All of Sarah Cheng 🔸's Comments + Replies

The surprise is what kind of sweet! ^^

@Toby Tremlett🔹 and I will be repping the EA Forum Team at EAG SF in mid-Feb — stop by our office hours to ask questions, give us your hottest Forum takes, or just say hi and come get a surprise sweet! :)

Reminder: applications for EAG SF close soon (this Sunday!)

Thanks for the question Ben! The main reason that this is a priority is to help EA Funds (which is now part of CEA) grow and diversify their donations, by making it easier to gather info from donors^[1] and build relationships with them, and giving us more freedom to optimize the UX of the donation flow. AWF in particular has ambitious 2026 plans and a significant funding gap, and we’d be excited to help them reach their donation goal for this year! :)

1. ^{^}

   GWWC, the primary platform EA Funds has used historically, defaults to opt-out for donor data sharing

Thanks JP — that's right that we originally showed it at the top of the post editor for first-time authors (and it wouldn't appear anymore after the user checked the box). Now I believe, because we moved the checkbox to the new user onboarding flow, it doesn't appear on the post page anymore.

For those who are interested in what the CEA Online Team^[1] is up to, I've set up a new OKRs doc for 2026 and summarized our Q1 2026 plans.

1. ^{^}

   Our team runs this Forum

Quick note: Forum support coverage will be lighter than usual this week and next as people are off on holiday, so you may encounter some process delays (for example, things may take longer than usual to get approved). We expect to be back to normal on Monday Jan 5.

Hope you all get to enjoy some relaxing time off as well! :)

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q4.2, which takes us to the end of the year.

Posting a bit late since I just got back from a long holiday — here's a bonus photo from my trip! :)

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q4.1 (the next six weeks).

Quick warning: crossposting from here to LessWrong is currently buggy, due to some ongoing infrastructure changes on their side. If you run into any issues saving or publishing your post with "Crosspost to LessWrong" checked, that may be the reason.

We're working with LW to resolve any bugs, but they have higher priority issues right now so I'm unsure how long it will take to fix. In the meantime, you can try unchecking that box and manually posting in both places. You can help us diagnose the issue by reporting any bugs you see. 

There should be a little x if you hover over your icon, clicking that should remove your vote.

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q3.2 (the next six weeks).

During last year’s Giving Season, I started up an EA Forum Instagram account as an experiment to see if the Forum Team could help spread important ideas outside of the Forum. In particular, I think there’s interesting and nuanced discussion on the Forum that is representative of EA in a way that other popular media does not capture about EA. I mostly ran it myself, and while it was fun, it took up more of my time than I could justify, so I stopped updating it earlier this year.

Now that the CEA Comms Team is larger and has hired a Marketing Manager, they’ve... (read more)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Jason! We'll take this into account when we review the rate limits, after we have a bit more data on its effects in practice.

The EA Forum moderation team has decided to enable the same automatic rate limits here as on LessWrong (see this post from the LW team for more info and reasoning).

Previously we had a couple automatic rate limits, and we've simply replaced those. Our codebase is open source, so you can see all the current automatic rate limits described in this file. Broadly they affect users who have low karma, or whose most recent content got downvoted by many others. In particular, we've noticed more new users who post a lot of lower-quality AI-generated content, so we ... (read more)

Mini EA Forum Update

We've added two new kinds of notifications that have been requested multiple times before:

1. Notifications when someone links to your post, comment, or quick take
   1. These are turned on by default — you can edit your notifications settings via the Account Settings page.
2. Keyword alerts
   1. You can manage your keyword alerts here, which you can get to via your Account Settings or by clicking the notification bell and then the three dots icon.
   2. You can quickly add an alert by clicking "Get notified" on the search page. (Note that the alerts only use the

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q3.1 (sorry this is a bit late, I just forgot! 😅).

Ugh I agree yeah, thanks for flagging this! I re-opened the poll by manually updating it in the db, and we should increase the default duration of polls.

None of the EA Forum reacts (including agree/disagree) have a strong version, so those would just be the individual number of users.

Hey Holly, it sounds like you’re frustrated by how people in EA are engaging with the idea of a pause. I’m sure that’s really hard, and I’m sure I don’t know even a fraction of what you’ve gone through. I know you’re doing this advocacy work because you care a lot, and I really appreciate that. You know that I personally support your work.

However, I’m worried that this thread is becoming unproductive, and risks making the Forum feel like less of a safe space^[1].

In particular, my concern is that you are criticizing @Denkenberger🔸 directly in a way that app... (read more)

Seems right, thanks! I've moved it.

I think it does help to have a username that people recognize, but IMO it's not too hard to get to that point. There's not a ton of activity on the EA Forum and it's not that hard to read most comments, so if you write a few good comments people will probably start to recognize your username.

