font sizes (and like, comment text is already almost that small)
I can't get behind the gray background though. I mean, how many sites does that? I find it harder to read.
I mean, how about Reddit?
Or how about Youtube (the background of the videos):
Or how about Facebook:
The pattern of "grey background with white boxes in front, occasional header or nav element on the grey background" is as far as I can tell the standard pattern to reduce eye fatigue while also ensuring high text contrast. I actually can't think of a content heavy site that doesn't do this.
I'm confused why the all white background is better, grey is easier on the eyes and the non-white color gives a natural framing to the other content. Both points seem pretty normal in design.
I disagree that those other sites are superior. Also a major issue is that they use visual/video content (reddit and FB) and have different modes of use/seeking attention. They are designed around a scrolling feed, producing a constant stream of content, showing 1-3 items at a time.
Setting the above aside, I'm uncertain why your changes reflect ideas from them. For example, your changes to text, make posts much more compact than Reddit or SO.
"Grey is easier" I don't think it is. Would you disagree that most publications use a white background? Could you provide at least some examples of ones that doesn't?
"I disagree that those other sites are superior." We would have to define superior. For me, the best (most well paid) minds in UX + the most number of users are objective measures. That doesn't mean we have to copy them, but it beckons to the familiarity factor.
I agree that they have a constant stream of content and this matters on design. What use is to have 50 compacted posts that I can scan in 1 second, if we have 30 posts a week? It is unfortunate that we don't have a higher traffic. I believe in reducing barriers of entry to help on this, and making a familiar site is but a very small of those.
To your third point, open a screenshot of my version, the current design here and any of them. See you can spot the ideas I try to incorporate. I don't know your background, but I can give you a a technical response. Fonts, spacing, that kind of thing. I basically copied the typography from them, while keeping the site identity and adding a few of my preferences.
Please note I did that in about 4 hours of work. The gross of it was very fast, some details took very long. 1 hour I spent fighting the pop ups before deciding to disable them
"Grey is easier" I don't think it is. Would you disagree that most publications use a white background? Could you provide at least some examples of ones that doesn't?
I checked two sites that you listed, FB and StackExchange, and they literally use a grey/off white background. Started with these two and I stopped after checking these two, I suspect I'll find more.
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/101876/why-not-use-darker-backgrounds-instead-of-white
The stackexchange site literally answered this very question and one answer pointed out that the very site is off-white (although less than grey or the EA forum). The top answer here supports grey backgrounds: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/23965/is-there-a-problem-with-using-black-text-on-white-backgrounds?rq=1.
Before I thought this opinion about the use of grey (and avoidance of high contrast) was normal/standard before. Now I'm even more sure, and not knowing/ opposing about it seems sort of strange to me.
"I disagree that those other sites are superior." We would have to define superior. For me, the best (most well paid) minds in UX + the most number of users are objective measures. That doesn't mean we have to copy them, but it beckons to the familiarity factor.
There's a lot going on here, but IMO neither of those things make this view very promising. This is because they are designed for MAU/growth hacking and the audience is different (and I don't think this is some elite or niche thing). Also, since the business is multiple billions are year, you naturally get top talent.
As an analogy, tabloids are popular and well designed for their audience, but that doesn't make them dominant design choices. I do agree that the design on average is good and things work for those sites.
Also, I suspect some design choices from those sites have dependencies—I think having an infinite scroll or video or picture focus would affect other design choices, such as size/position/font of text, so copying those design choices to a forum might not be appropriate without more sophistication.
I don't want to be disagreeable or press too much here on you here. Honestly I want to learn about design and different perspectives, but I don't think I am?
Some of the other things you said suggested you have strong views that seemed more personal and also that you use some unusual color filter? This makes me speculate that you are applying a personal perspective disproportionately and ignoring "the customer", but maybe this is unfair.
??? Yeah, Reddit's design literally uses a grey background. It's darker than the EA forum.
You're talking about the framing. Sorry, I didn't realize. It's not among my concerns to the site. Yes, It's a preference. There are a few main trends regarding framing, I'm on the one against it. Gray on gray refers to the comments section, and any other place where there is a gray background and a "gray" font. It is not an unusual choice, I just don't find it the best. As an argument, you read articles in a white background, why comments should have gray, aside from structural purposes?
Regarding audience, I kind of disagree. Yes, the audience here is not the same of that of Reddit. And I think this should change. Still I'd like to see a site like this. It literally created its own engine! Which is awesome by the way. I love VulcanJs. Here is an example of what I would like to see on hitting the main page: https://forum.vuejs.org/.
