Nice, I like that idea, and I think it would be good to make it easier for writers to understand what demand exists for topics. It reminds me of the What posts would you like someone to write? threads - I'm glad we experimented with those. However, I don't know if they actually led to any valuable outcomes, so I'd like to think more about how much user attention we should aim to put on this (for example, right now I feel hesitant to make a new thread pinned to the frontpage). Perhaps it would be worth experimenting with bounties, although I'm not sure if people would actually offer to pay for posts.

In the meantime, you can feel free to respond to one of the old threads (which will still appear in the "Recent discussion" feed), or my suggestion is to write a quick take about it (the rate of quick takes is currently low enough that you'll get some attention on the frontpage).

Thanks! For that kind of thing, I would suggest posting it as a quick take or a comment in the open thread. :)

Thanks for the suggestion! To clarify, are you imagining this as a tab on the Forum home page, or somewhere else? What kinds of open questions do you have in mind (perhaps some examples would help)? 

(Again: only speaking for myself, and here in particular I will avoid speaking about or for other people at CEA when possible.)

I hope the below can help with understanding the type of thing which can contribute to an opposing external impression.

Yup, I think it’s very reasonable for people outside of CEA to have a different impression than I do. I certainly don’t fault anyone for that. Hopefully hearing my perspective was helpful.

The first got no response, the other got a response which was inaccurate

I’m really sorry that our team didn’t properly respond to your messages. There are many factors that could affect whether or not any particular message got a response. We currently have a team assistant who has significantly improved how we manage incoming messages, so if you sent yours before she joined, I would guess someone dropped it by accident. As an engineer I know I have not always lived up to my own standards in terms of responding in a timely manner and I do feel bad about that. While I still think we do pretty good for our small size, I’m guessing that overall we are not at where I would personally like for us to be.

Looking to public, and frankly far more important, examples of this, the top comment on CEA's last fundraising attempt is highly critical of the Forum / Online team's direction and spend. At time of writing the comment has 23/2 agree/disagree votes and more karma than the top level post it's under. This seems like the kind of thing one prioritises responding to if trying to engage, and 10 months ago Ben West responded "I mostly want to delay a discussion about this until the post fully dedicated to the Forum". That post never came out^[1]. So again my takeaway was that the Forum team didn't value such engagement.

Hmm I currently don’t recall any post about Forum fundraising. I think we considered fundraising for the Forum, but I don’t remember if any significant progress was made in developing that idea. In my opinion, Ben and Oscar wrote multiple detailed replies to that comment, though I am sympathetic to the take that they did not quite respond to Nuno’s central point. I think this is just a case of, things sometimes fall through the cracks, especially during times of high uncertainty as was the case in this example. I feel optimistic that, with more stability and the ability to plan for longer futures, CEA will do better.

I also want to differentiate between public and internal engagement. I read Nuno’s writing and discussed it with my colleagues. At the time I didn’t necessarily think I would have better answers than Ben so I didn’t feel the need to join the public conversation, but at this point I probably do have better answers. I’ll just broadly say that, I agree that marginal value is what matters, as do others on my team. We do analyze the marginal impact of our Forum work. I would be excited to write more about it publicly but it will take a fair amount of work to make it clear and comprehensible for the Forum audience (up to my personal standards). Interestingly, Nuno’s points push me against taking the time to communicate publicly / be more open. Every hour I spend on writing a comment (and it can take me hours - I am not particularly good at writing, my training is in software engineering) is an hour that I don’t know how to value in the marginal impact analysis, so it defaults to being worth $0^[1]. I strongly feel responsible for using EA/charitable money well, so using my work time to do something that I ultimately won’t put any value on is difficult.

I personally think that CEA has been opaque for the last few years

I don’t disagree with this. I personally would prefer that we had communicated publicly more in the past, and I think ideally CEA would be more open about our work.

So I naturally interpret a post which is essentially a statement of continuinty as a plan to continue down this road.

