The Online team overall spends ~$2M per year. 75% of that is on “people costs” for our 8 full-time employees, all-in.^[1] Is that all on the Forum? Kinda. Our main focus right now, and for the past 6 months, has been the core Forum product, due to, basically, the community spike here. However, during normal times, including starting ~now, we spend 30-60% of our effort on expansionary projects, such as this major project from last year. I would model us like a tech startup, where most of our money is going to “R&D” that should pay off in future impact.

Which then nicely answers part of Jason’s question. If we had less money, then, given that our costs are so staff-driven, we would need to have fewer staff, and then we would be investing less in future impact. As for what we would do if we had double the funding, we are currently more bottlenecked by trying to remain a two-pizza team. It’s possible that we would make a hire on the margin, but we wouldn’t accept double the funding.

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   Including taxes, travel, team retreats, professional development budgets, etc.

What makes you think we take inspiration from LessWrong? 😛

The biggest influence is Reddit. Did you know that we once were a fork of reddit? The basic primitives of posts that get comments and karma are taken from reddit via that history. We still look over their work for inspiration sometimes.

I have also looked at Medium, Substack, Quora and Facebook (for Events).

For all the other categories besides trolls, the answer is, “quite small.” We are blessed by having a relatively light troll burden, but there are some situations where trolls can get past a tired moderator or facilitator, and cause us to spend too much time on them. If our systems were better developed, this would be less of an issue, but thankfully the costs have been low enough that we have not needed to invest in “shoot first, ask questions later” policies.

Hi Peter,

It’s hard to ask an agile team without an executive director about the future. I can tease that we’ve been exploring how different users find information on the Forum. Watch this space.^[1]

I also hear that we’re about to hire a great Content Specialist who’s going to have a transformative effect on the Forum’s content and culture. Maybe you know them and can tell me who they are?

Longer term, I think it depends on who the ED is and what their vision is. The Forum could be instrumental in their vision. A sketch as to how: The Forum is, according to me, the largest lever we have over EA culture. Or, the Forum is the place where the most EAs gather which EAs are able to write software for, so any future where you’d want an EA-facing software project with a network effect probably would want to start on top of the Forum.

Or perhaps the Online Team will focus on project(s) that are not based on the Forum, in which case, the Forum will continue to be its great self.

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   And opt into experimental features to see something sooner.

Just a quick clarification: I don't think this was a "change to lower community engagement." Adding the community section was a change, and it did (probably^[1]) lower engagement with community posts, but that wasn't the actual point (which is a distinction I think is worth making, although maybe some would say it's the same). In my view, the point was to avoid suffocating other discussions and to make the Forum feel less on-edge/anxiety-inducing (which we were hearing was at least some people's experience). In case it helps, this outlines our (or at least my) thinking about it. 

And before I get into my personal takes, here's a graph of engagement hours on Community posts vs. other content:

and here's a graph of the percent of overall engagement that's spent on Community posts (the blue line is a running 30-day average):

And another graph that might be interesting is this one — percent of karma (orange) given that comes from downvotes (the black line is the total number of votes in a period): 

On to how I feel about the change:

I'm pretty happy with it, with some caveats. 

I was quite worried about it initially,^[2] but eventually got convinced/decided that it was a good thing to try. I'm much more positive about it now, although I still think that we might be able to find a better and more elegant solution at some point. 

Some reasons I feel positive about it: 

(1) We get a lot of positive feedback on the Community Section, from a broad range of people. 

For the initial test, we surveyed people on the Forum (more here), and got the following results:

(45 responses. On a scale of 1-7 where "1" was negative and "7" was positive, 38% of responses put 6, 22% put 7, 13% put 5, 11% put 4, 7% put 3 and 2 (each), and 2% put 1.)

We'd also done some user interviews and gotten quick takes from people (again, a bit more here). 

Since then, we've continued hearing from people who really appreciate it. At EAG and in other ~EA spaces, I've been, unprompted, told things like "I'm going on the Forum a lot more now because I see interesting and useful content" and "The Forum seems much better now." 

A number of people have also asked for ways to hide the section for themselves entirely. 

(2) I feel that the Forum has gotten healthier.

I could try to point you to discussions that, before the change, I'd have expected would blow up in some unpleasant ways, I could pull out the number for how often moderators have to ban or warn someone per engagement hour in different periods, and I can point you to the "percent of karma that comes from downvotes" that I shared above, but I think this is mostly a subjective judgement, and factors in things that others might not agree with me on, like "how much does karma track what I think is more valuable?" 