Just for reference, I have 20 years as a developer, and I have been part in maybe hundreds of design discussions, even though I'm a front/back end developer. So, no expert but I'm somewhat on the loop. The changes I propose are a mix of personal choices and experience/research based opinions.
Also, any discussion of familiarity starts with mobile, which I don't use. My focus is mainly on the 1080p 24inch desktop experience.
An option to post anonymously or non anononymously with your account (instead of having to create a new account to post anonymously, and spend hours on internet anagram server finding an anonymous account name)
Can I opt out of Forum favourites? I'm sorry but I hate it
Variant of Korthon's comment:
I never look at the "forum favorites" section. It seems like it's looked the same forever and it takes up a lot of screen real estate without any use for me!
I just updated this section and it now shows randomized posts.
Same is true for me (as the person who built the feature). On LessWrong the recommendations are randomized but for some reason on the EA Forum the admins/devs decided to always have them be strictly ordered by the latest highest karma posts you haven’t read, so they never change, and inevitably end up in a configuration where you’re not interested in any of the posts.
I agree, I think the Forum has enough very-high-karma content now that randomising it here as well would be a good idea.
I also don't like this feature, although we should be aware that this feature is most helpful for new users, and new users are probably under-represented in this thread.
I agree it isn’t great. This was slated for a redesign, but then I deprioritized it. I should probably revisit what the right thing to do is. I’ve been meaning to randomize it, as Habryka mentioned. (I want it to not be randomized when you're logged out, which is why it’s like this. It’s supposed to be a way for newcomers to see the best of the Forum, so they don’t get lost in the weekly churn.) Maybe just randomizing it for logged-in users would be enough, but an option to hide it seems good, if more work.
Tags for tags: We should turn the "Related entries" sections of wiki pages into native tags so we can build a crowdsourced graph of links between the wiki pages. Links can be uni- or bidirectional and specify different types of relationships such as "A is related to B" or "A is a parent of B".
I second this. I think bidirectional links would be a better form for "Related entries" rather than manually adding the topics to the "Related entries".
User case: I've been trying to connect some topics on the Wiki with "Related entries"
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
As an aside: I believe this will work right up until you submit it, but am not sure.
A non-moderator account currently sees this
for comparison I see this
While I think LaTeX is useful, it is not very intuitive or user friendly and posting long curated articles is quite tedious. It would be nice to have a feature like Elementor.
I think there would be a lot of value in a detailed how-to document for content creators explaining each step needed to go from a GDoc or WordDoc to a forum post. This would optimally include a directory for keywords like footnotes, typographical emphasis, Title/Header/Normal text functions, etc.
The reference to LaTeX here isn't very clear to me. Does Elementor provide an alternative equation-rendering system? Or did you mean something else?
If someone downvotes, suggest that they explain why
I disagree and I downvoted this because explaining why you downvoted something is disproportionately likely to end up with me arguing with someone on the internet. I find this really unpleasant.
I'm happy to have a rule for giving an explanation to you if I downvote your posts. I've talked with you as a person outside of internet arguments, so I'm not as worried about getting into a protracted argument.
But as a general rule, I think I should be discouraged from explaining my downvotes so that I keep up my mental health.
Separately, if this was a thread that had agree/disagree enabled I would just click disagree! The comment is fine, and I try to reserve downvote for things that are mean or grossly incorrect if agree/disagree is available.
Hey (:
To be clear, my feature suggestion is something like a popup reading "you downvoted this, consider explaining why" as opposed to "in order to downvote this, you MUST explain why".
The pain point I'm trying to solve is "I don't know why people down vote my comments sometimes and it makes me sad and confused". Maybe my specific proposed solution isn't good; my pain point remains, though
I also acknowledge that "explaining why I downvoted" can lead into arguing-on-the-internet which could be negative in a way that I want to avoid (and I don't want to drag people into).
Oh for sure, I wasn't thinking you were implying making it a requirement. I was trying to say that even a nudge towards explaining downvotes is a nudge towards evil (for me).
Maybe the net advantage of explaining downvotes would be good, but I personally should probably be discouraged from explaining my downvotes.
Props for taking the time to explain, even though you don't like it!
Upvoted since you explained why you don't like my idea, and I like that! :)
What would people think of adding SummaryBot functionality to some very long comments? The emergence of a new HLI/SM thread reminds me that some comments are post-length and post-complexity contributions; many of them would benefit from a summary. That can be particularly valuable where the original poster and commenter start a dialogue, with long replies to each other's comments. Those threads can take a significant time commitment to get through!
Unsure what the cutoff should be to trigger a comment summary -- maybe 500-600 words?