I’ll just note that the point of this post was not to lay out all of CEA’s upcoming plans, nor explain how CEA will change, nor even to talk about CEA’s organizational values or principles. I believe Zach has more posts planned, but he is also very busy. 

But if you think CEA, or at least your team, has been responsive in the past, the same statement of continuity is not naturally interpreted that way. 

Apologies - to clarify, I don’t think I said that CEA or my team has been responsive in the past. I’m guessing that on average CEA and my team have been below my personal bar. I feel that the Forum team aims to be responsive, and it is good to continue to have that goal, and to continue to do better relative to that goal (such as by getting help from our team assistant). My dissertation about “team”, similarly, doesn’t mean that we have been great about following through on all the ideals that “team” implies. I just think that it is an accurate description of our goals, and what I personally aspire to do. Based on Zach’s comment, I’m optimistic that CEA will do better.

1. ^{^}

   I'm open to suggestions here. Perhaps transparency can be modeled as worth a fraction of the overall value CEA (or the Online Team, or the Forum) produces? But surely there are diminishing returns at some point - I would be surprised if I should be spending 50% of my work time on activities that are primarily valued via "transparency". I'm worried that this is so subjective that I would just use it to justify spending as much time as I would like on these activities. If I was allowed to ignore cost effectiveness I would naturally be more open.

I work on the Forum team, but this comment only represents my personal views and not those of CEA. Also, I am responding to this comment in particular because it mentions the Forum by name. I may respond to other comments if I have time but no promises.

First off, I want to say thank you for your comment. I think the Forum serves as an important space for organizations to get feedback from the community and I’m happy that it’s doing so here. I will also say that I think writing clearly is hard, and I am not a particularly good writer, so I am happy to clarify if anything I say is unclear. 

'I view the community as CEA’s team, not its customers' sounds like a way of avoiding ever answering criticisms from the EA community, and really doesn't gel with the actual focuses of CEA… you're supposed to empower us to work for/fundraise for or otherwise support charities

An organisation that aims to effect Y via X cannot afford to relegate X to an afterthought, or largely ignore the views of people strongly involved with X.

My understanding of the phrase “I view the community as CEA’s team, not its customers” is that CEA’s ultimate goal is to improve the world, and increasing the satisfaction of the EA community (or alternatively, satisfying any particular request an individual might have) is not the ultimate goal. I believe the purpose of laying this out is to be transparent and help readers understand and predict how CEA will act. My guess is that very often we will be improving the world by doing things that satisfy the EA community.

For the Forum in particular, user feedback is a vital input into how we prioritize our work. We gather this information via user interviews (such as at events, reaching out to specific groups of people while developing features, and broadly offering to do user interview calls with people like in my Forum profile), by including links to feedback forms when testing things out and launching new features, publishing posts and quick takes about our work, running various surveys including the annual Forum user survey, and even directly messaging users via the Forum to ask them questions. I genuinely believe that feedback is a gift, and I’m so grateful for people who take the time to provide it to us.

If you take one thing away from my comment, please remember that we love feedback - there are multiple ways to contact us listed here, including an anonymous option. You’re welcome to contact us with suggestions, questions, bug reports, feedback^[1], etc. (I can only really speak for the Forum team, but I would guess other teams feel similarly.)

Earlier this year we implemented the ability to import Google Docs to the Forum and people gave us lots of positive feedback about that. I think most of the work on the Forum will be somewhere between “making the community happy” and “the community is mostly neutral, maybe a small subset are happy” - if you look at the features in our latest update post, I think basically all of them have been either requested by users or people have given us purely positive feedback on them^[2]. One example of a change to the Forum that the EA community might have voted against is the big Forum redesign in 2023 - as you can see, we mostly got negative feedback about it. However, when I’ve interviewed users new to the site, I overwhelmingly get positive feedback about the design. It’s clear to me that having a skilled designer improve the site's usability was the right choice.

This reflects how I view my own work - to do good by supporting the EA community, which does not always mean that we should do what they would vote for^[3].

