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Receiving the news that the hub was shutting down is the reason I finally came here and looked around properly.

Glad I did.

The EA Hub is retiring

by Vaidehi Agarwalla 🔸, Sebastian Becker

Sep 1 20241 min read 22

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Building effective altruismCommunityAnnouncements and updatesCommunity infrastructureEffective Altruism HubOrganization updates

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The EA Hub is retiring

The EA Hub will retire on the 6th of October 2024.

22 comments

The EA Hub will retire on the 6th of October 2024.

In 2022 we announced that we would stop further feature development and maintain the EA Hub until it is ready to be replaced by a new platform. In July this year, the EA Forum launched its People Directory, which offers a searchable directory of people involved in the EA movement, similar to what the Hub provided in the past.

We believe the Forum has now become better positioned to fulfil the EA Hub’s mission of connecting people in the EA community online. The Forum team is much better resourced and users have many reasons to visit the Forum (e.g. for posts and events), which is reflected in it having more traffic and users. The Hub’s core team has also moved on to other projects.

EA Hub users will be informed of this decision via email. All data will be deleted after the website has been shut down.

We recommend that you use the EA Forum’s People Directory to continue to connect with other people in the effective altruism community. The feature is still in beta mode and the Forum team would very much appreciate feedback about it here.

We would like to thank the many people who volunteered their time in working on the EA Hub.

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Henry Stanley 🔸7mo16

Thanks for all the hard work that went into building/rebuilding/maintaining EA Hub!

It's always sad to see old projects get shuttered, especially ones that were a labour of love, so kudos on recognising that it's the right time to do this.

Chris Leong7mo12

You may want to see if anyone wants the URL.

Personally, I’d love to see a resource like aisafety.com which provides a broad overview of resources.

effectivealtruism.com only links to a narrow range of resources because it’s run by the Center of Effective Altruism, so I expect a need for them to “make it official”.

I’d be happy to assist with trying to find a new home for it, if that would help.

Sebastian Becker7mo5

Thanks for thinking about how this resource could be used!

Do you mean that another project could use the domain "eahub.org"? I am sceptical that this is a good idea. There was already confusion with another project with the same name in the past, so adding a third project in the mix will be confusing, and might be bad for that third project building a clear brand.

Chris Leong7mo4

Only so many good short names though.

david_reinstein7mo11

Would it be possible to pass some of the data to the EA Forum thing, perhaps with a simple permission tick box? I? This could help kickstart things a lot building network externalities.

This also seems like a good precedent To me. People will be more likely to participate in these data gathering survey things in the future if they think that if the initiative is retired there is the opportunity to re-purpose it for its successor.

Sebastian Becker7mo10

We did consider this but decided against it for several reasons
- We felt the only right way to do this would have been for it to be opt-in, i.e., that users would have to actively agree to this. We assumed that very few users would have done this and that the effort would have not been worth it.
- We raised this option with the Forum team in 2023 when discussing a possible handover and they felt similarly
- The vast majority of the profiles will be quite outdated by now (the % of users returning to the Hub to update their profile was quite low), so the quality of the data would also not have been great.

In the email we're sending to users we encourage them though to use the Forum's Profile Directory, so we hope that those users who are on the Hub, but not the Forum, will migrate their (I believe this will be a rather small subset of those Hub users who are still actively involved in EA).

david_reinstein7mo9

I understand the logic, but I think there could be some workarounds that make this doable. If you can put a “last updated “ on profile people can judge for themselves whether the information is rusty.* I would worry a bit that not doing this makes people think “why should I fill in my information on this next thing when I’m just gonna have to do so again when they switch it up next time?

*by the way voice recognition replaced “trustworthy“ with “rusty“ but actually it works as well. :-)

Sebastian Becker7mo6

You're of course right, there would be some advantages to doing it. It comes down to whether it's worth the time, and we concluded it is probably not.

david_reinstein7mo2

That’s fair. But maybe hold onto the previous database if possible, in case the signup for this one is low and it needs a kickstart?

