I'd like to be able to highlight a word or phrase in text I'm writing and Ctrl-V a URL link directly into that phrase. This is something that other platforms, like Slack do.

Yes, you can highlight a phrase and bring up the toolbar to add a link, but being able to do it immediately through a well known keyboard shortcut is easier.

I noticed that adding a tag to a post in draft mode now automatically adds the parent tag. But it's not clear to the user why two tags are being added at once. This also contributes to the overtagging of posts.

On Wikipedia, the guideline is to tag pages with the most specific categories they belong to. So if category B is a child of category A, then pages that belong to both A and B should only be tagged with B, whereas pages in A \ B should only be tagged with A.

In general, I think the EA Forum should be more thoughtful about tags. If we want to replicate... (read more)

When using search, the date on the search result card doesn't seem to always match up with the published date on the post itself.

For example, this post was published yesterday, 24th January, but when it appears in search it looks like:

which might be the date it was first created in draft form, and not published?

Which also leads to counter-intuitive things like:

Display a more detailed breakdown of karma and agreement karma by number of upvotes and downvotes rather than overall amount. 

I think that the weighted voting system is counterproductive overall (it creates perverse incentives, it ascribes false authority to users who are more prolific or who may have expertise in one area and poor understanding in others, and it is needlessly undemocratic) and makes it harder to meaningfully understand the karma of a given post or comment, but this could go someway in making the actual impact of posts and comments mo... (read more)

Couldn't see if someone already suggested this but:

• Have a separate field for org name on profile 
• Option to select if you're writing a post on behalf of an organisation or as an individual (this is very important imo often people write posts and it's not clear who they work for) 
  • Auto-tag with org name + "org updates" or similar tag
• Organisation tag shows all the people who've listed org name on their profile 

I'd like to be able to bookmark comments, in the same way you can bookmark posts. There's a lot of really, really well thought out and written comments, in some cases containing just as much value as articles, and I'd like to be able to bookmark a comment to come back to. 

I'd argue this is even more important than bookmarking articles, because articles have tags and titles to search for, whereas comments don't, and it's easy to loose track of what article and what thread the one you're looking for is contained in.

(Probably has been suggested before but thought I'd add): A small indicator for the original poster of the top-level post in the comments. Like the microphone on Reddit.

If someone downvotes, suggest that they explain why

For Shortform:

1. The link to get here from the main page is awfully small and inconspicuous (1 of 145 individual links on the page according to a Chrome extension)
   1. I can imagine it being near/stylistically  like:
      1. "All Posts" (top of sidebar)
      2. "Recommendations" in the center
      3. "Frontpage Posts", but to the main section's side or maybe as a replacement for it you can easily toggle back and forth from
2. Would be cool to be able to sort and aggregate like with the main posts (nothing to filter by afaik)
   1. I'd really appreciate being able to see the highest-scoring Shortf

Add Agreement Karma to posts.

This comment suggesting this feature got 32 Agreement with 9 votes:

When a user moves a controversial post to drafts, other readers get worried of censorship. Two recent examples: https://mobile.twitter.com/erikphoel/status/1559527499188654085 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sD4kdobiRaBpxcL8M/what-happened-to-the-women-and-effective-altruism-post?commentId=GpSneam3oSwaBYDWH

It might make sense to tweak the prose. Maybe let moderators add a reason, like for deleted comments (e.g. "spam", "moved to draft after a request from the author"), and for users write "the author of this post marked it as a private draft"

We should make it harder to manipulate your own comments' karma. My favoured approach would be to deactivate all voting on one's own comments. Also fine would be if by default, you strongly upvote and strongly agree with all of your own comments.

There was a good amount of agreement about this previously.

I think it would be better if agree/disagree voting didn't follow the typical karma rules where different users have different amounts of karma. As it stands I often don't know how many people expressed agreement vs. disagreement, which feels like the information I actually want, and it doesn't make intuitive sense that one forum user might be able to "agree twice as much" as another with a comment.

Make the forum available in other languages. Right now the only option is English.

