There's now a medium-sized amount of discussion of longtermism on Twitter, and I've noticed a bunch of people newly using it (such as some of those listed by Stefan Schubert here).
Twitter seems like a potentially underrated platform for longtermists. Like the EA Forum, Twitter promotes "liked" content. It allows us to follow content of interest to us. But it also differs from the EA Forum in some ways:
- It promotes concise discussion.
- It allows distribution of content to non-EA audiences.
- It allows reading content from non-EA contributors.
- It promotes content from top contributors to a greater degree.
Twitter also has some negative traits: it's potentially addictive, boosts (upvoted) political and emotional content. Unlike the EA Forum, it doesn't help longtermist content to be indexed, or attract as much within-group critique.
For better and for worse, I think the default path now is that Twitter forms a significant chunk of ongoing longtermist discourse. For long-form posts, I think many will be posted onto the EA Forum, Medium, or a personal blog, and then shared there.
Is there anything that needs to be done to adjust this trajectory? Mostly, the trajectory seems fine. Probably, some more posts on the EA Forum that are of widespread interest should be shared via Twitter. Probably, more effort should also be invested in mitigating politicisation and polarisation of the EA message there.
Edit: As a useful counterpoint, Tanner Greer argues that Twitter is turning the public sphere into just a "bare-knuckle brawl" here. If he's right: can we still participate in high-quality public conversation in Twitter? How can we best faciliate high-quality conversation in the public sphere without it? Or should we give up on that objective?
Hi! First post here; please let me know if I get anything wrong (now and forever).
I was very happy to find this post today when I came to review the forum after much procrastination, only signing up finally during EAGxVirtual. In my mind social networks are heavily under-utilized for constructive purposes in general, and for long term / utopian thinking in particular. I have been developing ideas in this space personally prior to joining the community, and I look forward to collaborate with others in EA on these topics if at all possible.
About the current trajectory and potentially useful adjustments:
If you are interested in discussing further, I remain open and interested.
Thank you!
Hi, Nathan! I very much agree that experimenting as a community with codes of conduct seems promising; ideally I believe they would be maintained in such a crowdsourced (and openly reasoned) way.
This is something I've been interested in for a while, and would like to continue researching as time permits. I am in the process of writing a post for this forum about some possible approaches to constructive community building that I've been considering, mostly to gather feedback and pointers to similar/better ongoing efforts. The question of how to agree on a code of conduct that is maximally constructive and inclusive features prominently. I'll share it here when it's ready, hopefully shortly.