Thanks so much for writing this. I broadly agree with your post, and I've been concerned about this ever since I took over the Forum team a little over 2 years ago. I still believe that the most important thing the Forum team should do is proactive/intentional community building, i.e. cultivating a community around a specific group of people and culture that will generate valuable discussions, which could involve many of the specific interventions in your list. Measure progress based on the value of all the discussions rather than the number of people participating.

Based on my experience as team lead I'm not that optimistic about things turning around while the Forum is still at CEA, especially while CEA is focused on growth and brand. With Rory and Amy leaving, it feels like there are fewer and fewer people in CEA leadership who "get" the Forum. I seriously considered spinning the Forum out of CEA — I left before anything came of that but there's maybe a small chance that still happens. I think it's plausible that's the only real way to preserve the intellectual community version (although who knows, maybe CEA will hire someone in a year or two who can turn things around). 

@Toby Tremlett🔹 and I worked closely on Forum strategy and I trust him to care about this as well. However, he is at a significant disadvantage relative to when I was team lead (ex. he basically has to do 3 jobs, no one was hired to backfill any loss of Forum capacity and there are no open JDs for the project) so I think it will be an uphill battle.

You're great Toby, but I do worry that it will be hard to make progress without getting you more capacity for the Forum. I'm glad that we were given more freedom this year, and I hope that means CEA will invest more than the current 1.5 FTE into the Forum, at least in 2027.

With your limited time, I wonder if you should focus more on proactive community building, in the sense we discussed when I first took over the team. I think people's perceptions of the space matter a great deal to how they engage with it, as you can see from some of Nathan's comments under the parent quick take. We can chat about it when we meet tomorrow. :)

I'd be interested to hear more about why you didn't want to engage with posts like CEA's, and what you mean by "many important questions are just 'not the done thing'". Not sure if it's related, but I think people who push back on CEA tend to get lots of karma still. :)

Thanks for sharing! I mostly agree. If you read my posts from the past 2 years you can see part of the story for why the Forum is the way it is. Broadly, the Online Team has been more focused on supporting the rest of CEA and doing growth-related work, and we've been putting less and less FTE toward the Forum over time (~1.5 FTE when I left).

I feel sad that we didn't push as much on quality and community as I had originally wanted. I found it challenging to try to convince leadership of the impact of doing cultivation work on the Forum, partly because the impact is actually quite nebulous and risks being just entertainment for EAs. Ultimately I still believe that there are tipping points that would cause the Forum to lose the majority of its value, and community building on the Forum can have significant impact by preventing that.

Ah, a bit of extra context: the "stories" page views vary a lot based on the marketing happening at any given time. I bet that was a recently released one when I took the screenshot and was getting posted across social media.

Just to clarify, are you responding to the "Likely that more than 10% of your post was drafted by an LLM?" message? That's now always shown at the top of the editor, to notify users about our new policy. So that's not related to the body of your post. :) We do currently use Pangram but the results are only for internal use, and don't affect the editor.

I can see why that would be confusing, so I'll update the wording to be more clearly a question.

Sharing an overview of the CEA Online Team's Q2 OKRs (we run this Forum)

Just a reminder that you can customize your own Frontpage feed, so if you'd like to give serious posts a chance today you can hide April Fools' Day posts.

Click on "Customize feed", add "April Fools' Day" by clicking on the + to search for the relevant tag, then click "Hidden".

Oh no, thanks so much for flagging this! Toby was on holiday today unfortunately, so I've just updated it.