I'd like to be able to add pinned posts or comments to my profile. Several people have asked me about my EA origin story so I've tried to refer them to this comment, but I always have a hard time finding the link.
Thanks for the suggestion! I've added this to our list for triage.
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 what Wikipedia does, one possible approach is to automatically remove a parent tag from a post when a user adds a child tag to that post. However, this messes with the voting mechanism of tags. A less disruptive approach is to hide parent tags by default when both the child and parent are added to a post (or hide the child tags if the parent is a white tag), and then allow the user to expand the full list of tags.
Thanks, I think think this is good feedback. I recognize the way parent / child tags work now isn't ideal. We'll have to prioritize improving this against other things we could work on!
Add the option to disable comments on your posts.
Strongly agree. I came on this thread to suggest this.
I have posted on the forum before, but I have recently developed some health problems (fatigue etc) that mean I can no longer afford the energy necessary to participate in comment discussions. This is the main reason why I am no longer posting. I would be far more incentivised to make future posts if I could turn off the options for people to make comments where I deem that comments would not add much value to the post (i.e. I would use this feature on lifestyle suggestions or resource recommendations, but not on philosophical hot takes).
Disagree. It's nice to have the space to talk about the idea for others, and I feel like both problems mentioned by both anon and Ren can be remedied by clearer communication:
When LessWrong posts are crossposted to the EA Forum, there is a link in EA Forum comments section:
This link just goes to the top of the LessWrong version of the post and not to the comments. I think either the text should be changed or the link go to the comments section.
It would be useful to schedule posts ahead of time.
I believe moderators can do this for you, but perhaps we should allow users to do this as well. I'll add it to our list for triage.
I'm a mod and did not know this was a feature! But I think it would be good for users to do it themselves.
I would be happy to know the total engagement time (reading the post, and reading and writing comments on the post) by post by day. As of now, one can only check the karma, comments, views, and reads by post by day on the posts' analytics.
I worry a bit that all the suggestions are about details, whereas the macro trend is that public discourse is moving toward Twitter, and blog content linked from Twitter. One thing that could help attract new audience would be to revive the EA Forum Twitter account, automatically, or manually.
When you say "macro trend", do you mean within EA or across the internet as a whole?
Also, when you say "moving", do you mean away from Facebook? The Forum has been growing steadily since we launched the new version in late 2018, by all the metrics we measure.
(Neither of these questions takes away from the idea of having a Forum Twitter account, but I wanted to figure out where the ideas were coming from.)
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.
Thanks Matt, noted!
If we had a tag called "Links" for posts that aren't displayed on the front page, then we could have a "Hackernews"/ "Reddit" style section were people can share -without comment- external links related to EA or that could be discussed in the context of EA. This would be different from current "link posts" which might have a higher (imagined) bar to posting.
Along a similar lines, there could be a low effort way for the current Shortform function to emulate Twitter, where the 'magic' sorting algorithm also takes into account the length of the post.
You can simulate this in your head by blending r/effectivegiving with the current forum. Problem is I think it devalues forum posts a bit. Kinda like (but milder than) if a scientific publication allowed authors to submit Tweets.
Personally, I'd be more excited about people just using those platforms - Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Quora, Tiktok, etc to discuss EA-related arguments, and for EA orgs to offer prizes for that, rather than shoehorning activities into the forum.
The main draw of Hackernews is that the people on it are quite smart and so it might be nice to have it on the forum.
But I agree that the r/effectivealtruism sub is not that good in terms of quality of discussing and what gets upvoted and would benefit from core EA people engaging and voting more there.
Double the karma weight of votes made before the new karma system was implemented. All votes used to be worth one point. For example, let's take an old post like this. It currently has 43 karma and 43 votes (probably all of them are upvotes). For comparison, my newest post has 53 karma and 16 upvotes. If you think about it, that old post is clearly more endorsed by the community. There were fewer readers when it was posted and a very high percentage of them chose to upvote it and probably many would have strongly upvoted if that was an option. Nowadays, even a regular upvote by high-karma users is worth two points. Posts like that old post do not appear in forum favourites and other places like that but they should. If you doubled the karma of such old posts, the karma for that old one would be 86 instead of 43 - a much better representation of how much the community endorses that post. Ah, maybe you should even triple the karma weight. Posts like this would then actually make forum favourites and I think they should.
Changing the raw totals sounds confusing, but you could implement some form of regularisation in ranking contexts - for example karma relative to total karma across all posts for that month.
It is a little strange that if I go to an old post I upvoted, un-upvote, and then re-upvote, its karma increases I think.
