Sorry, I'm confused about what the benefit would be. At a large enough scale it'd be almost guaranteed to leak, so what would be the advantage of this ?

I think this is a straightforwardly good idea; I would pay a $5k bounty to someone who makes "EA comms" as good as e.g. internal Google comms, which is IMO not an extremely high bar.

I think an important point (that Ozzie does identify) is that it's not a simple as just setting up a couple systems, but rather doing all of the work that goes in shepherding a community and making it feel alive. Especially in the early days, there's a difference between a Slack that feels "alive" and "dead" and a single good moderator/poster who commits to posting daily can make the difference. I don't know that this needs to be a fulltime person; my happy price for doing this myself would be like $20k/year?

Regarding leaks: I don't think the value of better internal comms is in "guaranteed privacy of info". It's more in "reducing friction to communicate across orgs" and in "increasing the chance that your message is actually read by the people". And there's a big difference between "an ill-intentioned insider has the ability to screenshot and repost your message to Twitter" to "by default, every muckraker can scroll through your entire posting history".

Public venues like EA Forum and Facebook are a firehose that are very difficult for busy people to stay on top of; private venues like chat groups are too chaotically organized and give me kind of an ugh-field feeling.

Some random ideas:

• Create the "One EA Slack/Discord to rule them all".  Or extend out of an existing eg Constellation chat.
• Ask EAG attendees to use that instead of Swapcard messaging, so that all EAG attendees are thrown into one long-lived messaging system
• Integrate chat into EA Forum (DMs feel too much like email at the moment)
• Integrate chat into Manifold (though Manifold is much less of a Schelling point for EA than EAF)
• Start lists of Google Groups (though this competes a bit against the EAF's subforums)

A modest step might be to allow a forum post author to restrict visibility of their post to those who enter a forum username/password (i.e., the post could not be indexed by search engines). You could go a step further and limit access to usernames that had been vetted in some fashion, but that would involve some time commitment and uncertain benefit. Perhaps during situations like FTX, you could allow posts to be limited to usernames created before the crisis happened . . . but that might give people a false sense of security as the odds of any mass communication leaking are non-trivial.

One caveat: any communication can become a "serious legal statement" if it's not legally protected from disclosure in discovery. And although the topic of record retention is far more complex than this sentence (or even Molly's backgrounder), as soon as a sufficient copy of the information exists, there may be an obligation to preserve it if relevant litigation is forseen. Any technology that allows recipients to view the information at their convenience will probably involve creating a sufficient copy. So this would not have helped with the FTX situation. I'm guessing that the people involved in that situation have been advised to rely on their telephones considerably.

If you try to send something privately to thousands of people there's a pretty good chance it will get leaked, especially if it is as newsworthy as the stuff around FTX was.

Is the legal status of unintentionally public things better than explicitly public things, such that people would have been able to speak more freely in the kind of large but not public communications system you are envisioning? (Pretty sure no, but not a lawyer)

In general, I think the status quo of reaching EAs by posting publicly on the Forum is a good one:

• When you make a system that attempts to classify which people are EA enough to receive your communication it's likely you will miss a lot of people who arguably should be included. This risks both that they'll be people you needed to communicate with and and they'll feel left out.

• Your 'private' group will likely not actually be very private, since the sort of criteria you're floating include a very large number of people.

• While transparency isn't as important to EAs as it was 10 years ago, there are still a lot of benefits to it and I think our culture of talking publicly is really valuable.

(Copying a comment I made on the original post.)

I think the main issue with this is that this creates some kind of official 'membership' of EA which comes with tonnes of issues. (How do you decide who gets in? Who decides and how that/if people get thrown out? (Would SBF still in this?) Is there a transparent process for this? What kind of obligations do people part of it have (in terms of keeping conversations private for example)? Can you leave voluntarily and are there any repercussions if you do?, ...)