Also rely less on acronyms. For example, when selecting "program participation" it shows you the acronym VP:

I happen to know that this stands for "Virtual Program" but a newcomer (especially one that isn't a native English speaker) might not know this (and might even assume it stands for something different like Vice Presidency, Virtual Profile, Video phone-call, Viewpoint, Value proposition etc).

Curated posts could resurface to the frontpage at exponentially decaying intervals.

1. Counteracts recency bias. Enables longer-term discussions.
2. Increases exposure (and over a more varied reader population) to the most important ideas.
3. Efficiently^[4] increases collective memory of the best contributions.
4. We might uncover and dislodge some flawed assumptions that reached universal acceptance in the past due to information cascades. 
5. Given recency bias combined with the fact that people are very reluctant to write things that have been written about befor

Quiz as a Service for posts

I stumbled upon this service:

https://quizgecko.com/

That can generate a quiz out of anything. 

Having a "quiz me!" or "did you fully get the article?" button on every forum post where it would provide an AI-generated multiple-choice quiz would probably be very valuable for everyone.

I'd be happy to work on the development of this.

Embed iframes

Some use cases:

• interactive visualizations
• videos
• airtables (as already suggested)
• polis questions (as already suggested)
• guesstimate models
• and many many more

This feature is very versatile and would solve many things at once.

Co authors (second authors and later?) of posts don't appear to have their posts in the profile?

Sidhu has no post listed:

This seems mild, but could be bad if someone likes to co author a lot.

Check if information cascades / social influence bias is a problem on EA Forum.

If it is, maybe we could implement Emrik's idea to counter it, or some similar mechanism.

See here for the explanation of the potential problem.

To test it, we could do an experiment where some bot (or server-side process) randomly upvotes or downvotes new posts. We measure final karma after some fixed time, and see if that single vote snowballed.

relevant discussion

Bookmark folders.

There should still be the default one, but if you choose you could put the post in some other folder (sorta like youtube does with saving videos to playlists).

It can have many use cases, like:

• prioritizing things to read
• topic specific folders
• maybe even curation, if you could also make those folders public

Right now I'm doing something along these lines, but with an external editor and lists of links, so it's a bit awkward to use.

Have an optional Subtitle line to add more context on forums, and have it be expandable on the front page.

E.g.  "Why The forum should have subtitles: an in-depth look into how subtitles help people get more context in less time"

The Search Page doesn't seem to show results for basic questions. Some examples:

• What is the difference between shortform and post?
• How to Create Posts / where is the create button
• other things explained in the forum manual
• where to write "forum feedback", this suggestions thread doesn't show up for this term

Not sure if this is an search indexing issue, or perhaps the actual "questions" user would put in the search field, aren't part of the posts answering them. This could maybe be solved by adding a new post - which basically explains the same as other inform... (read more)

This is minor, and probably not relevant to most people, but my work (Rethink Priorities) would definitely use an RSS feed version of the Forum so we can get notifications of when things with certain tags are posted in Slack. I think we could do this now with an account / notifications to email / email to Slack, but instead are using Greater Wrong for now for simplicity (e.g. this feed goes to our comms Slack channel) https://ea.greaterwrong.com/topics/rethink-priorities?format=rss). Thanks for all you do!

"agree/disagree" for posts, not only comments.

Might reduce downvotes on posts

Allowing for photos to be smaller /  in-line with text so you can have image on the left and text on the right. 

Maybe a feature to let Google Doc headers/internal links be switched automatically to EAF headers? This will be mildly useful to me, and considering the most common type of broken links I see from others on the forum, probably to others as well!

Hi there, as a fellow EA, developer and avid creator of Userscripts, here are my thoughts on first seeing the site.

The design is very different from other online communities. This makes for an awkward first impression, users like familiarity in their UI.

I believe the gold standard for forums are Reddit, Facebook, StackOverflow, Discourse. By gold standard I mean some of the best minds in software UX works on these site. I particularly love Discourse.

This is a forum, yet there are no topics / subtopics. It tries to do too much in one place. I don't think questions, articles and events belong in in the same listing. I am aware of the filters, my criticism still stands :-)

Everywhere I move the mouse I'm assaulted by a popup. Why do you hate me? :-D

Infinite scroll / load more adds uncertainty to the UX. It's hard to track context, I can't tell if I click somewhere all my "progress" will be lost.