It's not just about ranking. It's also about how much karma individual users have and (most importantly) about how worthy-of-reading a post looks when you open it based on its karma. I think that the situation where all votes made before the new system are worth one karma point is no less confusing than a system where they are worth two karma points.
Sans-serif font in body text! The comments section is absolutely beautiful to read, but I find the body text of posts very difficult. Most blogs and online news sources seem to use sans-serif, probably for readability.
Alternatively, give users the option to pick their own font. Also, maybe make text black instead of a lighter grey?
When you say "make text black instead of a lighter grey," are you referring to all of the Forum's light-grey text (e.g. voting buttons, section subtitles), or something more specific?
I tried to check on the "sans-serif is easier to read" claim but didn't find conclusive evidence; checking Google Scholar, the first study of computer readability I saw found that serif fonts were easier to read. (This is just one study, of course, and knowing that the Forum's specific body type is tough for some people really helps us.)
I meant the body text of posts could be darker - I wouldn't change the buttons or other light-grey text.
Interesting that the study found serif fonts more readable. I'm not aware of conclusive evidence in either direction, I'd just heard folk wisdom that sans-serif is more readable on a computer screen.
My general opinion is that the comments section on this forum is extremely easy to read and clean to look at, some of my favorite formatting anywhere, but personally I find the body text of posts much more difficult to read than most sites. I wonder what most people think, I wouldn't expect everyone to have the same experience.
i would find it helpful to establish a norm to begin posts with a short (!) 'tl;dr'-section which summarizes the main results/arguments of the article, since sometimes it is hard to tell what a post is about only from the title/the preview one gets by hovering over the link.
I think it's already quite common for commenters on posts without these to request them; is there something in the UI you'd like to change to encourage this?
if im not mistaken, when you hover over the link to a post you just see the beginning of the post, right? this sometimes is not very useful. maybe you could give post creators another text field ("thumbnail"/"preview"/"tl;dr") where they can explicitly fill in what should be shown when hovering over the link. this field should probably be character limited then. this text should be displayed at the top of the post, too. (and if posters dont fill it out it could just fall back to showing the beginning of the post).
What you describe is almost exactly identical to an admin feature that we have from LessWrong. Which isn't much help to you yet, but might get released more widely.
This needn't be written by the author - it could be added by higher karma readers, for instance.
or written by anyone but approved by the author?
Yeah that works too.
(Not sure if that has been suggested before, but) you should be able to sort comments by magic (the way posts are sorted on the frontpage) or some other better way to combine top+new properties for comments. Otherwise new contributions that are good are read far too rarely, so only very few people will read and upvote them, while the first comments directly receive many upvotes and so get even more upvotes later. Still, upvotes tell a bit about what comments are good, and not everyone wants to read everything.
I would definitely use it myself, but I would strongly suggest also making it the default way comments are sorted.
(That wouldn't totally remove bad dynamics, but it would be a start.)
Few UX suggestions for post edit:
Add a "publish" button in the options below:
Have a Save Draft / Publish button on the top (not just bottom) when in edit mode / or a "skip to bottom" to make it easier to save /publish
Meta suggestion: Could be nice to start a new features thread and/or use a feature suggestion forum at some point, this one is getting a bit difficult to navigate right now.
MVP option could be to create a copy of this thread but delete all the implemented features so that only WIP /not implemented ideas are here.
Make it possible to only filter / see unread posts by default on the forum homepage.
This past month I've noticed I've missed a bunch of cool and relevant posts because they dropped off the home page too quickly for me to see them. I'd like that not to happen. Not a suggestion, but related: it seems like some good posts fall of the homepage way too quickly. It would be nice to give those posts a chance to be seen. Often if there are a couple really high popularity posts in a week then the people who happened to post less popular posts get unfairly disadvantaged, which seems suboptimal.
Thanks Vaidehi! Filtering only to unread seems like a good idea, I've added that to our backlog.
Regarding your second point: If you have a suggestion for how to increase visibility of other posts, let me know. My current best guess is to improve targeting, i.e. users who are most interested in animal welfare posts will disproportionately see animal welfare posts, which will give those posts increased visibility amongst the people who most want to see them (albeit at the expense of hiding non-animal welfare posts from these people).
Yeah so maybe I'm somewhat of a minority but as a meta person I'd like to see at least the headlines of most posts, and wouldn't want those to have less visibility. Mainly because I'm concerned about only consuming meta content and not staying in touch with object level advancements.
Not a suggestion per se - will comment later on if I have any.
I wish the notifications icon at the top right would have have separate icon to indicate replies to my posts and my comments.
