Effective Altruism ForumAI Pause Debate Week
EA Forum

by Aaron Gertler, JP Addison
Jun 16 20201 min read 765

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Building effective altruismCommunityEffective Altruism Forum
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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

  1. ^

    Note: there's a delay between when we write tasks down and when they get triaged into a state that gets synced with Github.

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Yonatan Cale12d2-2

Add a 😂 emoji reply!

Yonatan Cale12d20

1)

In links to tags, like this:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/HqxvGsczdf4yLB9FG

Also add a human-readable (slug) part to the url, similarly to what you do with posts:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NhSBgYq55BFs7t2cA/ea-forum-feature-suggestion-thread

 

2)

If someone enters a link that doesn't have the human-readable part, like 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NhSBgYq55BFs7t2cA

then redirect to a url that does have the human readable part

 

P.S

I really can't think of anything lower priority than this :P but thought I'd write... (read more)

4
JP Addison
11d
💙
lauragreen13d10

Didn't read through all comments so unsure if this was suggested already, but could the karma / agree votes be located at the bottom of comments rather than at the top (or both)? For very long comments (especially in gnarly threads) it's a pain to scroll up to agree/disagree vote, and it incentivises liking based on the author or first few lines rather than reading through.

burner14d10

Within the community tab 'New and Upvoted' seems to still be the same posts, month after month. Perhaps new should gain more weight, given the current posting frequency and upvoting?

Chi1mo10

Within-post bookmarks

I often start posts but they are too long to read them in one go and the fact that I have to do that (or forever forget where I am) creates a big ugh field for me. Solution: Within-post bookmarks! I think it would be amazing if we could mark where we are in a post and the next time, we can just click to get ourselves back there!

(FWIW, I think that's a major feature of printed media, which I have much less ugh feelings about reading. You can always put it away without it being annoying later on.)

3
JP Addison
25d
I expect this to be hard to get right, but I think it would in fact remove a major bottleneck to returning to a post. Claim: the hard part is getting people to set their bookmarks. Maybe we could do something automatic?
1
Chi
23d
Not sure about the claim but possible! I certainly wouldn't say no to something automatic. But I think if setting it yourself is easy enough, it would still get a bunch of the value! I think if the feature was implemented in a similar way to in-line commenting on LessWrong, where you just hover over the correct line and it offers you a bookmark-button that you just need to click, that would be low-friction enough for people like me to use it. (I think anything that's two-click might be too much friction)
2
Larks
25d
Would it be possible to track how far down the page someone had scrolled, and by default return them to that place the next time they visited?
2
JP Addison
24d
That's what I mean by something automatic. I'm not sure without trying it whether it'd be a terrible and disorienting experience that was wrong most of the time, or whether it'd be successfully useful.
Will Aldred1mo20

The "hover over a username to see their profile preview" feature is neat. There appears to be a minor bug, however, wherein 5-digit levels of karma don't always display correctly in these previews (because the third digit gets omitted). Here's an example of an incorrect display:

And here's an example of a correct display:

Ren Springlea1mo10

I would love an option to switch off the total karma count from one's profile. I've found myself noticing that it can occasionally create perverse incentives.

4
JP Addison
1mo
I assume this is about for your own psychology? My recommendation here is to use your ad-blocker to block out the specific element. I've just submitted a change that will make this uBlock Origin rule work: ###karma-info (Note the three #s)
1
Ren Springlea
1mo
Thanks, this is cool and I'll use it. I think more broadly, my comment is roughly equally motivated by three main things: my own psychology; concerns about an author's karma influencing readers' subconscious evaluations of that author's posts and opinions; and, specifically for people who work full-time in the EA community, a vague sense that it feels a bit strange to have a numeric score attached to what is in many ways a professional, and often philosophical, body of work. (The third point of course has an analogy with academic research, but I think that's also a problem with academia.) But since you gave me a solution, I'm personall happy. Thanks again.
Tom Barnes2mo10

It would be great to have some way to filter for multiple topics.

Example: Suppose I want to find posts related to the cost-effectiveness of AI safety. Instead of just filtering for "AI safety", or for just "Forecasting and estimation", I might want to find posts only at the intersection of those two. I attempted to do this by customizing my frontpage feed, but this doesn't really work (since it heavily biases to new/upvoted posts)

2
JP Addison
2mo
You can do this! Filter by topics on the left hand side of the search page.
1
Tom Barnes
2mo
My bad, thanks so much!
Will Aldred2mo20

There appears to be a bug where a question post cross-posted from LessWrong goes up on this Forum as a regular post, as happened here.

