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Jon_BeharJul 5 201916

My frustration centered around not being able to take a post I’d written in google docs and simply paste it into the forum to post without extra work. I’ve run into two problems trying to do that: pictures and footnotes. It didn’t help matters that I wrote a post with a ton of footnotes before they became supported, but even now that they are it’s a pain to use the markup editor instead of just copy/pasting things. I’d strongly prefer to get this and the search functionality taken care of before adding new functionality (e.g. sequences).

There are also things I like about the new forum. The notifications about replies is a huge plus, and the question and link post types are a clever nudge to engage people. I’m sort of on the fence about the frontpage/community distinction. I sympathize with the intention, but worry that it buries time sensitive news that EAs need to know about (e.g. when a grant application window opens).

Last but definitely not least, thanks Ben for your openness to feedback (even if some is critical) and lack of defensiveness! Strong upvote.

See in context

I find this forum increasingly difficult to navigate

by Arepo

Jul 5 20191 min read 50

66

CommunityBuilding effective altruismCriticism of effective altruist organizationsEffective Altruism ForumCriticism of work in effective altruism

Frontpage

This has been bugging me for a while. Tbh, the most useful interface for me was the 1.0 forum, which allowed filtering by highest rating over several different time ranges, as well as showing some useful data on the front page.

V2.0 no doubt had some advantages, but I found that often I'd be reading a post, close the window, want to go back and find it a pain in the butt to find the post again.

The latest version has reached the point where I just don't see the point of visiting the forum any more - as far as I can see, the only option is the default date-order one, which means I'm essentially going to see a random set of noise on visiting. [ETA - on closer inspection it seems that the 'recent posts' section is mislabelled, and actually has some magic sorting formula based on some combination of karma, recency, and perhaps other factors. So I guess we have two lists, but 'magic' sorts (ie sorts whose outcome I can't predict with a little thought and basic knowledge of the posts in question) seem to me to be less useful than any explicit kind - even date-sorting.]

I'm not trying to make an argument here, merely express a grumble/opinion that something important has been lost in the interface. In that spirit I suggest people just up/downvote this post according to whether they share the sentiment.

(in related feedback, it'd be nice to have proper polling option available)

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JP Addison🔸Jul 6 201944

Lead developer for the Forum here. I'm trying to ramp up the amount of feedback I get and this thread was very useful.

Addressing one large theme - sorting and filtering:

I was excited to see people wanting more sorting options because I'm working on something related right now. My goal is to make it easier to get e.g. the top posts in the past month. It's still very much in early development and I want to make it something that works for LessWrong as well, so no promises that it'll ship the way I'm currently envisioning it.

In order to get that though you have to find the AllPosts page. LessWrong has a sidebar on the left that's auto-expanded and has a link to the AllPosts page. I'm interested in what the EA version of the LessWrong sidebar should be and this conversation has updated me towards building that sooner.

Jonas VJul 10 201913

It would be great if the AllPosts page displayed the first ~100 posts instead of just the first ~16. Every few months, I find myself spending several minutes repeatedly clicking the "Load More Days" button.

RaemonJul 13 20196

Quick note that if you set All Posts to "sort by new" instead of "sort by Daily" there'll be 50 posts. (The Daily view is a bit weird because it varies a lot depending on forum traffic that week)

JP Addison🔸Jul 13 20191

Seems reasonable.

MosesJul 5 201928

Both here and on LW, I have /allPosts bookmarked, "Sorted by Daily"; that helps. I haven't used the front page in ages.

jimrandomhJul 5 20199

LessWrong has a sidebar which makes the link to All Posts much more prominent; it looks like EA Forum hasn't adopted that yet, but it would probably help.

RaemonJul 5 20194

Strong upvoted mostly to make it easier to find this comment.

Stefan_SchubertJul 5 201927

I think it would be good if there were very simple and clear instructions on how to write posts, including advanced stuff like how to post images. (It would also be good if it was made clear what one can't do.) Unfortunately I found it challenging to write a post when I tried to.