At the moment those get drowned out by notifications about posts and comments from people I follow (which are so numerous that I've been trained to rarely check the notification inbox, because it's such a rabbit hole...), so I often see comments weeks or months too late.
I'd also like to be able to get email notifications for just replies to my posts and replies to my comments.
Thanks for the suggestion! I like the idea of visually distinguishing the most important notifications (i.e. the ones you might want to reply to).
There are a lot of customization options for notifications, so I'd recommend looking through your account settings:
For example, you can set "Comments on posts/events I'm subscribed to" and "Replies to my comments" to notify you both on-site and via email.
You may also prefer to batch email notifications (rather than receive them immediately) if you get too many (for example, you could batch "Comments by users I'm subscribed to" to get an email about it once per day).
Though I agree that the notification customization UI is not the best — the wording is not super clear, and I think the way notifications are categorized is not ideal. I also agree that too many notifications is a UX problem, and we have a backlog item to explore better ways to batch notifications to improve this experience (though to be honest I'm not sure when we will get around to it).
I think the user bio editor in Settings should be a bigger text area with rich text formatting (like the ones for posts). This would make them more WYSIWYG since user bios are displayed in a similar style to posts.
Hi, sorry to be a complainer - I've just seen a new "continue reading" feature and I don't like it. If I stopped reading a sequence or article it means I'm aware of its existence and have chosen not to read it. This feature keeps reminding me of my least favourite articles (right now it's convinced I should read Aaron's placeholder post for a new sequence). I couldn't spot any way to remove it. Okay, that's all, thanks very much for your attention.
It sounds like the "placeholder post" you're seeing is a draft that should be invisible to you, which indicates a different bug.
Is the title you're seeing "Sequence Placeholder Draft", or something else?
Yes that's right - it has [Draft] [Unlisted] before that title
I would consider something to reduce the karma users can get from commenting on controversial posts. Right now it seems easy to get very high scores by making not really that great comments in such places.
As an example, I think this comment I made is decent. It makes a true and relevant point that no-one else had mentioned . But it's not great; the topic of that thread is not that important, and the all the comments in it, let alone mine alone, do not resolve the issue. Most importantly, that comment is definitely not over 50% as good as this article I wrote. I would say the article is at least a thousand times more important, and took at least a thousand times longer to write.
I'm not sure how exactly you would do this though, as all the most obvious methods have significant drawbacks.
Maybe turn off strong voting in comments or even comment karma from counting to users' total karma in such posts? How do we decide which posts to consider controversial, though? Just the mods do it (they kept object-level election posts in the personal blog)?
An approach some forum use is the ratio of up and downvotes: -38+40 is not the same as +2 ! This allows you to have a smooth measure of the degree of controversy rather than a binary classification.
One underlying reason your comment got a lot of upvotes was because the post was viewed many times. Controversy leads to pageviews. Arguably "net upvotes" is an OK metric for post quality (where popularity is important) whereas "net upvotes"/"pageviews" might make more sense for comments.
Side-issue: isn't Karma from posts weighted at 10x compared to Karma in comments? Or at least, I think it once was. And that would help a bit in this particular instance.
We no longer weigh frontpage posts 10x, though we might want to reinstitute some kind of weighing again. I think the 10x was historically too much, and made it so that by far the primary determinant of who had how much karma was how many frontpage posts you had, which felt like it undervalued comments, but it's pretty plausible (and even likely to me) that the current system is now too skewed in the other direction.
My current relationship towards karma is something like: The point of karma for comments is to provide local information in a thread about a mixture of importance, quality and readership, and it's pretty hard to disentangle those without making the system much more complex. Overall the karma of a post is a pretty good guess on how many people will want to read it, so it makes sense to use it for some recommendation systems, but the karma of comments feel a lot more noisy to me. As a long-term reward I think we shouldn't really rely on karma at all and instead use systems like the LessWrong review to establish in a much more considered way which posts were actually good.
We've also deemphasized how much karma someone has on the site quite a bit because I don't want to create the impression that it's at all a robust measure of the quality of someone's contributions. So, for example, we no longer have karma leaderboards.
A topic could be controversial in society but the votes could still go mostly one way on the EA Forum itself, though. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if Democrat-favouring election posts were not scored as very controversial on the EA Forum, given the political leanings of EA. Do we also want to consider posts on controversial topics more broadly?
Just saw this and wanted to add my strong agreement that (a) this is a problem, and (b) I don't know how to fix it.
My lizard brain has definitely learned that commenting on high-controversy posts gets me lots of karma, and I don't like it.