2
JP Addison
2mo
I believe we fixed this here.
Yonatan Cale2mo20

I'd expect clicking on my profile picture to take me to my profile (currently the click doesn't do anything) (but it does have a pretty animation)

4
JP Addison
2mo
I just added this to a recent related improvement. Should be fixed when that Pull Request gets merged.
BrownHairedEevee2mo40

The default generated slugs for posts with non-Latin script titles are absolutely useless:

私たちは毎日、毎秒、トリアージに直面している - https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WvikY6ixzcwKtKveN/unicode-52

Generally, the slug should match the post title in some human-readable way, so that it is possible to see what the post is about based on the URL alone, without a title or link preview. A sensible way to do this would be to romanize the title if it is not in Latin script, producing something like:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WvikY6ixzcwKtKveN/watashi-tachi-wa-ma... (read more)

4
JP Addison
2mo
Should be fixed on our next deploy: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/pull/7618
2
BrownHairedEevee
2mo
Yay, ありがとう！
2
BrownHairedEevee
2mo
Relatedly, the auto-generated audio narration feature breaks down for non-English posts. For example, in the Japanese post above, the narration skips everything except for the bits of English. The handling of this Spanish post is slightly better: all of the text, being in Latin script, is included in the narration, but the words are spoken as if they're English words.
BrownHairedEevee3mo20

We should be able to add tags to sequences and have them cascade to the posts in those sequences.

2
JP Addison
2mo
We definitely want this, and have considered featuring sequences on topic pages more prominently.
Vaidehi Agarwalla3mo50

It would be useful to be able to have a change log add-on that shows up as a banner on the top of a post (and ideally but this might be a bit spammy, notifies people who have read, or maybe upvoted or commented on the post) so that they know when a correction has been made. 

Many people may not go back to a post after reading, or notice the change-log (if the authors even include one) - and the changes can often be really important. 

Quick solution: Have a box where people can add their change log and make it a pinned comment (but only for the purp... (read more)

2
JP Addison
2mo
Thanks for the suggestion, I've belated added to our backlog.
jwpieters3mo63

Wasn't sure where else to mention this – the search feature on the forum is pretty bad. I tried finding a post from Claire Zabel by searching "Claire Zabel". I couldn't find it because her username is actually "ClaireZabel"

2
Vaidehi Agarwalla
3mo
+1 I've found this problem a lot. Also the fuzzy search on the search bar is sometimes too fuzzy (e.g. the opposite problem)
2
David Mears
2mo
Re fuzzy search... I couldn't find this post. Search shouldn't be converting 'EA' into a separate search for the word 'effective' absent 'altruism'. Also it feels like it isn't weighting the title heavily enough relative to post body, since the correct title isn't far from my search query.
2
David Mears
1mo
more weird search behaviour  
Omega3mo36

it would be nice to exclude text e.g. the appendix / pre-amble / introduction from the "time to read" estimate.

E.g. in our upcoming post the time to read the core pieces is 22 minutes, but the total read time is showing 39 minutes (almost double) because of our lenghty appendix and some introductory context.

2
JP Addison
3mo
Yeah, that makes sense. The issue turned out to be a pretty good candidate for someone to submit an open source contribution for.
5
David Mears
2mo
I have just submitted a PR for this. (and I have no association with Omega) edit: It was approved and merged 😊
ludwigbald4mo20

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

2
JP Addison
4mo
Thanks for the suggestion! I have also wanted this. My suggested bad workaround is to subscribe to posts by the author, often for the duration of the sequence the author is only posting posts to that sequence.
Will Aldred4mo20

There are some posts, for example this "EA Forum feature suggestion thread", the "List of EA funding opportunities", and "Propose and vote on potential EA Wiki articles / tags", which I think could be pages in their own right, findable via the home page's left menu. I make this suggestion because:

  1. These posts are harder to find, in my opinion, than they should be given that they're essentially living documents that'd benefit from having more contributors.[1]
  2. A comments section seems like not the best interface for handling suggestions/contributions.
    1. For insta
... (read more)
Will Aldred4mo20

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.

2
Lizka
4mo
Re Library page: I agree with and appreciate this suggestion. I'd be excited for that to be a list you can sort in different ways. I think it's on the list of things to prioritize, but I'll make sure.  Re top right search bar: I think they do, but they're at the bottom of the results, and in some cases that might get cut off. But you can also use the full search page for this, e.g.: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/search?contentType=Sequences&query=classic%20posts%20from%20the%20&page=1 
2
Will Aldred
4mo
Ah, I didn't realize one could search for sequences in this way, and I now feel silly for making my above assertion. Thanks for replying so quickly and for pointing this out.
Daniel_Friedrich4mo52

Suggestion: Integrated search in LessWrong, EA Forum, Alignment Forum and perhaps Progress Forum posts.

rime5mo-10

[I was inspired to suggest this by the downvotes on this comment, but it's a problem I've seen more generally.]

The agree/disagree voting dimension is amazing, but it seems to me like people haven't properly uncoupled it from karma yet. One way to help people understand the differences could be to introduce a confirmation box that pops up whenever you try to vote, that you can opt out of from your profile settings.

This box could contain something like the following guidelines:

  • Only vote on the karma dimension based on whether you personally benefited from re
... (read more)
[anonymous]5mo83
2
Ren Springlea
3mo
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).
rime5mo10

I was going to write a short suggestion about profile wikis, but it ended up long so I made it into a post. In a picture:

Lorenzo Buonanno5mo30

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

3
Sharang Phadke
4mo
Thanks for this suggestion, we've put this problem a bit higher up on our backlog, since we noticed it affected a few different users in the last few months! (no specific timeline on solving it at the moment)
[anonymous]5mo40

How long until we can bring Anthropic's Claude on as a moderator?

