I think my main goal with this isn't necessarily about restricting users, but having new users show that the understand community norms (e.g. about how to be clear about reasoning, etc) prior to posting. I agree filters might help too! (I left the downvote comment because I want to encourage people on the forum to be transparent about why they downvote, myself included).

Yeah, that's fair — I guess I think that while posts shouldn't be filtered on content ~at all, they should be moderated on stylistic things, and part of the reason I like rate limiting is that it helps people get used to what I view as good community norms (e.g. reasoning transparency, etc). So maybe that's why I am more sympathetic than others to heavy-handed moderation.

I also found how they worked / what they were really ambiguous for a long time, so had happened to look into it at some point.

I agree!

I believe Renaissance Philanthropy isn't exactly itself a funder or funded by any one donor, but is instead a collection of Funds, each of which have their own donors (and many of which are multi-donor), while RenPhil provides operational infrastructure. They have more information on the model here. So the question might be better targeted at the specific funds than RenPhil itself, and some of the funds do report their donors (e.g. see the bottom of this page).

I'm excited to see more diversification in the EA animal welfare funding space. Thanks for doing this!

(this is at -1 karma when I left this comment). I'm interested in why folks downvoted this? I understand disagree voting, but was surprised by the downvote, so would be helpful to hear your perspective.

This is not really directly relevant, but I feel somewhat confused by considering statements made during a trial as strong evidence of someone taking seriously the harm they caused (to be clear, you didn't express this directly, but I've seen other supporters of this decision say this, and Caroline's message suggests I should take her statements in the legal proceedings as evidence). Caroline was directly incentivized to both cooperate to make creditors whole, and to express regret and wrongdoing, because she would spend more time in prison if she did not do these things. I think it would be far more meaningful evidence if she had, for example, come forward and admitted to wrongdoing and helped right things when she did not have an incentive to do so (e.g. whistleblown before things blew up).

I don't really think individual organizations have an obligation to protect the brand of EA as a whole, and ideally they just improve the brand of EA by doing good things themselves. But I'm a utilitarian, and I aggregate. I hope that you're right that she's an incredible hire, and the marginal value Manifund produces by doing this offsets the obviously very large costs the ecosystem will bear due to your decision.

Yeah, I agree with this. I do think the EA Forum still has decent posts, but the frequency is just declining a lot. I definitely think a huge part of this is that lots of former power users mostly do AI stuff now, and the Forum doesn't seem great for AI discussion.

I agree this is playing a role - I think I feel a bit negative about this:

• Substack posts seem on average lower quality than good EA Forum posts, and the Substack posts cross-posted here (mine included) seem worse than great EA Forum posts.
  • I think this is partially that Substack has worse incentives for quality (e.g. to post more).
• Substack comments are lower quality by a large degree.
• It's harder to track ~all the conversation on a topic, which the Forum was nice for.

Maybe bringing back the EA Forum Prizes, to incentivize people to post (e.g. in the same way that building an audience on Substack theoretically could earn you money) would help?

I personally think rate limiting new users would be a good way to help with quality of new posts generally (e.g. maybe you can only comment, at some limited frequency, when you first create an account, and only make top-level posts either via mod approval, or if you hit some reasonable threshhold of comment karma from other people, demonstrating you write things others find valuable to read).