Thanks for the suggestions!

1. We do this to some extent. Users can "Opt into experimental (beta) features" via their account settings, and we will sometime release features early for them and ask for feedback or see how they interact with it. We also do normal user interviews during feature development.
   1. We also encourage people to comment here if they have ideas for the Forum, or reach out to us directly.
   2. I will also reiterate that we are looking for volunteers to help us do cause-specific community building, and we would very likely reach out to those volunteers for quick feedback about Forum things.
2. My colleague Emma has done one of these. We'd be interested to do more of this but we need help figuring out who to interview, so we'd welcome more suggestions!
   1. Our Content Manager Toby has done these for people more closely associated with EA, but he is our only person working on Forum content so he is quite busy. It's hard to prioritize doing a single interview over spending the same time encouraging multiple authors to write content.
   2. I think that interviewing knowledgable people and sharing on the Forum is quite valuable, so I want to encourage other users to do this! :) I've also considered having our team commission this kind of work, which we may do at some point.

Yeah, I think it's hard (and maybe not worth our resources) to build one space that fulfills all of those criteria. I think it would be fun for the Forum to have a more casual space, but there exist many other places that can fill that need:

• The EA subreddit
• EA Anywhere's slack workspace and virtual events
• EA Gather (a virtual space to hang out and co-work)
• The EA community on Twitter
• The Effective Altruism Facebook group
• The EA Hangout Facebook group
• The EA Corner Discord

Personally I don't use any of these very often so I don't have much opinion on them.

Thanks for the feedback!

1. We've invested a fair amount of team resources into changes to improve the new user experience over the past two years, such as the big redesign, adding the "Best of" page that you mentioned, and an improved onboarding flow for new user accounts. I agree that new users do sometimes still find the home page overwhelming, but I think that, on the margin, improving the new user experience is not currently the best use of our team's resources (outside of specifically the new author experience).
2. Thank you for sharing, and apologies for making you feel uncomfortable. If it helps, users can hide themselves from the "People directory" by checking a box in their account settings (under "privacy"). I will say that I don't view the "People directory" as any sort of definitive list, since literally anyone can make an account (for example there are lots of spam accounts listed, and we haven't prioritized removing them). Forum user accounts have always been publicly searchable — the directory is just a view on top of the same data, intended to make it easier for, say, hiring managers to find people with relevant interests.

Thank you for sharing your experience and your feedback! :) I'm happy to hear that the Forum has been valuable for you in the past.

I’d like to think the Forum could better blur that distinction to avoid hubs becoming silos with strong views (which I think contributes to the confusion around the public perception of EA).

I like this framing, and I think it is a real value that the Forum can provide. Seems like it fits into my point #3 here, about why a central online space is a good bet.

the Forum right now is confusing because it’s providing multiple services in one; a newspaper, an opportunities/classifieds board, a library (the wiki) and a discussion space though not as free flowing as slack/discord. Now with groups and CRM and event tracking it’s becoming a catch-all for EA information

Yeah this is fair. I still think that the core of the Forum is discussion. The wiki is mostly useful to organize that discussion (including making it easy to view past relevant discussions). News posts are significantly more valuable if people discuss it in the comments.

Things like job postings do provide some value to the world (sometimes it leads to people getting hired in an impactful role), but I don't view that as the primary goal of the Forum. I think dedicated job and opportunity boards are better suited for those goals. Think of it this way: if the Forum frontpage was only job postings, then people would only come if they were looking for a job. In that situation we've just turned into a worse version of a dedicated job board. If the Forum frontpage was only discussion posts and had no job postings, that still seems quite valuable, and in fact feels like a reasonable state for the Forum to be in (though I don't currently think we should separate out job postings).

Has the forum team considered reframing the Forum as an intranet?

Perhaps others on the team have, though I haven't thought about this specific framing before. I think there is some interest from inside of CEA to move in this direction (for example, more closely integrating Swapcard/EAG and EAGxVirtual with the Forum), so I wouldn't be surprised if we do. I think this is certainly a possible long-term goal for the Forum, but I currently feel unsure if it's the right fit. For now, this sounds like mostly a software product-focused play, and I'm currently more optimistic about focusing on community building than focusing on the Forum as a product. But I could imagine that once the community feels like it's in a better place, we go back to investing in the product in a way that resembles an intranet.