Ben PaceJul 5 201915

Here's an editor guide I just updated.

Lukas FinnvedenJul 5 20194

There's a section on writing in the lesswrong faq (named Posting & Commenting). If any information is missing from there, you can suggest adding it in the comments.

Of course, even given that such instructions exists somewhere, it's important to make sure that it's findable. Not sure what the best way to do that is.

Lukas FinnvedenJul 5 20198

Copying all relevant information from the lesswrong faq to an EA forum faq would be a good start. The problem of how to make its existence public knowledge remains, but that's partly solved automatically by people mentioning/linking to it, and it showing up in google.

Jon_BeharJul 5 201917

I suggest a putting a “help” button in the editor, right next to the “save as draft” and “submit” buttons. This info should be super easy to find when someone’s writing a post.

Relatedly, when the instructions are being refreshed for the planned update I think it’s important to run them by someone non-technical (and probably at least one generation older than the person writing the instructions) to see if they can understand them.

ArepoJul 5 201918

(also worth noting that for me it'd be really helpful to have a user-categorisation or tagging system, so we could easily filter by subject matter. Even just old-school subforums would be swell, but the ideal might be allowing non-authors to tag posts as well)

RyanCareyJul 5 201913

For explicit sorting and simple interface, you might like ea.greaterwrong?

Ben PaceJul 5 20198

Thx for the post.

Re: searching for great posts, there is also an archive page where you can order by top and other things in the gear menu.

Can you say more about how you used the old forum? I’m hearing something like “A couple of times per year I’d look at the top-posts list and read new things there”. (I infer a couple of times per year because once you’ve done it once or twice I’d guess you’ve read all the top posts.) I think that’s still very doable using the archive feature.

Am also surprised that you lose posts. My sense is that for a post to leave the frontpage takes a couple of days to a week. Do you keep tabs open that long? Or are you finding the posts somewhere else?

ArepoJul 5 20195

Re: searching for great posts, there is also an archive page where you can order by top and other things in the gear menu.

Ok, that's quite a lot more helpful than I'd realised - why not make it more prominent though? I didn't see these options even when actively looking for them, and even knowing they're there, unless I deep link to the page as someone above suggested, it's several clicks to reach where I want to be. Though (more on this below), the 'top' option is the only one I can see myself ever using.

Can you say more about how you used the old forum? I’m hearing something like “A couple of times per year I’d look at the top-posts list and read new things there”. (I infer a couple of times per year because once you’ve done it once or twice I’d guess you’ve read all the top posts.) I think that’s still very doable using the archive feature.

I mainly used the 'top posts in <various time periods>' option (typically the 1 or 3 month options, IIRC); median time between visits was probably something like 1-3 months, so that fit pretty well. That said, even on the old forum I strongly wished for a way to filter by subject. Honestly, my favourite forums for UX were probably the old phpBB style ones, where you'd have forums devoted to arbitrarily many subtopics. I don't think they're anywhere near the pinnacle of forum design, but 'subtopic' is such an important divider, that I feel much less clear on how I can get value from a forum without it (which is part of why I've never spent a huge amount of time on the EA forums - though a bigger part is just not having much time to spare)

To a lesser degree, I found the metadata on who'd been active recently. It let me pseudo-follow certain users (though I suspect an actual follow function would be more helpful)

Am also surprised that you lose posts. My sense is that for a post to leave the frontpage takes a couple of days to a week. Do you keep tabs open that long? Or are you finding the posts somewhere else?

Often a friend would link me to a post that had already been around for a week or two when I read it.

Ben PaceJul 5 20196

Ok, that's quite a lot more helpful than I'd realised - why not make it more prominent though?

You can get it by clicking "view all posts" at the bottom of the recent post list on the frontpage. As you can see on LessWrong (which this site is a clone of) it's also permanently on the left side of the screen even more prominently. The folks working on this site have slightly different site goals and haven't included that (yet).