Gray on gray! No gray background please!

Titles are long, yet the columns are narrow.

The comments font looks bold, it should be lighter.

Some pages have too much info. "How to use the Forum" shouldn't have a pages long comments section, specially with unrelated discussions.

Still, thank you for taking the time in trying to innovate and contribute to the OS community!

The LessWrong API does not seem to work using HTTP requests from a remote host (my machine).

To be specific, the following Python code shows an HTTP request for the GraphQL API.

# Python 3.9 code 
import requests

query_text = """
{
  comments {
    results {
      _id
    }
  }
}
"""

headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}

url = 'https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/graphql'
requests.post(url, json={'query': query_text}, headers=headers)
# <Response [200]>

url = 'https://www.lesswrong.com/graphql'
requests.post(url, json={'query': query_text}

Promoting shortforms to top-level posts, preserving replies. I wanted to do that with this, because reposting it as a top-level post wouldn't preserve existing discussion.

The reading time estimates on lesswrong crossposts seem to be wrong.  For example, this says 1 but should be 5-10 (I would guess):

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fH5adhXF377Bt6fWj/public-facing-censorship-is-safety-theater-causing

I would appreciate being able to answer a private message by replying to the associated email notification, like I can do with e.g. Github and Discourse.

We should have at least one dedicated "megathread" for EAG-related questions each year, so it's easier to ask such questions in public without creating dedicated posts for each of them.

In addition to enabling drop-down boxes for commonly used jargon, it would be great if drop-down boxes were an editable feature. I frequently try to balance my explanations so that they're able to cover the inferential gaps without being too longwinded. One way of dealing with this is to make separate articles for people with different backgrounds like what Arbital does. But I think I prefer just having drop-down boxes for deeper or alternative explanations that not everyone needs.

The lesswrong way of dealing with lost and recovered text is much more pleasant on firefox. On the EA forum I have to tick through two boxes every time I edit anything.

On lesswrong there is a little box that I can click if I want to 

Embed high impact jobs related to [the tags of] the post that the person is currently reading.

"You're reading an article about biosecurity, here are some open biosecurity jobs you might be interested in"

We can build a filter based on this, I don't consider it production-ready in that level yet, but if CEA is interested, it could be.

(I somehow don't predict you'll say "yes" to this, but I'm not sure what's the reason you'll say "no", so asking)

Allow users to embed Airtables in forum posts, such as this

When clicking on a tag, sort the post by "new" instead of by "relevant" by default. (What does "relevant" even mean? the newer posts are almost certainly more relevant)

An automatic jargon-explainer for commonly used jargon. This gets the best of both worlds, for readers and writers. People can use jargon more often,^[1] and not have to worry about it not landing with readers. And readers unaware of the jargon can hover over the word to see what it means, while readers who already do know can keep reading. Makes it easier to read for people within a wider range of inferential distance.

 

1. ^{^}

   Efficient communication without having to link to each jargony word, since that might get distracting and take attention away from links they do want to emphasise.

Ideas coming out of a discussion yesterday evening

Problem: the eventual karma of a post depends a lot on the number of upvotes it gets in the first couple of hours/days after posting it.

Problem: The quality and relevance of new posts varies a lot nowadays. Readers need to (mentally) filter very quickly what to read. We tend to filter on easily available info, such as the karma that the post already has and the author's name (If your name is "Holden Karnofsky" and I've read many good posts from you in the past, I am much more likely to read the post than if... (read more)

Some suggestions for making tags more usefwl. I say some reasons I think tags are important in the post, but these suggestions are easy to see usefwlness of anyaway.

Right now, you can't tag a post while you're writing it. You have to "save as draft" and then add the tags to the draft, or add the tags after you publish it. This is needlessly annoying. I suggest making it like this:

The miniscule effort encouraged by making it mandatory is probably outweighed by the benefits many times over on average. Consider that the effort is a one-time cost, while the be

Automatically create a bibliography with all the links in a post.

Tagging users to notify them (@[username]). People should be able to ‘authorize’ friendly tags but ‘professional’ tags should be possible by default. Users should be able to turn on-off notifications for ‘friendly’ and ‘professional’ tags. In this way, people could make and maintain connections via the Forum.