Thanks Jason! Luckily, which posts get categorized as "Personal blog" is public information (I think it's easiest to skim via the All posts page), so I would be happy for people to check our work and contact us if you think we've made a mistake. If you take a look now, you'll see that very few posts have been moved there so far, and I don't expect the rate to change very much going forward.

2. My guess is that the vast majority of new users don't even know what "Personal blog" means, so I'm not sure how demotivating it will be to them. As I mentioned in ano... (read more)

Thanks Ben! 😊

(Toby's title change was basically just the two of us trying to figure out how to better communicate his role to external people, it's not related to his level. He has a fair amount of autonomy in his role, and I thought "Content Manager" didn't properly reflect that. Also I personally could never remember which of "Content Manager" and "Content Specialist" was the more senior title... 😅)

Ah yeah sorry I was unclear! I basically meant what you said when I said "at their discretion, but starting conservatively" — so we are starting to take "quality" into account when deciding what stays in the Frontpage, because our readers' time is valuable. You can kind of think of it like: if the mod would have downvoted a post from a new user, the mod can instead decide to move it to "Personal blog". I think it's possible that this is actually less discouraging to new users than getting downvoted, since it's like you're being moved to a category with dif... (read more)

The EA Forum moderation team is going to experiment a bit with how we categorize posts. Currently there is a low bar for a Forum post being categorized as “Frontpage” after it’s approved. In comparison, LessWrong is much more opinionated about the content they allow, especially from new users. We’re considering moving in that direction, in order to maintain a higher percentage of valuable content on our Frontpage.

To start, we’re going to allow moderators to move posts from new users from “Frontpage” to “Personal blog”^[1], at their discretion, but starting ... (read more)

Yeah I would be interested in experimenting with ways we could do community-based funding for Forum things! :) You'll definitely hear about it if we give it a shot lol

Thanks for sharing! That's helpful to hear. :) This broadly matches my understanding, based on the data from our 2024 EA Forum user survey^[1]. A majority of respondents said that little to none of their Forum time would otherwise have been spent on work, but our site usage increases during work hours — that tells me that a lot of people are using the Forum in place of other media they would procrastinate take a break with during work or school hours. I guess it's good if people are replacing more addictive distractions with the Forum, since you can only re... (read more)

I'm not sure, but I actually think the amount of content capacity put towards the Forum has been about the same for its whole lifetime (~a bit less than 1 FTE). However, I think that content capacity has been focused on different things over time (Lizka got pulled into a bunch of random non-Forum projects for example, and there were fewer "Forum events" before Toby started running them). Also the Forum community has changed a lot over time.

In the early days, the community was really small, so probably they didn't get many promotional posts because orgs did... (read more)

At the very least I expect the momentum could keep it going for a while.

Yup this seems right to me, but I would expect that usage would naturally go down over time. You can see this happening in the chart from my January post, for example.

I think that online spaces naturally move toward being "a place [for orgs] to promote things" once they have an established audience. For example, I feel like most Slack workspaces turn into this. Most subreddits have rules against promotion, probably for this reason. Without a Forum Team that pays attention to the distri... (read more)

Yeah I definitely have this in my head when thinking about how to run the EA Forum. But I haven't made a commitment to personally run the site for five years (I'm not a commitment sort of person in general). Maybe that means I'm not a good fit for this role?

I also hear conflicting views on whether it's good or bad to "signal that there is real investment". I think I intuitively agree with Habryka here, but then others tell me that it can look bad for us to talk about doing work that doesn't tie directly to impact — like maybe if we talk about improving the... (read more)

The Online Team is the current custodian of an important shared resource (the Forum). If the team can't actually commit to fulfilling its "Forum custodian" duties, e.g. because the priorities of CEA might change, then it should probably start trying to (responsibly) hand that role off to another person/group.

I agree with this, though I feel like the devil is in the details of what "Forum custodian" means. FWIW I don't think anyone at CEA is interested in shutting down the Forum, or reducing the moderation capacity.

Maybe a useful example of "new engineering... (read more)

I appreciate this comment a lot, thank you!

The sheer geographical coverage, and the element of in-depth intellectual engagement aren't practically replaceable by other community-building efforts.

I think that fulfilling this role is a lot more important than growing the EA community, and other goals that the EA Forum might have, and that it is worth doing until a better new venue comes along.

I broadly agree with this! :) I personally care a lot about keeping the Forum community alive. Although I ultimately care about impact, and so I think it's possible tha... (read more)

Thanks! I found it helpful to hear your perspective. :)

I imagine many readers here would have little idea of what "new engineering work" would really look like

Yup this is fair — this includes work to customize the site for events (like the Donation Election voting system), and also work that is intended to be a longer-term investment that makes the site better (like updating our notification defaults, or improving site speed, or adding features like Google Docs import).

when you say “engage,” I hear “try to elicit compulsive behavior from.”

