Thanks for posting Dylan! I like the creative ideas on how to separate out cross- and link-posts. I'll consider them if/when we work on that feature. 

In case people are wondering what the Forum Team's response is to recent concern about the site - I've been drafting a long (too long) post today. Will edit, make sure I'm synced up with the rest of CEA etc... before posting. Shouldn't be too long. 

PS- Kind of you to check with me first as well!

I think yearly would be too restrictive - my current thinking in this direction is that I'd like a more defined Forum theme (like the line at the top of the featured page 'Selected posts to help us answer: How can we do the most good with our resources?') combined with many more themed weeks. Stay tuned, I'll be writing some updates soon once I'm less busy with giving season. 

Until then, what themes would you like to see in Forum discussion? 

I'm curating this because it raises questions about what, for some, is a background assumption. I think it could kick off some valuable conversation. Thanks for writing it Arepo!

I put a little poll here to follow up on whether minds were changed by the cluelessness critiques competition. If you read the posts during that week, check it out. 

If you have engaged with Anthony's sequence, and you hadn't thought seriously about cluelessness before, I'd be interested in knowing if it changed your mind on your cause prioritisation. You can answer as a reply, or just vote:

Engaging with the problem of cluelessness has changed my cause prioritisation

Not at all

Significantly

Note: I couldn't post this at the time because there was a bug, but I'd be keen to hear responses now as well. 

Thanks Huw! I've already announced one week, but the marginal funding week posts will be prominently linked on the site throughout giving season, so they'll have a lot of chances to get attention. 

So much to say in response to this. First of all, thank you for caring, and for writing this appeal. 

I want to start by reassuring you that I agree. Not necessarily with all of your prescriptions (though they are all worth considering) but with the diagnosis. I agree that the Forum has been marginally too focused on 'growth'. 

As Sarah writes in another comment, CEA, or a lot of CEA work is indeed focused on community growth. We are proposing an alternative goal for the Forum - roughly 'effectiveness for engaged EAs'. In practice (I'm working on finalising metrics today) this means measuring some proxy metrics - like % of people in "EA" jobs who visit the Forum at least monthly (relevance), number of words in comments (loose proxy for quality of discussion, especially if tempered by karma and ignoring AI), and some measure of ultimate impact, probably surveys of engaged EAs to find out when posts change their donation or career decisions. We've been testing this new theory of change out over the last few months.

Unfortunately, since we've started experimenting with the new ToC, we've had a lot of capacity issues - Sarah left, Agnes is on Maternity, I had to take two months of unscheduled leave for family reasons etc... the bottom line is that right now we are one dev, and one me (who has just got back to work). Despite this we have been able to make some moves in the direction of this ToC: 

• The cluelessness critiques competition is not an event we would have run for engagement reasons - I was running it because it highlights an important crux for engaged EAs.
• The featured page is (the first draft of) an attempt to create future-proofed infrastructure to highlight the best posts on the Forum as EA undergoes growth. I appreciate that its current instantiation has some issues, which I hope to get to this quarter.
• My plans for Giving Season (to be announced tomorrow, I hope) are focused almost entirely on causing high quality conversations on important cruxes for engaged EAs. 

This new direction for the Forum came from me thinking about two things you mentioned. 

1. "I’m a bit concerned that the EA Forum is going to die a slow death." - This keeps me up at night fairly often - I don't want the Forum to die full stop, and definitely not on my watch.
2. And this: "To me, the EA Forum was the core intellectual center of EA in the past. It was a place where there was reliably extremely high-quality discussion about difficult ideas. I think that the best version of EA maintains this, and getting the Forum to that place again is pretty important for the future of EA."

That second point is what I called in some memos the 'social reproduction of EA'. We could easily grow an EA movement that is overly attached to the current institutions and beliefs of EAs - a movement that takes current 'cause areas' as fixed, and gets a lot of people into great jobs. This would be very impactful in the short term. But if we want there to be an EA movement existing into the future (i.e. in the next decade) that is capable of coming up with new ideas, and pivoting to the new most impactful cause areas when that's what the world needs - we need to continually recreate EA as an intellectual community, as well as a practical one. This isn't a unique problem to our time, it's in the natural life cycle of a highly committed EA to be excited by a range of causes and ideas, then over time make more commitments such that it is harder, emotionally and likely fiscally, to change direction. 