I'm finding him to be very good at demonstrating cognitive and emotional empathy for views that are in disagreement with his own, updating accordingly, and then gently proposing ways forward that incorporate both perspectives.

(Maybe a little too deferential at this point, although I expect there's less of that when he's moderating human discussion rather than talking to one human, plus of course it's a live debate in EA how much epistemic integrity to sacrifice for the sake of keeping the pea... (read more)

Matt Goodman5mo30

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.

7
JP Addison
5mo
No, sorry, we don't support that. It sounds like a very reasonable use-case though, and I'll add it to our tech backlog. In the mean time, I recommend a link to an off-site image hosting service.
3
Matt Goodman
5mo
Thanks, I appreciate it:)
David Mears6mo53

Several serious posts are drowned out on April 1st each year. I half intended to write a round up of these to help them avoid being drowned out, but didn’t get around to it before the work week; now I’m requesting that the EA Forum team consider doing this. In future years (assuming your timelines are that long) I would also be in favour of having a separate section for April fools (like the community section) even though this dampens the humour.

EA Italy6mo37

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

1
Sarah Cheng
6mo
You'll need a site admin to help with both of these. Could you contact us with the details (ex. how you want the chapters organized)? Thanks!
Rasool6mo10

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:

4
JP Addison
6mo
You can do both of these things. You can click to the left of a comment to get to the parent comment, and then collapse by clicking on the minus icon next to the username.
1
Rasool
6mo
Cool thanks, I did not know about that first one. I note that that is different to how it works on substack comments, where clicking to the left of a comment collapses the parent comment rather than scrolling to it like here
2
JP Addison
6mo
I did not know that, that's useful.
Rasool6mo10

On https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts, clicking on a shortform expands it, but there is no way to unexpand/contract it

This is not the case with topic page edit and discussion, where clicking on the topic title toggles between expanding it and unexpanding it

Ideally shortforms could be toggled unexpanded in a similar way

David Mears6mo61

Up/downvoting a post shouldn’t be possible within 30 seconds of opening a (not very short) post (prevent upvoting based on title only), or should be weighted less

2
David Mears
2mo
@JP Addison  are you open to me working on a PR that offers this to authors as a toggle-able option?
4
JP Addison
2mo
LessWrong is thinking about this. I don't want to make it user toggle-able. My guess is that removing the voting from the top of the post that's more the direction I'm going. LW wants to try it for admins to see how they find it before shipping it further.
Rasool6mo12

The link from linkposts like this one, don't work, I assume because the link needs to be prefixed with https://

Can this be added automatically if it is missing, or do linkposts need to go via https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/out?url=

Nick Whitaker6mo22

Maybe a bit obscure but exporting a sequence from LW or EAF as a PDF would be awesome. 

Nathan Young7mo21

Reformat all shortforms so they have agreevotes.

2
Ben Millwood
7mo
Mine does, now, as does at least one other post that didn't before, maybe they're just global now?
5
Sarah Cheng
7mo
Yup, we updated all posts and shortforms to include agree voting today.
Nathan Young7mo20

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.

1
Sarah Cheng
7mo
You can re-hide them from that section by opening "Customize Feed" and setting "Community" to be "Hidden":
2
Nathan Young
7mo
I don't see an option:     And your image isn't showing to me.
1
Sarah Cheng
7mo
Oh sorry, a recent change to images caused a bug, but it should be fixed now. (You can fix your image by editing and submitting your comment.) You can add "Community" as an option by clicking on the + button and searching for it.
2
Nathan Young
7mo
It is not listed here. And I tried to resubmit my image. Still looks massive.
3
Sarah Cheng
7mo
Interesting, thanks for flagging this bug! It should be fixed now - please let us know if you run into any related issues.
2
Nathan Young
7mo
Though it only shows up at the start. If you search "community" it still doesn't.
2
Nathan Young
7mo
Also resizing images never works for me.
Nathan Young7mo20

Reformat this comment section so that it has agreevotes. 

1
Sarah Cheng
7mo
Done! :)
Rasool7mo30

(Semi-serious), since we care about the long-term future, denote years with a 10,000 year digit, so 02023 instead of 2023, like they do at longnow.org

Rasool7mo20

You can subscribe to other users' new posts from their profile, but I would like to be able to subscribe to users' new comments which I don't see a way to do

Lorenzo Buonanno7mo90

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

4
JP Addison
7mo
As an aside: I believe this will work right up until you submit it, but am not sure.
2
Lorenzo Buonanno
7mo
A non-moderator account currently sees this for comparison I see this
Ben Millwood7mo110

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...

Ben Millwood7mo40

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.

3
Ben Millwood
7mo
Also, probably voting should be prevented on deleted comments.
BrownHairedEevee8mo260

Can we add agreement karma to comments on all posts?