I mainly used the 'top posts in <various time periods>' option (typically the 1 or 3 month options, IIRC); median time between visits was probably something like 1-3 months, so that fit pretty well.

Interesting. I realise there's a class of users who check on that regularity, and want to see the highlights from a couple of months. On LW we have the curated section which does this sort of thing, but the EA Forum doesn't, so I guess it'd be especially useful here. This does move it up my priorities list quite a bit. Thx.

even on the old forum I strongly wished for a way to filter by subject... my favourite forums for UX were probably the old phpBB style ones, where you'd have forums devoted to arbitrarily many subtopics

My teammate Oli Habryka has strong opinions here, I'll let him write stuff if he has time. Current plan is to not do this anytime soon.

I agree following users is important.

Often a friend would link me to a post that had already been around for a week or two when I read it.

In general I myself keep cool-looking tabs open for a while, and if I don't read them and I close them I know that there's no easy way to get back to them. I agree many sites are more static than this Forum - compare HackerNews to SlateStarCodex, where I can see all the SSC posts from the past few months listed on a screen, whereas with HN I can't see all the posts from the last hour on the screen. But for the majority of places I'm interested in, if I don't save the link prominently or recall the title clearly, I won't lose them, so I'm surprised this is more prominent for you with this Forum.

mike_mclarenJul 7 20196

Regarding the breakdown by subject, I agree that this would be very valuable, but that having a bunch of subforums probably isn't the answer. To me, the obvious solution is having keyword/tag support, where authors and/or mods set the keywords for their article, and users can view all posts with a given tag. This feature is built into popular blog-building platforms like Hugo (through Hugo "taxonomies"); I have no idea how hard it would be to implement in the LW/EA forum software. But the ability to filter to posts relating to AI, wild-animal suffering, community building, cause prioritization, etc. seems to be an important feature for making forum posts on a given topic remain relevant long after they have fallen off the Latest Posts list.

erikaalonsoJul 12 20197

Minor suggestion: I often share posts from EA Forum on social media, but the posts do not have a default "share image" attached. If you added some metadata identifying a default image for all posts I think that the social shares would get a lot more traction.

JP Addison🔸Jul 14 20191

LessWrong* used to have a single default image for everything and I thought it was annoying because it was so generic and was glad when they removed it. I'm not familiar with best practices on social links, it's possible there's standard advice that disagrees with me.

*Who's codebase we forked and thus we have similar dynamics as.

Michelle_HutchinsonJul 5 20197

Thanks for bringing up suggestions like filtering by subject matter and rankings - I imagine it's really useful for the forum team to hear what improvements people most want, and how people typically use the forum.

I downvoted though, because I think it could be expressed in a kinder and more constructive way. It would have been nice if the title was more like a specific feature request rather than a general attack on someone's hard work, and if the post included some appreciation for things that have been improved over the years, and the hard work people have put in to make that happen. It might also be good to rephrase particularly loaded statements like 'The latest version has reached the point where I just don't see the point of visiting the forum any more'. Being in effective altruism is kind of challenging, because we're always trying to do everything as well as we can, and optimise. I think that makes it all the more important for us all to try to be as supportive and caring to each other as we can.

My impression, incidentally, is that the search functionality is decidedly better than it was on the old forum: the search results seem to be more related to what I'm looking for, and be easier to sort through (eg separating 'comments' and 'posts')

KirstenJul 5 201934

I am very torn because on the one hand, I really want to appreciate people's hard work, but on the other hand, just because people work hard doesn't mean their work has actually improved the Forum.

It's important to be kind, but it's also important to be honest. While I think this post could have been better, the most important thing is that it exists at all. And it's important that it's not just a feature request - it's important that the post is clear that some people think the site is getting worse overall.

Jon_BeharJul 5 201914

Agree with Khorton there’s a balance to be struck. But I think it’s critical to be able to provide feedback like 'The latest version has reached the point where I just don't see the point of visiting the forum any more'. It’s “particularly loaded” in the sense that it conveys a strong opinion, but that’s a good thing. If it were expressed in a mean way, that’d be a big problem. To me, that comment read like a simple statement of a fact that the forum team would definitely want to know.