I think some of the disagreement is that people interpret the terms “team” and “customers” differently. In some ways we do treat Forum users as customers - for example, our engineers rotate being on-call to respond to customer service requests. We think this is worth their time because we feel that our users provide significant value for the world, not because our end goal is a high customer satisfaction score, but the result is basically the same. As I referenced earlier, our team functions similarly to other tech teams. So for example, when we are building a feature for group organizers, we will do many user interviews with group organizers. Thinking about my own experience as a customer, oftentimes websites will use dark patterns, compromise UX, prioritize engagement/addictiveness, and literally outright lie, all in order to maximize their profit. I am happy that we do not treat our users as customers in any of these ways. One slightly different way of thinking about “customer” is more like “customer service”, where an organization should strive to satisfy any individual who files a complaint. Honestly I think the Forum team is pretty good at this given our small size, but I would like us to be able to prioritize issues that users report relative to the value of our other potential work and not automatically file customer service reports in the highest priority bucket.

I like the term “team” because that emphasizes that we all broadly have the same goal (improving the world) and I am happy for Forum users to act in service of that goal (even if they criticize my work), in the same way that I appreciate when users give me feedback about the Forum in a way that reflects understanding of that shared goal (like, “I have this suggestion for you, though I’m guessing that this wouldn’t affect many people so it’s probably low priority”). In practice, much of the way that the Forum makes progress on that goal is by “empowering [people] to work for/fundraise for or otherwise support charities.” Another aspect of “team” I like is that this implies collaboration and transparency, since we have shared goals (so it would be against my interests to lie), whereas I think it’s entirely normal/expected for a company to mislead its customers^[4]. “Team” means that we respect your time more than other websites (that treat you like customers) do, because we believe your time is valuable (for the world) and we want you to use it well, because we have shared goals. When someone answers my inactive user feedback form saying that they use the Forum less now because they are focused on doing good directly via their job, I don’t feel like I have “lost a customer”. I feel happy that they are presumably correctly valuing their time and doing more good (although I hope they still occasionally return to contribute back to the community).

A point that multiple commenters reference is about how CEA handles criticism. In my opinion, someone who is on the same team as you is much more likely to take your criticism seriously than any entity to which you are a customer. For example, if I complain to a company about their shady business practices, I expect them to completely ignore me or possibly lie to me, but certainly not to actually consider my point. If you complain to the Forum team about something we are doing that you consider morally dubious, we actually engage with it (at least internally - we have not always done as well as I would like at responding publicly, and I hope we improve on this in the future.)

Given this, I personally disagree that we “relegate the EA community to an afterthought” and that we “largely ignore the views of people strongly involved with EA”, and I disagree that we implied that we plan to do these things in the future. In my opinion, viewing the EA community as CEA’s “team” does not preclude us from caring about our effect on the community, nor does it mean that we no longer want to nurture and support the community, nor does it imply that we will ignore criticism, nor does it mean that we don’t care about people’s opinion of our work. I would go so far as to say those are more important for a teammate to care about than a company to care about.

…that isn't the transparency I'm concerned about. Just a general commitment to sharing info guiding key decisions about the community with the community…

I believe the purpose of Zach’s post was to explain that CEA will focus on EA principles rather than specific cause areas, and that it was not meant to communicate anything about CEA’s principles as an organization. Personally I am quite pro-transparency and hope to post more about my work than has been the case in the past.