1
Sharang Phadke
4mo
By the way, this is now done
2
Nathan Young
7mo
Or all new comments at least.
Sharang Phadke8mo20


@Matt Goodman  thanks for all your suggestions. I think they all make sense or have been suggested before, and we'll have to prioritize them against our other work!

Matt Goodman8mo10

I'd like to be able to hide the amount of karma and agreement points a comment or post has. I think seeing how many people have upvoted a statement affects how likely I am to agree with or upvote that statement. I think it makes me more likely to vote in accordance with social agreement, rather than whether or not I think a statement is true or well written.   I'd like to be able to turn this off from time to time. Strongly downvoted comments should probably still be hidden.

Matt Goodman8mo30

I think the UI for voting could be improved in the following ways:

  • The arrows for voting on Karma point sideways, not up and down. It's not immediately clear which one is upvote and which one is downvote.
  •  The explanation text about voting (the one that explains Karma, agree/disagree and strong votes) only appears when you hover your mouse over the arrows. This means you never see it on mobile, where there's no mouse.
  • the hit boxes could be bigger for arrows on mobile.
Matt Goodman8mo10

The formatting toolbar doesn't appear until after you highlight text. This means you can only format text after you've written it - you can't for example, select bold and have your text appear in bold as you write it. This is something I find unintuitive. It took me a a few minutes of looking for the toolbar and googling how to do it before I realised the toolbar only appears when you highlight text. I'd like the formatting toolbar to always be on the page when I'm writing. 

Matt Goodman8mo10

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.

5
Rasool
8mo
Ctrl+K is a pretty well-known shortcut, for example on Google Docs, and works here too
1
Matt Goodman
8mo
Thanks, I didn't know that one!
BrownHairedEevee8mo170

Can we put this page in the sidebar?

BrownHairedEevee8mo80

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)

3
Sharang Phadke
8mo
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!
1[comment deleted]8mo
Rasool8mo20

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:

2
Lizka
8mo
Thanks for flagging this! This does seem off; I've passed it on for triage & fixing.
lastmistborn9mo100

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.

2
NickLaing
9mo
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.
6
lastmistborn
9mo
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
4
NickLaing
9mo
 I know. Look how easily you got to 5 Karma on this comment ;)
Vaidehi Agarwalla9mo100

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 
2
Peter Wildeford
9mo
I’d like this
4
Lizka
9mo
Thanks for suggesting these, I'm passing them on. 
Matt Goodman9mo80

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.

1
Sharang Phadke
9mo
Thanks Matt, noted!
emre kaplan9mo30

It would be nice to be able to order search results by date and maybe some other features like karma.

Bella9mo280

(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.

1
Jorgen_Ljones
9mo
Came here to suggest this
1
NickLaing
9mo
Love this!
Yonatan Cale9mo9-2

If someone downvotes, suggest that they explain why

6
dan.pandori
8mo
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.
3
Matt Goodman
8mo
Props for taking the time to explain, even though you don't like it!
3
Yonatan Cale
8mo
Upvoted since you explained why you don't like my idea, and I like that! :)
6
Yonatan Cale
8mo
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).
3
dan.pandori
8mo
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.
Aaron Bergman9mo120

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
3
Sharang Phadke
9mo
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!
Bob Jacobs10mo30

So, proposing that we give everyone equal voting power gives those on the forum with more voting power an incentive to lessen mine (by downvoting this). So how about this: we make the agreement karma democratic. That way we can see what people actually agree or disagree on and since it doesn't affect karma we can make it democratic without affecting those with disproportionate voting power.

EDIT: Three people upvoted this suggestion, one person downvoted this suggestion, the result is negative karma. What we see is that the downvotes contain a lot more voti... (read more)

WilliamKiely10mo140

Add Agreement Karma to posts.

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

2
WilliamKiely
10mo
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.)
1
Pato
8mo
I agree that maybe people don't get it (like kinda me) but I think both things, posts and comments, should have it or neither.
Tristan Cook10mo93

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.

Lorenzo Buonanno10mo172

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"

1
Sharang Phadke
9mo
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.
RyanCarey10mo260

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.

JP Addison10mo310

This has now been implemented. You cannot strong upvote your own comments, nor vote along the agreement axis.

2
RyanCarey
10mo
Great, thanks!
8
Stefan_Schubert
10mo
Thank you!
2
WilliamKiely
10mo
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.
2
Habryka
10mo
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".
2
Elizabeth
10mo
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. 
2
RyanCarey
10mo
This problem won't arise if everyone strong-upvotes themselves by default.
2
Habryka
10mo
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.
2
RyanCarey
10mo
Most people have strong upvote strength 3-7 though. Anyway, if this is a big problem, then just cap self-upvote strength around 5?
2
Habryka
10mo
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.
2
RyanCarey
10mo
I was thinking just for comments.
4
Habryka
10mo
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.
3
WilliamKiely
10mo
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?
5
RyanCarey
10mo
To me, that sounds like a feature, not a bug, given how the influx of users has degraded average post quality recently.
2
RyanCarey
10mo
The third proposal seems fine to me, but the fourth is complex, and still rewards users who strong-upvote their own comments as much as the rules allow.
2
WilliamKiely
10mo
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.
2
Stefan_Schubert
10mo
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.
Siao Si10mo20

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.