Michelle, FWIW I haven’t voted on your comment. While I disagree with you on whether the tone was appropriate and how good the new search is, I really appreciate your give a clear explanation of your downvote of the OP and hope others follow this example.

Jon_BeharJul 5 201924

Michelle, I’m very surprised you find the new search functionality to be an improvement. I thought the old search worked quite well, but find the new functionality nearly useless. Unless I know the exact title of a post and search for that, I routinely get results that are tangentially/un-related, old, not-well-upvoted, or all of the above. For example, the top results when searching for “effective altruism” are:

1. Effective Altruism and Religious Faiths: Mutually Exclusive Entities, or an Important Nexus to Explore (9 karma, 4 years old)

2. Effective Altruism & Slate Star Codex Readership (3 karma, 6 months old)

3. Effective Altruism subreddit (9 karma, 3 years old)

The comments that are returned are similarly old and low-karma (though I do love that the new search returns both posts and comments). I also tried searching for “bednets”, “artificial intelligence”, and “jobs” all with similar outcomes.

I actually wanted to post screenshots of the search results, but couldn’t figure out how to insert pictures (I figured out a workaround in the past, but I can’t remember what I did, only that it was time-consuming and extremely annoying). More generally, I’ve found the process of posting quite frustrating (which I’m not alone in). I strongly upvoted the OP for these reasons; I hope this isn’t read as a lack of appreciation for the hard and extensive work that people have put in on the new forum.

Ben PaceJul 5 201915

Can you say more about what you find frustrating about using the editor/posting? Am also interested to know if you find it better/worse than the old site.

Jon_BeharJul 5 201916

Last but definitely not least, thanks Ben for your openness to feedback (even if some is critical) and lack of defensiveness! Strong upvote.

Lukas FinnvedenJul 5 201920

With regards to images, I get flawless behaviour when I copy-paste from googledocs. Somehow, the images automatically get converted, and link to the images hosted with google (in the editor only visible as small cameras). Maybe you can get the same behaviour by making your docs public?

Actually, I'll test copying an image from a google doc into this comment: (edit: seems to be working!)

Jon_BeharJul 5 20196

Testing a reply with an image copy/pasted from a public google doc (shows up as camera in the editor)

Edit: it worked! Good to know about this workaround (though the direct google doc import Ben mentioned would still be preferable since it'd deal with footnotes too).

Jon_BeharJul 5 201915

btw, I had to google what a markdown editor was so perhaps the instructions could be made more accessible to laypeople

Ben PaceJul 5 20199

A year ago I did write a little editor guide, but many parts of it quickly went out of date. I'll post to the Forum if I update it.

Edit: I updated it.

Ben PaceJul 5 201913

Gotcha. Not being able to easily copy-in from G-Docs and fotnotes+pictures being lotsa work.

Chatting with the team, their sense is that copy-pasting footnotes is very unlikely to ever work between editors (e.g. I don't expect footnotes to be copied functionally into MS word, Dropbox paper, or any other editor you might use). If that's the case, I would like to build the ability to do a direct import from g-docs, which would solve these problems.

Also agree with the images. The big thing we don't do right now is host images, which means you have to upload them to the internet yourself then put the URL into our editor.

The current state of the plan is to do a big overhaul of the editor framework either this quarter or next, where I expect us to spend time on these issues and others. In general we found that making small edits to the current editor for things like this were too costly in both the short and long run, and we'd also prefer an editor a bit more like google docs in a bunch of ways.

SiebeRozendalJul 5 20199

Just adding something here: I had done all my images and footnotes well and then switched back and forth between editors, which somehow messed it all up and I had to manually insert all footnotes again.

Jon_BeharJul 5 20192

Cool, direct import from g-docs would do the trick from my perspective. Thanks for the update!