I also find it easier to read what I want to read on the Forum right now. I hadn't expected a huge change in my own experience — I read a lot of Community posts! — but I actually quite like having the section. 

(3) I was worried about various downsides, and they haven't seemed to have gotten very bad — although that's my main uncertainty. 

• Growth in total engagement hours has stalled. I don't know if that will continue, and I don't fully know why that is. Maybe people are tired, disenchanted with EA (or more precisely, maybe new folks aren't finding EA as much), using Twitter/LW more, or too busy working on slowing down AI or the like. (I’ve seen data about other ~EA engagement metrics that suggest there’s at least some lull.) Or maybe we've discouraged authors of important and engaging Community content from posting on the Forum, and this has knock-on effects on non-Community engagement.  
  • But we didn't see a mass exodus, which I was somewhat worried about, and it's not on a clear down trajectory. And evaluating all of this is pretty hard given the quick growth in 2022 due to FTX and WWOTF, and the crazy engagement levels in November.
• I was really worried about the community/individual people missing out on important discussions. This is hard to notice — I shouldn't expect to know what discussions I'm missing out on. But I was tracking some topics that I'd discussed with folks off the Forum that hadn't made it on to the Forum, and I think most of them showed up during Strategy Fortnight, so I'm excited about more pushes/events like that (and other things listed here and elsewhere). 
  • Here's another bad and subjective datapoint: the average karma of some Community posts compared to some non-Community posts that are of a similar minimum quality/value (according to me) is quite similar (with Community posts winning a bit).^[3]
• There are other downsides, like:
  • Authors are sometimes sad that their posts are in the Community section
  • We've introduced some messiness/complexity to how the Forum is structured
  • Maybe we've implicitly made communicated something about what is and isn't "valuable" that I don't endorse

My personal approach here is to keep an eye on this, see if people are engaging to the extent that they endorse, and continue looking for better solutions. 

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   I think this is almost certainly true — engagement with community posts went down —but there was also less big news to discuss, and that might have been the actual cause of the decrease. 

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   Initially I was particularly worried that we would miss out on important conversations, and worried about our reasoning (I was worried that we were getting feedback from a heavily biased sample of people).  I think I was also worried that there was something "special" about the Forum as it was at the time — I've now articulated this in terms of "we're at relatively ~stable eliquibrium points on some important parameters and structural/external changes can mess with that stability" — that we would mess with by doing something big like this. 

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   Here's a bad baseline sanity check that I did at some point: (1) Take the posts shared in the Digest — which gives me a baseline of ~quality/value-to-readers (according to my own judgement). Note that I don't filter strongly for karma in the Digest; if something gets a lot of karma and I'm not too sure about it, I'd maybe err on the side of including, but I don't really use karma as a big factor. (I might also be more likely to miss low-karma good posts, and there are other reasons to share or not share something in the Digest, but let's put that aside for now.) (2) I compared how much karma different types of posts were getting. The posts that I was putting as ~top 3 in the list order for the Digets had noticeably more karma, on average. Setting those aside, though, Community posts in the Digest got ~100 karma on average, and non-Community posts got ~80 karma on average. (Note that there's a lot of variation, though.)

Hi Joseph, we removed that section because we could see that it wasn't getting many clicks, and we didn't think the algorithm for selecting the posts was that good^[1]. You can still find a page with the remnants of it here though if you want. The list at the bottom there uses the same algorithm as the old Frontpage section, including filtering out things you have already read.

We have started experimenting with better algorithmic recommendations recently, currently these are just at the bottom of posts but we're thinking of adding them back into the Frontpage. We're also thinking about adding a "best of" page (possibly algorithmic, possibly not) à la slatestarcodex, so hopefully your wishes will be answered soon. The filter on the All posts page is a good idea too, we'll consider adding that, it might be tricky to do though for annoying technical reasons.

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   Because it would always show the same few high karma posts until the user clicked on them, so if there were none that you wanted to click on then the list would become useless

Hey! I noticed this is your first comment and wanted to try to explain why you got some negative karma there: I think this might not be the best place for you to ask those questions, since they're the online team rather than introductory-type community builders. 

Here are a couple of links that might help you with your question: the "Learn" section on effectivealtruism.org and the EA virtual intro program.