I'm not sure whether the Forum has been successful in the social reproduction of EA in the past - there are some examples of people who become contributing EAs through engagement just with the Forum, but I'd guess that more people become EAs through in-person communities in concert with the Forum, and without the Forum, 'EA ideas' will by default come from orgs which have constrained charitable purposes, and are therefore more sticky and less able to pivot than individuals. 

Much more to say but the point is I agree, and I'm very interested in making and keeping the Forum as the intellectual core of EA.

Quickfire on some of your suggestions. 

• Substack crossposting: This was a very interesting point to read, I'll be thinking about it more. My current strategy with Substack has been to crosspost the best of what I see - with the ultimate aim of ensuring that an engaged EA would not need to check both the Forum and Substack. I agree that this has costs, especially in terms of having to accommodate the worse epistemics that are the norm on Substack. Your comment makes me reconsider whether we should eat that cost - I like the idea of having some way to link-post that doesn't take up the space of a full post. Perhaps the easiest test here is a weekly links and discussion thread.
• CCBY: This was a decision made before my time that has only been mentioned to me once or twice as an issue. If it's low cost for us to switch to a more flexible regime, and it would lead to more posts, even just from you, it might well be worth it. I'll check it out.
• Prizes and contests: These can be hit or miss, but we have long considered bringing back Forum comment prizes (Though Aaron did discontinue them for a reason, this reason may not hold anymore). I was pleased with how the cluelessness critiques week turned out, and I'd definitely consider running more such competitions (organisations can reach out to me if they'd like to propose sponsoring one, as Macroscopic did for that week).
  • I do also think that theme weeks and debate weeks have pretty great ROI in the same way as competitions, and as we get more capacity I plan to run more regular events. In the mean time, collaborative events can be easier to run, so if you are an individual or an org who would like to run an event with the Forum to encourage discussion of a cruxy issue for engaged EAs, message me.
• AI generated content: This is part of a broader thing we want to do when we have more mod capacity. LessWrong has a rejected content feature which lets them be more opinionated about what they want on the site. We've long planned to implement this and have been constrained by capacity (both dev and mod). The Featured Page is working somewhat to do the opposite (the carrot not the stick) but it isn't quite enough for the most engaged users (it only gets around 1 post a day). I'm keen to do something here - probably not outright banning AI content though, because I don't think that is the future-proof option.
• Ask people to apply to join the Forum: I've been thinking about this recently, especially with recent waves of time-consuming bots signing up (you guys hopefully never see this because they can't post until they are approved, but a lot of behind the scenes work, mostly from @Dane Valerie goes into checking the legitimacy of new posters). Facebook groups have that little box where you have to explain why you want to join and an admin approves you - I think something like this might work great for the Forum. I'll consider it further.
  • Overall I'm probably a bit less keen on gate-keeping than you, but also I agree more than I disagree. The Forum, as I see it, should not be positioned as a 'top of funnel' product. However I do think that it can be helpful for people who are learning how to think like EAs and I don't want it to be totally inaccessible to them. 

Thanks again for writing it, and let me know if you (or other commenters) want to find a time to chat about the Forum on a call. I'm especially keen to hear more ideas, like these, for achieving the vision of the Forum that I think we share. 

Caveat here that I'm representing only my views, as EA Forum Product Lead, and not the considered views of CEA the organisation. 

[Edit: Giving Season plans are live, but I'm still taking suggestions, here or in the comments on the post]

Aiming to finalise plans for Giving Season this week. I'm not running a donation election (for reasons I'll explain in the announcement), which gives us some more space to focus directly on having important conversations to do with funding and resource allocation in the movement. 

I'll run a marginal funding week (week starting 16 Nov - message me if you'd like to take part), and a debate week (planning it for week starting Nov 30). I reckon I have capacity for two more themed weeks, as well as AMAs etc... 

What would you like to see us run over Giving Season? 

I'm biased but I think it's a tricky comparison since giving Tuesday was a big deal that people would prepare for for a while, and this was one post. So I wouldn't personally say these numbers are embarassingly low. 

haha damnit this was bound to happen with my claude coding.