Yeah this is a bit tricky. Historically, the EA Forum and LW have been far on the side "respect users' time". For example, the default setting for karma notifications on LW is to be batched daily, so that you only see that star once per day rather than right after you've gotten an upvote. This was also the case on the EA Forum until earlier this year, when we decided to change a bunch of our default notification settings, and specifically we changed the default karma notifications to be... (read more)

Hey Lizka! I love that memo and I agree with most of it (I don't have any particular disagreements, I just feel unsure about some things). It's been a significant influence on the Online Team overall, and on how I think about running the Forum. I also agree with the specific points in your comment.

Part of the goal of the exercise was to, as the Online Team, "stare into the abyss" and try to figure out, how much does it really make the world better for us to put capacity towards the Forum? Are we only putting resources towards the Forum because of momentum/... (read more)

Great point — this matches my intuition, but I've never participated in any serious open source projects, so I wasn't sure how feasible it would actually be to get useful contributions. I've volunteered to help with a few coding projects in the past, and most of the time I quickly lose motivation to work on them. So I expect most volunteers to also get bored/distracted and not do anything useful.

Nice! I think LW has a work-in-progress branch with this sort of thing, though I have no idea if/when they will wrap it up. We also have an admin-facing feature where we can set up a process to automatically import posts to your Forum account from an RSS feed (although it's rarely used so it's probably buggy).

My recommendation is actually to let our team assistant manually crosspost your pieces to your Forum account. She does this for Lewis Bollard's Substack, for example. For now, I expect she will do a better job than any of the automated options.

If anyo... (read more)

Not sure what the disagree votes are about, but I agree that it would be nice to have more open source contributors! 😊 The Forum codebase is already open source and we do occasionally get contributions. We also have a (disorganized) list of issues that people can work on. IMO it's not the easiest codebase to dive into, and we don't have much capacity to assist people in getting set up, but now that LLM tools are much better I could imagine it being not too onerous to contribute.

If anyone wants to help, I'm happy to suggest issues for you! 🙂 Feel free to ... (read more)

I wanted to quickly add that you can also message @Toby Tremlett🔹 or contact the Forum Team if you have any questions (such as "do you think the Forum audience would like this?") or want feedback. We may be slower to respond and may not give as detailed feedback as Justis, but anyone is welcome to reach out to us. :)

I appreciate the suggestion! :) I've added it to our backlog. My current guess is that, given the limited resources we have to spend, this probably won't meet our bar for being cost-effective enough to implement.

Thanks for flagging these! And sorry for the delayed response. :)

1. Yeah I agree with this, I threw it in our task backlog earlier but we haven't had time to fix it yet
2. Interesting! I guess this is a weird edge case with our comment linking code, I'll record this as well

Thanks for flagging! :) I've updated that post, and I'll record this as a low-priority bug.

Thanks for the feedback! I think moderation is tricky and I'm relatively new at it myself. I'm sad at how long users can get stuck in the queue, and I'd love to improve how fast we resolve moderation questions, but where exactly we draw these lines will probably be a learning process for me, and we'll continue to iterate on that.

It looks like you submitted the comment on Dec 17, and our facilitator messaged you on Jan 6 (the delay partly being due to people being out for the holidays), and then they approved your comment a little over a week after messagin... (read more)

Hi! I just want to start by clarifying that a user’s first post/comment doesn’t go up immediately while our facilitators/moderators check for spam or a clear norm violation (such as posting flame bait/clear trolling). Ideally this process takes no more than a day, though we currently don’t have anyone checking new users outside of approximately US Eastern Time business hours.

However, some content (like your first comment) requires additional back and forth internally (such as checking with moderators) and/or with the new user. This process involves va... (read more)

To quickly add on to what Toby wrote: the CEA Online Team has also been redesigning effectivealtruism.org and we expect to soft launch it soon. I post quick takes when we update our half-quarterly plans, so you can follow along there. :)

For example many editions of the EA handbook spend a huge fraction of their introductions to other cause areas effectively arguing why you should work on AI instead. CEA staffers very heavily favor AI.

Just wanted to quickly add that I don't think that this is quite accurate.

My experience facilitating the Intro Fellowship using the previous version of the EA Handbook was that AI basically didn't come up until the week about longtermism, and glancing through the current version that doesn't seem to have changed. Though I welcome people to read the current ve... (read more)

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q2.1 (the next six weeks).

Thanks for the suggestion! I reached out to them last week about their USAID content, and I expect to see something here from them soon. :)

If you see content you like from GiveWell in the future, I encourage you to to reach out to them and suggest that they crosspost it! You can also flag it to myself or Toby and we can reach out, though that may take longer.

Thanks for writing this Ozzie! :) I think lots of things about the EA community are confusing for people, especially relationships between organizations. As we are currently redesigning EA.org it might be helpful for us to add some explanation on that site. (I would be interested to hear if anyone has specific suggestions!)

From my own limited perspective (I work at CEA but don’t personally interact much with OP directly), your impression sounds about right. I guess my own view of OP is that it’s better to think of them as a funder rather than a collab... (read more)