Thanks for sharing some data here! I think the picture is more complicated than it seems (isn't it always), though I'm not super confident about that. A couple points:

• I think one relevant factor here is that (I believe) the Events and Groups teams rely more on funding to scale, and so when funding became less available they (I think) made an explicit decision to spend less. Funding doesn't affect Forum usage nearly as much (for example, we've almost always had one content manager on the Forum Team).
• I mentioned in a comment I just wrote earlier that my understanding is that traffic to 80k resources has not declined.
  • Actually you may be interested to read my whole comment that I linked to, since I think it adds some context relevant to this thread.

Nice — I like the way you described this, and I broadly agree. It's possible that it's more effective for the Forum Team to be doing a lot of the work to share on external sites (like via our Twitter account) so that others can contribute by lower-effort actions like retweeting, liking, and commenting (as opposed to us trying to get individual readers to share content more).

From past user interviews, I feel like a surprising amount of Forum content gets shared. A common story is that people only really go to the Forum when a link is shared with them. However, it's possible that that view is outdated and less sharing is happening now.

We have improved the shareability of posts in the past year or two (I forgot exactly when we did some things), like by letting authors edit the social preview image and text for their posts, and showing that image in the post hoverovers, and adding a "share" icon at the top of the post page with a dropdown of options. As far as I know those didn't move the needle a lot, though I haven't personally dug much into that data. I would hesitate to add more to the UI than that to encourage sharing content, because I don't want to add clutter to the post page.

We are considering updating our default social preview image at least, so maybe that will help. :)

I feel like it's hard to say how that impacts the Forum. Some people also crosspost their blogs onto the Forum, and our team even handles the crossposting for some authors. Some authors get more engagement on the Forum than on Substack. I'm just not sure if it overall helps or harms Forum usage.

Yeah I agree that "friendliness" and "welcomingness" are more important than "fun", and I'm more confident that we should be prioritizing increasing those qualities.

I'm so glad that you brought this up! This is broadly the headspace I was in for like, most of the time I've been working on the Forum. I think these are important points and I agree that external factors can play a huge role in how much usage the Forum gets. This feels like a clear takeaway from looking at how media around FTX affected Forum usage, for example.

In early 2024, our team did a marginal impact analysis that provided some evidence that our work was cost-effective (above an internal bar that I'm not going to explain more here). This made me made me feel like our work was valuable even if the overall usage numbers were going down, because I believed that the primary (basically in my head I rounded it to 100%) driver of usage was external factors (outside of some spikes around drama). As in, it didn't feel like the tech work we did made any significant improvements (I had less visibility on the content side so I won't really comment on that).

This was my view going into this new role. However, chatting with @Will Howard🔹 more about Forum strategy actually changed my mind on this quite a bit. My current hypothesis is something like: the actual current bottleneck around increasing Forum usage and the value of discussions is content quality (and vibes), rather than the number of visitors to the site. For example, I believe that traffic to 80k resources is still overall increasing (I'm not 100% sure though), and a lot of their traffic should flow through and impact Forum usage (like, they link directly to Forum posts in various places). The fact that our usage and [in my low-confidence, lightly-held, subjective opinion] overall value of discussions has still gone down is a sign that we cannot lay all the blame on external factors.

Broadly, I think that users' perception/expectations/feelings about the Forum matter quite a lot for reaching our goals, and I am currently optimistic that we can make significant improvements by focusing attention and intention on community building.

(I also think that things like public awareness and marketing do matter still, which is why our team is putting some capacity towards promoting content externally, and we will likely explore things like paid advertising later this year.)

On a more meta level: in some way I think it would be the "easy way out" to continue believing that external factors are the overwhelmingly largest influence. There is certainly data one could use to support that hypothesis, and maybe it would be easier to believe that I have very little influence and therefore very little culpability. But I also feel like, ignoring the possibility that our team could make a big difference (by focusing on community building) would be neglecting our duty. So you could view this as me taking a bet on a new hypothesis (which may or may not pan out).