3
Sharang Phadke
10mo
Thanks for the feedback. The tradeoff I see is that it could be valuable for folks to be able to express a strong vs weak opinion. Perhaps what we need is to give a better breakdown of how the votes went?
Bob Jacobs10mo60

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).

5
Lizka
10mo
I appreciate this, thank you!
Emrik10mo50

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
... (read more)
5
Sharang Phadke
10mo
Thanks Emrik, we do plan to reconsider how the frontpage should work in a few months!
3
Emrik
10mo
I also made a suggestion on Sasha's post related to nudging people's reading habits by separating out FTX posts by default. I don't endorse the design, but it could look something like this.[1] Alternatively, could introduce 'tag profiles' or something, where you can select a profile, and define your filters within each profile.[2] (P.S. Sorry for the ceaseless suggestions, haha! Brain goes all sparkly with an idea and doesn't shut up until I make a comment about it. ^^') 1. ^ 2. ^
3
Sharang Phadke
10mo
Oh I really like this, and I've had some similar ideas. Will make a note of it!
wachichornia10mo10

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.

1
Sharang Phadke
10mo
Interesting suggestion, I think this could be interesting. When you say "would probably be valuable", what do you see as the value? Gamification? Remembering the post better? I think there are a variety of caveats (below), but ultimately I'd be interested in you trying this out on a number of posts to see how useful it is, and maybe writing a post about it. Caveats: * Many posts won't have a clear right and wrong interpretation of issues, will a quiz give the wrong impression? * This AI tool doesn't take much additional input (as far as I can tell), and I'm curious whether it will pick out key points vs non-novel statements
1
wachichornia
10mo
The value needs to be researched! I have tried the tool on "hard" mode and the questions are quite nuanced. You would only be able to get the answers right if you really read the article in detail and took your time. The AI tool will not take additional input indeed.  I'll do as you suggested! Will try it a few times and post about it
Filip Sondej1y3-2

Embed iframes

Some use cases:

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

1
Sharang Phadke
1y
Thanks for this suggestion, I believe you can already embed a number of things in posts by default, but not arbitrarily anything, see here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y8gkABpa9R6ktkhYt/forum-user-manual#Extra_cool_things
1
Filip Sondej
1y
Oh great! I didn't know about some of them. Still, the main thing I had in mind was to embed some custom interactive stuff. Implementing it as iframe support, would be the most general, and you would solve all the possible "embed X" suggestions at once. So it seams to be the most efficient approach.
2
Ben Millwood
7mo
It might be too powerful. In particular, moderators can no longer fully control the content of the post. If you're sneaky, you can even engineer a post that appears differently to different people. I think allowing authors to embed totally arbitrary content is too much freedom.
Charles He1y30

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.

2
Charles He
1y
Ah, maybe the above might be an async indexing thing? (e.g. async/chron tasks updates the indexes every 24 hours and the above example is too recent to be indexed)  Amber Dawn has her posts listed:
Filip Sondej1y70

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

1
Sharang Phadke
1y
Thanks for this suggestion. Do you suspect that this is a big deal and have any intuition as to why? My intuition is that it's quite an interesting experiment, but seems unlikely to be a major influence on the Forum based on the fact that most posts with high karma are actually pretty decent.
1
Filip Sondej
1y
I don't suspect it to be that bad. More like some noise added to each post's score, and some posts not getting enough attention because of that. In the reddit experiment single upvotes caused posts to have 25% higher mean score later (this effect was present in all parts of the distribution). But the effect size was very dependent on the topic, so I'm curious how would that turn out for EA Forum.
2
Emrik
1y
I was curious about this when I skimmed the paper, but I couldn't find a breakdown of the impact of the random upvotes on, say, the top 5% highest upvoted posts. Do you know where to find that breakdown or what you mean with this?
1
Filip Sondej
1y
Ah, no, I just read the report of results on Wikipedia (that's how they worded it). Hm, it's strange if that's not in the paper.
3
Emrik
1y
Ah, yeah, I read this on Wikipedia: But since I don't know what effect sizes they're talking about at the top of the distribution, I don't think this sentence is very informative.
5
Emrik
1y
I love that as a mechanism for measuring the effect of info cascades. It's cheap, non-obtrusive, and certain. It's from this study. But I no longer like the solution for it I suggested in the Occlumency post. I think there are better ways using karma to mitigate info cascades and diversify what people read/discuss.
Filip Sondej1y10

Recommend posts using collaborative filtering ("people who like the same posts as you, also like:")

MVP could be done quite easily using some of these techniques.

I have some ideas how to do better. If you consider implementing this feature, hit me up to talk!

Filip Sondej1y83

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.