Also, orgs (or departments) could have their own tags. For example, if someone does not make a writing contest deadline, they should still be able to notify the org about an idea. Organizations could be also able to filter their tag and another set of ... (read more)

Encourage short posts:

1. Make the word count visible without mouse-over
2. Allow an optional sorting algorithm that takes into account word count
3. In "new post", add a template text "TL;DR:" (which is deletable, but a small nudge to write a summary)
   1. (or perhaps explain a bit more, like "A TL;DR should contain bottom lines and not reasoning, and it should help the reader decide if this post is relevant for them or not)

Allow registered users to post anonymous comments and generate a unique anonymous Id to track them so we can e.g. see the thread of anon1's comments.

I think ideally this should not be visible to mods / backend so it's truly anonymous.

Let co-authors access post analytics

I can get around this by asking the main coauthor to share the analytics, but I´d rather I could access them myself.

A page for current contests/prizes, just like there's a page for events. Been quite a few of them lately, and they seem to (anecdotally) generate quite a bit of interest for writing usefwl things. 

The ones I know about:

1. OpenPhil's Cause Exploration Prize
2. EA Criticism Contest
3. Retroactive Funding Contest
4. Clearer Thinking's Regranting Program
5. New Blog Prize

Quite a few on LessWrong that recently ended too. I expect there are more that I just haven't seen.

Oh, there's a Topic for it. Another thing I didn't have the bell set to the right colour on. Black! But uh,... (read more)

For events it would be useful to get notifications a fixed amount of time before the event rather than when they are uploaded to the system. Right now I get 2-8 notifications at a time often for the same recurring event.

Ability to include a poll in when you make a question post, à la Twitter! I know this feature has been suggested before, in response to which Aaron Gertler made the Effective Altruism Polls Facebook group, but it seems to have plateaued at 578 members after 2.5 years. Response rates in the forum would probably be much higher.

An option to subscribe (notifications on email or otherwise) to search terms.

Currently I'm hesitant to even glance at the Frontpage because there are so many potentially interesting things I would eagerly read and get nerdsniped by. So looking at it predictably wastes my time when I know I should (for now) be concentrating on the topics I'm currently focusing on. But I do want to catch the forum post I'm most likely to benefit from. Hence I want to be able to customize what I get sent by email (or the bell top-right).

This is probably a better way to match ... (read more)

This is a long series of comments (~1200 words)

TLDR; The EA forum team could transform the forum by introducing high status, high activity “focus posts” that are centered on object level discussion, at the same time greatly empowering the forum moderator.

This content below is quickly written, and tries to motivate a vision, not a specific plan. Also, “focus posts” seems like a bad name, someone please come up with another?"

Motivation/Background:

There is a sense that high quality discussions and comments on the forum are briefer and don't occur ... (read more)

I would love it if I could scroll through all the comments and posts I have upvoted (so I can easily revisit/revise my own curated list of content that my past self thought was worth others seeing).

1. Add a sorting option for Occlumency so people can find the posts with the most enduring value historically (sorting by total karma doesn't do it due to the sharp increase in karma allocated towards newer posts due to influx of new forum users).
2. Add a tag for "outdated" that people can vote up or down, so that outdated but highly upvoted past posts don't continually mislead people (e.g. based on research that failed to replicate). I can't think of any posts atm, but if you can think of any, please mark them.
3. Consider hiding authorship and karma for posts 24 h

A emoticon or image next to someone's first post either on the homepage or when you click into the post so that people know that they are engaging with a potential newcomer and maybe are nicer / more welcoming?

Could be obvious downsides to this I haven't thought of

See this comment.

This pattern of broken link, where the intended link is appended to another, distinct URL, has appeared in many comments or posts. 

This defect seems common enough that it seems to justify investigation of the root cause (or even very crude automatic fix) especially since the pattern in the defect is so simple. 

Please let me search within my bookmarks.

In general, I read something and bookmark it if I liked it. Then that thing that I read comes up in conversation. I go into my bookmarks to find it so that I can share it with the other person mid-convo quickly but then I can't retrieve it from the bookmarks list as fast as I thought I could! This happens to me in almost every session as a facilitator of the EA Virtual programs!