Aaron Gertler 🔸Jul 5 20194

I'm curious about your vision for what better search results would look like. I'm not sure how the current search works, but I expect that it prioritizes title-matching, so that the phrase "Effective Altruism" returns posts whose titles begin with that phrase (which isn't very common, as most people here abbreviate it "EA").

Would your preferred results look like any of the following?

The highest-karma posts using the phrase "effective altruism" anywhere (title or text)
The newest posts using the phrase "effective altruism" anywhere (title or text)
The posts using the phrase "effective altruism" most often (between title and text)

Keyword search seems like a pretty good way to find "that one post you're looking for", but I could imagine that karma/newness should be factors if people are using Forum search to hunt down "interesting posts about topic X". I don't know how common each use case is.

----

Regarding screenshots: Images can't be added to comments (correction: they can, see here); is that what you were trying to find a workaround for? (If so, it's useful feedback for us that this is something people want.)

You can add an image to a post by leaving a blank line where you want the image to go. Then, highlight a space in the blank line. You'll see a bar pop up with options like "bold" and "italic".

Click the image of a photo on that bar, and you'll be able to add the URL where your image is hosted. The Forum doesn't support attachments, but there are a lot of sites where you can upload an image for free. My favorite is imgbb.

Jon_BeharJul 5 201916

Re: pictures, ability to do pictures in comments would be nice. But my frustration was really around this:

Click the image of a photo on that bar, and you'll be able to add the URL where your image is hosted. The Forum doesn't support attachments, but there are a lot of sites where you can upload an image for free. My favorite is imgbb.

This is a real pain, and a disincentive to using charts or tables. I write in google docs for a variety of reasons, including because it’s easy to get feedback from people. So once I’ve written a draft, edited, sent it out for feedback, revised it, given it a final edit, and at long last have it looking the way I want in a format that’s used around the world, I don’t want to have to upload a bunch of images to some site I'm unfamiliar with, then insert each of them into the post.

I’d like to do be able to do a simple copy/paste. Inserting attachments would still be frustrating, but a significant improvement on the status quo. In either case, I’d like there to be clear and easily accessible instructions (people shouldn't have to figure out the imgbb solution on their own). Hope this clarifies where the frustration stems from, let me know if you still have questions.

Jon_BeharJul 5 201916

Re: search, “effective altruism” was probably a bad example but I guess I’d like to see that return something like CEA’s guiding principles (or whatever the old search version did). “Bednet” is probably a better example. You’d expect this to turn up something about bednets and/or AMF. Instead, it returns three results that mention bednets but are in no way about them.

1. Charity Entrepreneurship Research Summary (22 karma, 3 years old)

2. The age distribution of GiveWell’s charities (13 karma, 4 years old)

3. What consequences? (25 karma, 2 years old)

Interestingly, searching for “bednets” instead of “bednet” yields very different results:

1. 8 ways to free up donation money without sacrifice

2. Where should anti-paternalists donate?

3. Kidney donation is a reasonable choice for effective altruists and more should consider it.

I’m not sure exactly what my algorithm would be, I imagine it’d involve keyword matching in the title, in the text, karma, recentness, etc. Let’s say someone wanted to find “After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organization”, which I believe is the highest karma post in forum history. And it has a title that you can’t expect people to remember. I’d definitely want that to be the top result if someone searched for “jobs” (it’s the 7th result, requiring an extra click to see) or “ea job market” (doesn’t show up).

Lukas FinnvedenJul 5 20191

Images can't be added to comments; is that what you were trying to find a workaround for?

It's possible to add images to comments by selecting and copying them from anywhere public (note that it doesn't work if you right click and choose 'copy image'). In this thread, I do it in this comment.

I see how I can't do it manually, though, by selecting text. I wouldn't expect it to be too difficult to add that possibility, though, given that it's already possible in another way?

Habryka [Deactivated]Jul 5 20199

On LessWrong we intentionally didn't want to encourage pictures in the comments, since that provides a way to hijack people's attention in a way that seemed too easy. You can use markdown syntax to add pictures, both in the markdown editor and the WYSIWYG editor.