2
Ethan (EJ) Watkins
6mo
I like this. Building on your idea with the yellow colour code, I think it would be good to have functionality to mark typos, with the option of providing a revision suggestion that the author can press accept or reject on. Similar to how edit suggestions work in Google Docs.
Filip Sondej1y10

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.

1
Sharang Phadke
1y
Thanks for this suggestion, we actually have something like this on our list (though it's not super high). Some of the team suspects that more people are likely to use other tools to track all their links and research across sources.
1
Filip Sondej
1y
Yeah, good point. It may be mostly redundant.
Filip Sondej1y10

An optional reading time indicator, like here: working example (and that tool's description).

The bar at the right of each post is the reading time indicator. Full bar means 30 min, half bar means 15 min, and so on.

You can find the code that implements that bar here: html, css

The post length is often the deciding factor in whether I want to read something, so it's nice to have it at a glance. Also I admit I kinda want to incentivize people to write more concise posts :)

Filip Sondej1y10

Add an option for drafts: "Anyone with a link can read", but make it really anyone, not only forum users, as it is now.

(Recently I wanted to get feedback from some people who are not on the forum, and I had to copy draft to google doc, and later copy it back, and fix all the footnotes :/ )

Next step (but probably harder), would be to let anyone comment. If they aren't logged into forum, these comments are anonymous.

Also collaborative editing in markdown mode would be useful.

Vaidehi Agarwalla1y80

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"

1
Sharang Phadke
1y
Thanks for this suggestion, I do think an experiment with slightly more context on the front page would be really interesting, whether with subtitles or snippets of text. Will keep make a note of this!
Jordan Arel1y20

Hi! I didn’t realize this thread existed until just now. Just wanted to make sure you were aware of my feature suggestion, “Fine-Grained Karma Voting”

Cassidy1y60

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

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)

3
Ben_West
1y
Thanks! I think these are indexed by search, they just don't show up as top results (e.g. the "what is short form" query gives me the norms post on the third page of results). I agree though that this is a sign that our search engine could use optimization, so thanks for pointing it out
abrahamrowe1y20

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!

1
Sharang Phadke
1y
We do have a few different default RSS feeds, which you can find in the left sidebar. Does that meet your needs?
2
abrahamrowe
1y
Unfortunately not! We use Greater Wrong because we can do an RSS feed for a specific tag for the forum. E.g., we have a communications Slack channel where any post made and tagged "Rethink Priorities" is automatically posted using an RSS feed. This isn't really that big a deal for us - I just thought I'd mention it here :)
Yonatan Cale1y120

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

Might reduce downvotes on posts

6
jimrandomh
1y
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.
JJ Balisan1y10

Allowing for selective shared list for post that may be drafts and or info hazards in a similar way in which I can do Facebook posts to close friends etc.

Vaidehi Agarwalla1y20

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

4
Vaidehi Agarwalla
9mo
Followup: fix the bug where pictures become really big / allow for emoji's to be copied from e.g. twitter. What it should look like (from the editor view) What it actually looks like:
1
Sharang Phadke
1y
Thanks for the suggestion, is there a particular post that you wish you had this view on? And I'm guessing you are suggesting this as an option for the post writer?
2
Vaidehi Agarwalla
1y
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W2w7xA9AtDnjcK6DP/an-ea-s-guide-to-berkeley-and-the-bay-area This one, in the people section! 
1
Sharang Phadke
1y
Thanks for the example!
Nathan Young1y20

I have had a request for uploading a PDF. 

Linch1y70

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!

1
Sharang Phadke
1y
Thanks, we've recorded this on our backlog, it does seem like something that should work properly.
Daniel Vanzin1y100

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!

2
Sharang Phadke
1y
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.
1
Daniel Vanzin
1y
Alright, here is a very crude preview https://openuserjs.org/scripts/icetbr/Clearer_EffectiveAltruism.org_Forum
3
Habryka
1y
It does sadly look very broken for me:  It does look better on the all-posts page:  Some thoughts * I like the idea of making the text smaller and increasing the density of the post list. Seems good to experiment with * I think getting rid of the grey background really breaks a lot of the recent discussion section as well as the overall navigability of the UI (and also we've gotten tons of user feedback that people found the perfect white as the whole background to feel quite straining on their eyes). * I do overall think the font is just too small for me to read. I expect most users would zoom in a decent amount in order to actually make it comfortable to skim.  * I think having line-breaks in the post-titles is quite bad for skimming, and also gives undue attention to posts that have longer titles, which seems quite bad. * While I do find it easier to skim to move the post-icons to the left of the items, I think it gets the information hierarchy wrong. I think the type of post (link post, curated, personal blog) is at best a secondary piece of information, and the design you proposed gives it too much prominence. 
4
Daniel Vanzin
1y
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.
4
Habryka
1y
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). 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 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.
2
Charles He
1y
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.
1
Daniel Vanzin
1y
"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
3
Charles He
1y
  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.    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
3
Charles He
1y
??? Yeah, Reddit's design literally uses a grey background. It's darker than the EA forum.
1
Daniel Vanzin
1y
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.
Charles He1y20

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}
... (read more)
2
JP Addison
1y
I happen to know that this is because they block user agents that declare themselves to be bots. However, as this is a purely LW problem, I recommend taking future such requests to the LW team.
-6
Charles He
1y
Thomas Kwa1y92

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.

