What this is:
The Forum Digest is a weekly email that goes out to subscribers to share some of our favorite EA Forum posts from the past week. We usually include some question or request posts, and we’re starting to share a “classic Forum post” per week, too. You can find some recent issues here.
The Digest is generally put together by Lizka (me), with occasional help. Please give us feedback!
Quick FAQ on the Digest:
Are the posts you share just high karma posts?
Nope. The posts are probably higher karma than the average post on the Forum, but to the extent that that’s true, it’s probably because we agree with the Forum users who are upvoting the high-karma posts that those posts are good.
You can also set up an RSS feed to see all the posts above a karma threshold.
My post didn’t make it into the Digest. Does that mean it’s bad?
No. First of all, we simply don’t have space in the Digest for all the good posts. There are around 20 posts per day by now. Also, there are a variety of factors that make us more likely to put something in the Digest. For instance, we might be more likely to put in a question that doesn’t have enough answers than one that’s gotten tons of attention.
Are you planning on changing the Digest?
We’ll probably be changing it, but we don’t know right now what the specific changes will be. It highly depends on the feedback we get.
I’d like to give feedback. How can I do that?
You can comment on this post or fill out this feedback form. We really appreciate feedback!
Other resources & curated content
- The “Library” page on the Forum displays some sequences and core readings
- Effectivealtruism.org
- The EA Newsletter comes out once a month
- The All Posts page lists the top karma posts without our curation, and you can sort the posts in other ways, too.
fwiw, I think it makes more sense to ask for feedback as comments on this post.
Thanks for all you do :)
Thanks for the feedback! :)
I agree - let us all see the feedback, when the writer is willing for it to be seen by all :)
I'd love to get feedback in the comments of this post. Please feel free to share!
I've noticed that the digest seems to bias toward ranking the most recent posts within the week higher up. If this is indeed a feature of the digest, as opposed to a misobservation on my part, and if it's an intentional feature, then to me this seems less good than simply picking and ranking the best posts from the week, with no bias in the rankings based on publication time within the week.
Restating the above more concretely: The digest is normally sent out on a Wednesday. Posts published right before the digest is sent out (e.g., posts published on the Tuesday) appear to be systematically ranked higher than if they had been published earlier (e.g., the previous Thursday).
If the aim of the digest is to highlight the best content from the whole week, then this bias toward the most recent posts within the week—if it indeed exists—seems out of place. This bias may also incentivize Forum users to publish on certain days of the week (e.g., Tuesday). Such an incentive strikes me as odd.
Totally specific to me and my mind, but I've found that I often end up not interacting with the digest because there is too much information there that I'd like to look into to add to my currently full plate. Sometimes I'll just open all the tabs and bookmark, but recently I've just been letting them sit. In many ways this is a success case that just doesn't fit with my ~very~ full set of tabs, but maybe it could make sense to make it smaller?
Thank you! I really appreciate this feedback.
I like the Forum Digests. And I want to be able to view and manage them in my browser (via tabs, etc), and point other people to them via a URL, and be able to refer to and search an archive which has a permanent copy of them, and to be able to see past issues, etc.
Where can we view them online?
Thanks!
Hi, not sure how useful this is to you, but I use the forum digest as a way to gauge what is interesting, relevant, or important to EA's. I browse the list and think over the content, forming an idea in my mind of topics or discussions that EA's like to engage with or would engage with. I'll then browse a selection of what's listed, a few of them or whatever I have time for, to answer further questions I form or just to explore the content. I'm still new to the EA ways of thinking and EA culture, so I bother to do all this.