Ben PaceJul 5 201920

Tah for trying to generally make the Forum a nicer place Michelle. That said I want to say that in this case, for me, I had zero negative experiences reading the post, and the line “The latest version has reached the point where I just don't see the point of visiting the forum any more” was the most useful part of the post for me. I’ve not heard anyone tell me the new Forum is unusable for them, and I’m interested in further (unfiltered) info from Arepo + others (though I don’t have a lot of time to engage).

(@everyone else, in case it’s not apparent, I’m part of the LW team who created the codebase for the new site)

bethJul 5 20195

These are some issues that actively frustrate me to the point of driving me away from this site.

Loading times for most pages are unbearably slow. So are most animations (like the menu from clicking your username top right).
Many features break badly when Javascript is turned off.
Text field for bio is super small and cannot be rescaled.
Super upvotes have their use but the super downvote just encourages harsh voting behaviour.
The contrast on the collapse comment button is minimal, same for a number of other places.
Basic features take much effort to navigate to. Going to all posts either means two clicks (hamburger menu then all posts) or clicking a link that can not always be seen without scrolling (which is a mess because the page height will change when recent comments have finished loading)

Ben PaceJul 5 20195

Thx.

My sense is you might get more of the experience you want using ea.greaterwrong.com, which doesn't require javascript, is focused on speed, and generally has a lot of custom options. The site has all identical content.

MosesJul 5 201910

Just as a data point, I didn't read OP as an attack at all.

I also don't think that if you have overall negative feedback, you should necessarily have to come up with some good things to say as well, just to balance things out and "be nice". OP said what they wanted to say and it reads to me like valuable feedback, including the subtle undertone of frustration.

As a data point on the object level, I think that magic sorting makes sense on a website with intense traffic (HN, reddit), not on a site with a few posts a day.

RaemonJul 5 20196

For the record I'm someone who works on the forum and thought the OP was expressed pretty reasonably.

ArepoJul 5 20191

My impression, incidentally, is that the search functionality is decidedly better than it was on the old forum: the search results seem to be more related to what I'm looking for, and be easier to sort through (eg separating 'comments' and 'posts')

For what it's worth, my main concerns are the visual navigation (esp filtering and sorting) rather than a search feature - the latter I find Google invariably better for, as long as you can persuade the bots to index frequently.

utilitarian01Jul 5 2019-16

Aaron Gertler 🔸Jul 5 20196

If you want to create a poll, consider using Effective Altruism Polls (a Facebook group I made), then linking to the poll here.

Not all Forum users have Facebook accounts, so that's a downside, but you also get additional data from Forum users who are in the polling group but might not have otherwise seen your post (e.g. if they only visit every so often).

Jon_BeharJul 5 20194

Great to learn about that group, maybe worth a top-level link post?

Google Forms is free and very easy to use if you want to do a poll without being restricted to people with FB accounts.

Aaron Gertler 🔸Jul 5 20194

Thanks for pointing out the existence of the "All Posts" page, Moses. That page has acquired a lot of new filtering options since the Forum was launched in November (at that point, it was literally just a list of all posts).

Arepo: Aside from time-range filters, are there particular features you miss from older versions, or wish existed in the current version? What "useful data" was on the front page of V1.0 that isn't accessible now?

Vaidehi Agarwalla 🔸Jul 5 20191

It sounds like having a "History" or "Recent" profile section might solve your issue of losing a post

riceissaJul 5 20191

filtering by highest rating over several different time ranges

The EA Forum Reader I made a while ago has the ability to do this. The top view shows posts in order of score, and one can filter by various date ranges ("Restrict date range: Today · This week · This month · Last three months · This year · All time" exactly like on the old forum). In addition, the "Archive" links (in the sidebar on desktop, or at the bottom of the page on mobile) in the top view show the top posts from the given time period, so e.g. one can view the top posts in 2018 or the top posts in February 2019.