2
JP Addison
1y
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.
Tyner1y10

The reading time estimates on lesswrong crossposts seem to be wrong.  For example, this says 1 but should be 5-10 (I would guess):

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fH5adhXF377Bt6fWj/public-facing-censorship-is-safety-theater-causing

2
JP Addison
1y
Seems correct, and I know exactly why. Thanks for the report!
Pablo1y40

I would appreciate being able to answer a private message by replying to the associated email notification, like I can do with e.g. Github and Discourse.

2
Lizka
1y
Thanks for sharing this! I've passed this on to the rest of the team. I agree that this would be useful. 
Vasco Grilo1y70

Would it be interesting for EA Forum questions to have a feature to allow surveys and predictions? In theory, one could post a question with a link to Google Forms, but maybe some kind of integration would encourage more surveys and forecasts. Given the large number people who read the EA Forum, there is margin to collect lots of data.

BrownHairedEevee1y20

We should have at least one dedicated "megathread" for EAG-related questions each year, so it's easier to ask such questions in public without creating dedicated posts for each of them.

4
Ben_West
1y
Thanks for the suggestion! I passed this on to our events team
Emrik1y10

In addition to enabling drop-down boxes for commonly used jargon, it would be great if drop-down boxes were an editable feature. I frequently try to balance my explanations so that they're able to cover the inferential gaps without being too longwinded. One way of dealing with this is to make separate articles for people with different backgrounds like what Arbital does. But I think I prefer just having drop-down boxes for deeper or alternative explanations that not everyone needs.

2
Ben_West
1y
Thanks! I've added this to the issue tracking your original suggestion.
Nathan Young1y20

The lesswrong way of dealing with lost and recovered text is much more pleasant on firefox. On the EA forum I have to tick through two boxes every time I edit anything.

On lesswrong there is a little box that I can click if I want to 

9
JP Addison
1y
With the deployment of the collaboritve editing rework, this will now work the same way here as it does on LessWrong.
Nathan Young1y20

I'd like to be able to permanently set the front page to sort by "top (inflation adjusted) unread"

Jack Malde1y40

People should be notified if one of their posts is referenced in another post.

I recently realised that one of my less upvoted posts was mentioned in another post to have inspired a particular model. I then had a look at my other posts and saw more instances of having been referenced. It's nice to realise that people are using your work, but at the moment there's no easy way to know this!

Yonatan Cale1y20

Embed high impact jobs related to [the tags of] the post that the person is currently reading.

"You're reading an article about biosecurity, here are some open biosecurity jobs you might be interested in"

We can build a filter based on this, I don't consider it production-ready in that level yet, but if CEA is interested, it could be.

(I somehow don't predict you'll say "yes" to this, but I'm not sure what's the reason you'll say "no", so asking)

2
JP Addison
1y
Curious for your idea of a mockup. Where would the embed go?
2
Yonatan Cale
1y
I think you are significantly better than me at this, I can take it to my Product/UX friend if you'd like me to take it seriously. Or - is your pushback that there's no good place?   I can also play around with embedding it in different places and see how it looks. My initial try would be "under the new-comment box"
4
JP Addison
1y
I expected you to have a vision for where it would go, which maybe you did, or maybe you just came up with that in response to my question. My take: I agree it works well below the post (I'd go above the comment box, I think), and not so well elsewhere. I kinda have a thing I'd rather go there for new users, which would be a banner-link to the topic page, but after a user logs in, and say reads 5 posts in that topic, I'd like that banner to go away. At that point I would replace it by this. I would only pushback as a matter of prioritization at that point. Please forgive my run-on sentence. 😅
2
Yonatan Cale
1y
OMG that's way less push back than I expected! Or, may I ask, when you say "prioritization", do you mean ~3 months or ~3 years?   Also, when you do implement this, please take into account this (potentially significant problems with the 80k job board vetting, and the suggestion to let people comment on jobs).   New users: Sounds good, like you're taking something important into account that I forgot, without losing any significant amount of value.   Run-on sentences are welcome! 🐈
2
JP Addison
1y
I don't know, sorry. I find those things really hard to predict. It depends on how a different sub-team (Clifford's) evolve's their strategy.
Yonatan Cale1y20

Allow users to embed Airtables in forum posts, such as this

4
JP Addison
1y
Thanks for the suggestion! I wish Airtable had a more neutral UI style, or we could customize it, but it's probably still worth.
2
Yonatan Cale
1y
Airtable colors can be customized in their paid version. If you decide to enable embedding them (including "only if they're paid and look a certain way"), I'd be happy to know
Yonatan Cale1y20

When clicking on a tag, sort the post by "new" instead of by "relevant" by default. (What does "relevant" even mean? the newer posts are almost certainly more relevant)

4
JP Addison
1y
It sounds like you're looking at topics where you already know the material. When I think about what topic pages are best at, I think "presenting new material to an unfamiliar audience" is core to their value proposition. Relevance sorting is being done to allow the content that's most "core" to a topic to rise to the top. Relevance can be voted on by anyone. To see the difference between relevance and just "top rated" compare these two.
2
Yonatan Cale
1y
I understand, thanks!
Emrik1y150

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.