To respond to some specific points:

1. sharing forum changes they're considering, and the case for/against them
   1. We have done this for some projects in the past, such as when adding emoji reactions.
   2. I’m happy to do more of this myself. Some reasons that I do not prioritize this:
      1. Lack of demand (I appreciate you sharing what you would like to see from us! It’s hard to know what is worth us writing about otherwise. For example, it’s not clear to me if anyone got any value out of this data-sharing post and it took me a fair amount of time to put it all together.)
      2. I believe that I have a bias towards thinking that the Forum is valuable/important, and so I try to counter that in various ways. In this case, because I care a lot about the Forum respecting people’s time, I want to push back on assuming that Forum-related questions are valuable/important enough to be worth their attention. We just ran a Forum user survey which was quite long - I spent a long time iterating on the text/questions and cutting things down, and in the end I was still pretty worried about asking for too much time. As a tech team we already prioritize work based on user feedback, so additional feedback gathered from a public post will also have diminishing returns.
      3. Smaller things, like the fact that I’m quite busy and am a slow writer, and I find publishing things on the Forum pretty scary.
   3. We shared a public version of our half-quarter OKR planning doc in our Forum update post. That doc gets updated right after we finalize our OKRs, and is currently the closest thing to this that exists.
2. open-sourcing forum data (IIRC they might technically have done this? But with no documentation, and an API that you have to direct-link to)
   1. Our codebase is open source, and I personally think the documentation is quite good. We use GraphQL which is a commonly used technology. If you have questions about accessing data, feel free to contact us.
3. generally cultivating a culture of directly engaging in discussion with the community more
   1. To this end, I will publicly suggest that if you have any questions for CEA, you should feel free to contact us.

1. ^{^}

   Including critical feedback! Every time I talk to a user I emphasize that critical feedback is especially useful for us, because people are biased towards saying nice things to us (at least to our face - I think this is less the case online).

2. ^{^}

   I actually don’t know of any particular requests or feedback after the fact that we got about site performance improvements, but I am confident that it was worth doing. Improving site speed is one of the most evidence-based ways for a site to decrease their bounce rate and improve their SEO ranking. This type of issue, which either minorly inconveniences many people or disproportionately impacts people who are not Forum users but would have been, is hard to justify working on purely based on the goal of “community satisfaction”, but makes more sense under the goal of “improving the world”.

3. ^{^}

   Not that customers normally get to unilaterally decide on what a company does via a vote.

4. ^{^}

   To be clear, I think any organization has incentives against being 100% transparent, and I don’t think CEA is at the ideal level of transparency. But when I compare my time working in for-profit companies to my time working at CEA, it’s pretty stark how much more the people at CEA care about communicating honestly. For example, in a previous for-profit company, I was asked to obfuscate payment-related changes to prevent customers from unsubscribing, and no one around me had any objection to this.

I appreciate this suggestion, and the really helpful context! I'll add it to our backlog. The Groups features of the site haven't gotten any love in a while and I hope we can circle back to them soon.

If it were me, I would default to posting them as quick takes. I think that would get them more visibility than a personal blog post (not sure), and quick takes are a good fit for asking for feedback on more early stage things.

But I am somewhat biased because I'm pretty scared to publish frontpage posts, and I don't want to discourage you from posting it there, especially if you are willing to put in some additional effort to make it valuable for frontpage readers (such as by including a written version of the contents, or by asking for specific feedback in the post, or framing your post as a discussion about the video topic that people can continue in the comments). As you say, in the worst case, if it doesn't get many upvotes, it will fall off pretty quickly.

On another note, I think the Forum isn't currently that well-suited for sharing video content, so if you have suggestions for how we can do better there, let me know! :)

For a first video, I thought it was surprisingly good! :) I appreciate that you speak clearly, the script is pretty short and to the point, and honestly I thought the editing was way better than most of YouTube (you cut enough to keep it moving, but not too much as to be being annoying or distracting). There were a couple times I felt like you could have edited it down more. I liked the infographic cut-ins, and you could probably add slightly more visual aids before it gets to be too many.

I'm glad you enjoy making them, and I encourage you to keep doing it!

Do you have a sense of how impactful your work has been so far (in particular the work that has been out longer, like the Moral Weight Project and the CCM tool)? I'd be interested to hear specific impact stories, if you can share them.

Thanks for all you do - I think it's really cool! :)

Ah, it's the button in the middle of the post - here's the link for convenience. :)