Reading time estimates on older posts.

If I'm not mistaken, posts before a certain date do not have the estimated time in minutes to read the post near the publication date and author's name at the top.

A way to report users for deletion.

There are a few spam accounts like this one (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/msreeyaa) but I see no way of reporting them to the moderators.

Since they aren't posting or commenting the way in which they have an effect is when searching the forum. (You'll just have to take my word for it that I wasn't searching for 'escorts' when I came across that profile...)

A way to see what you have previously voted on with karma.

There's been murmurs about adjustments to the forum about voting and volume and this probably reflects broader sentiment. 

Some considerations:

• With more content, there's more eyeballs, so the net effect is maybe ambiguous? But yes, it seems plausible it is negative (something something dilution).
• There's only so much attention that comes from any given user, so you can't fix things by showing more posts

I think there might be a number of solutions that immediately come to mind that haven't been written about, and these solutions do account for the ... (read more)

The analytics page is great!

Add a tag: "Volunteering listing (open)"

(Just like "Job listing (open)")

In the forum main page, have a new title:

Help building our community:

This post has no comments yet: ...

This post is from a new user, help welcome them: ...

...

After editing Swapcard: "Do you want to update your EA Forum profile too?"

At least if it was done through a CEA form

"I'm open to job proposals" : Yes / Maybe / No

This will really help with EA orgs hiring, and is so easy, and CEA already asks this question for EAGx events

Categorized upvoting suggestion

Make it possible to only filter / see unread posts by default on the forum homepage. 

This past month I've noticed I've missed a bunch of cool and relevant posts  because they dropped off the home page too quickly for me to see them. I'd like that not to happen. Not a suggestion, but related: it seems like some good posts fall of the homepage way too quickly. It would be nice to give those posts  a chance to be seen. Often if there are a couple really high popularity posts in a week then the people who happened to post less popular posts get unfairly disadvantaged, which seems suboptimal.

A chatroom

A moderated chat room that runs the whole time so you can chat to other poeple currently looking at the forum.

This might make the forum more welcoming.

Listing of “all posts I upvoted/strong upvoted”

Easy and credible way to add a bounty and prizes for questions (like this one )

I would like the ability to sort search results by date. Often, I want to know who mentioned something in the past few weeks or months, this is currently not possible. (I'm guessing the current sort order is by magic, but there is nothing indicating this.)

There should be a way to suggest an author cross-post a post of theirs and/or give them karma if you x post a work they've posted. 

There is an "exploit" against anonymity on LessWrong

On a recent popular LessWrong post, the OP, Gwern, receives a "anonymous" critique, and then chooses to deanonymize his critic, very likely by using a trivial API call:

The above call produces the identity of the commentor, who turns out to be Mark Friedenbach.

Technical comment for onlookers:

The reason why this happened is that LessWrong, like all websites, represents the information you see (posts, authorship) with underlying data/variables. This data pops up in a lot of places, and the ... (read more)

Please remove Google resources, like Google fonts, from the website. It will make it easier to visit the website from certain countries.

I'm not sure what the actual feature would be, but make  it easy for people to cross-post from their personal blog (maybe just do substack to start) to the EA Forum. I recently saw the blog prize announcement and there were about 10 blogs linked there i'd never heard of. It would be great to get that content onto the forum.

Ability for OP to pin comments to the top of the comment thread

(not actually sure about this - could have bad negative consequences) 

Use case: I write a post about a project and a team member makes a comment that I want to make sure people see, or I make an update comment 

Ways to reduce risk: 

• If the OP of the post is in good standing karma-wise, or has X karma (100+? 1000+) they should be able to pin certain comments.
• People can still filter by the existing filters and ignore the pins 

Why not just edit the post itself? I think some... (read more)

It would be useful to schedule posts ahead of time. 

It would be great if I could link to a comment.

(And sorry if this was already suggested. I couldn't find it when I searched "link to")

Inline draft comments
I really like the forum editor. Unfortunately, I don't end up writing posts in it very much as I almost always ask for feedback and reviewers can not easily add their suggestions.

Google doc comments are probably the gold standard here.