Sebastian Becker7mo7

As communicated here and to users via email, all data will be deleted after the website goes down, so this is not an option.

However, regarding your use case (finding lawyers/accountants), I have tried using
- free text search on the profiles directory: seems not to work so well and something that could be improved.
- the role filter feature. That seems like it might be useful to you!

david_reinstein7mo3

Eg I was looking for EA/earning to give lawyers and accountants to hire and had trouble finding them

dirk7mo7

Dunno if it's still helpful, but https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/talent-directory is a directory of EAs looking for work and contained several each of lawyers and accountants on a quick search.

Ian Turner7mo3

Did you find them? Perhaps they should be added to the periodic EA Advertisements post?

david_reinstein7mo2

Helpful but to disambiguat, that is a directory of professionals who want to do impactful work.

I am also looking to favour “earning to give” professionals willing to do non-impactful work.

Ala my “corporate bake sale” post and @Brad West Introducing the Profit for Good Blog: Transforming Business for Charity

Ian Turner7mo2

I was referring to this post, which I think includes services for those who are earning to give?

MathiasKB🔸7mo8

Thanks for all of the hard work you put into developing and maintaining it!

Midtermist127mo5

Posting from an alt account...

Very disappointed that the EA hub is not at least retaining the information for future use or otherwise making any effort to convey the information. Collectively, EAs, including myself, have spent a lot of time submitting the information. EAs spend their valuable time contributing to these projects with trust that the information will be stewarded and used. Now it seems that no effort is being taken to see that there is even the possibility of future use of this information. I don't know what the cost of the information retention would be, but I would be very surprised if it was lower than either the value of the possibility of its future gainful use and/or the harm from the loss of trust caused from the fact the products of community members' time was discarded so cavalierly.

The lack of care for the information gathered will likely cause people to slightly update against spending their time to collaborate in networking projects.

david_reinstein6mo2

Perhaps someone would want to champion this and get EA ~Meta or EA community funds to cover the cost of their time and tech in maintaining this? As @Midtermist12 says, I think the investment would be worth it, both for the use of this info itself, and for the knock-on effects for future collaboration.

This seems potentially important for initiatives like @Brad West's Profit For Good initiative.
A warm list for this ... Earning to give/EA people in relevant businesses.

Brad West🔸6mo2

Thanks for thinking of us @david_reinstein!

Right now, we're focused on gathering information about Profit for Good businesses. Down the line, we’re definitely interested in compiling a guide of individuals or businesses that might offer favorable terms to Profit for Good enterprises, especially those benefiting effective charities. However, at the moment, we don’t have the capacity to work on compiling and developing this list.

Vaidehi Agarwalla 🔸7mo2

Sebastian addressed this in a comment below. I'll also add that the Hub is a volunteer-run project, and we have limited time / resources.

Said Bouziane7mo2

Receiving the news that the hub was shutting down is the reason I finally came here and looked around properly.

Glad I did.

AltForHonesty6mo1

People have expressed reasons why they think this is disappointing but I will add another one. This is yet another way that the groupthink-generating karma system will distort our community.

The EA hub didn't sort people based on karma, but now this new system does. The karma system generates soft-censorship, self-censorship and groupthink. If you write a critique on a post with high-karma authors, they can just strong-downvote it and delete it from the frontpage, which just leaves you with less karma and voting power in the future (and other people can see your low comment-to-karma ratio, or the little icon indicating it, and dismiss you).

People with more voting power can downvote people they disagree with giving them less voting power (and thereby less voting power they can distribute to other people of similar sentiment... ad infinitum) while conversely upvote things they agree with giving those people more voting power (and thereby more voting power they can distribute to people they agree with... ad infinitum).

Getting sorted lower on the directory becomes yet another reason why people wouldn't want to criticize popular EA people/ideas (and the people that disregard this and go against their own self-interest to help EA as a whole will get yet another punishment for it).