 

Example
  1. ^

    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.

8
JP Addison
1y
This is really a fantastic suggestion, and complete with a screenshot with the UI that I like. Thanks!
4
Emrik
1y
I forgot to mention, but there already seems to be an implementation of the hover-over thing for Arbital (try hovering).
Imma1y50

Ideas coming out of a discussion yesterday evening

Problem: the eventual karma of a post depends a lot on the number of upvotes it gets in the first couple of hours/days after posting it.

Problem: The quality and relevance of new posts varies a lot nowadays. Readers need to (mentally) filter very quickly what to read. We tend to filter on easily available info, such as the karma that the post already has and the author's name (If your name is "Holden Karnofsky" and I've read many good posts from you in the past, I am much more likely to read the post than if... (read more)

1
Ollie Etherington
1y
Thanks for the suggestion - I've made a note of it!
3
Emrik
1y
Oh. This exactly equivalent to what I suggested in Occlumency.  People seem to be converging on this as a suggestion, so I definitely think it would be good to test run it for a while. I'm not optimistic about it being net positive, however, but I think testing it could be usefwl. Honestly, I'm pessimistic about the value of the frontpage, and I prefer searching for things to read by browsing tags.
Emrik1y30

Some suggestions for making tags more usefwl. I say some reasons I think tags are important in the post, but these suggestions are easy to see usefwlness of anyaway.

Right now, you can't tag a post while you're writing it. You have to "save as draft" and then add the tags to the draft, or add the tags after you publish it. This is needlessly annoying. I suggest making it like this:

The miniscule effort encouraged by making it mandatory is probably outweighed by the benefits many times over on average. Consider that the effort is a one-time cost, while the be

... (read more)
2
Ollie Etherington
1y
Great suggestion! I've added it to our list of features to consider.
Chi1y10

Automatically create a bibliography with all the links in a post.

2
Ollie Etherington
1y
Thanks for the suggestion - I've made a note of it!
2
brb243
1y
Zotero creates a bibliography if you click on all the links and then click on the browser extension icon on each page. It does not always work perfectly - but e. g. data from academic articles get usually copied well.
brb2431y10

Tagging users to notify them (@[username]). People should be able to ‘authorize’ friendly tags but ‘professional’ tags should be possible by default. Users should be able to turn on-off notifications for ‘friendly’ and ‘professional’ tags. In this way, people could make and maintain connections via the Forum.

Also, orgs (or departments) could have their own tags. For example, if someone does not make a writing contest deadline, they should still be able to notify the org about an idea. Organizations could be also able to filter their tag and another set of ... (read more)

2
JP Addison
1y
Thanks for the idea! LessWrong recently built something similar with the ability to use #Title to mention posts or topics. How do you think a user would distinguish their intent to do a friendly vs professional tag? What would the boundary be between them? 
0
brb243
1y
OK! I cannot find #Title on LessWrong but based on your description it seems analogous to linking a post or using a tag? If a user is a fan of someone who they do not have an actual connection with (usually did not meet in person for 1-on-1 and have not shared common interests), they would use the professional tag (for example, one could tag Joel McGuire if they write something that they think that he would find useful, based on his posts). The friendly tag (that has to be authorized by the tagged person) should be used when people are confident that they know their friend's interests so well that they would recommend something that the friend would enjoy (while they may also find it useful). So, the intent difference is inform based on the user's professional presentation vs. notify of enjoyable content based on the users' friendly connection.
Yonatan Cale1y40

Encourage short posts:

  1. Make the word count visible without mouse-over
  2. Allow an optional sorting algorithm that takes into account word count
  3. In "new post", add a template text "TL;DR:" (which is deletable, but a small nudge to write a summary)
    1. (or perhaps explain a bit more, like "A TL;DR should contain bottom lines and not reasoning, and it should help the reader decide if this post is relevant for them or not)
3
Ollie Etherington
1y
Thanks for the suggestions! I've made a note of all of them!
Vaidehi Agarwalla1y50

Allow registered users to post anonymous comments and generate a unique anonymous Id to track them so we can e.g. see the thread of anon1's comments.

I think ideally this should not be visible to mods / backend so it's truly anonymous.

1
Ollie Etherington
1y
Thanks for your suggestion! We're already considering adding the ability to create anonymous posts, but the idea of a unique id to track them is interesting - I'll make a note of it.
brb2431y40

'Commenting sprees' - blocks of time where discussion with more immediate replies would be encouraged.

Stefan_Schubert1y50

I would prefer a more failproof anti-spam system; e.g. preventing new accounts from writing Wiki entries, or enabling people to remove such spam. Right now there is a lot of spam on the page, which reduces readability.