Ok, I take your point to be that in any area where reasonable EAs may disagree, we should make sure to flag that (which is probably most topics tbh)!

I would agree with that, and maybe the risks you're flagging just don't seem that serious to me because the groups I've been part of always have made that diversity clear 🤔

This seems like maybe a good idea, but could you spell out your reasons? Are you just worried about anyone joining thinking that the group is about any particular thing?

(My own experience is that most people in EA view purchasing vegan food ass a good thing, and I never felt the need to explain this, or never felt that anyone was turned off by it) 

I'm quite a visual thinker, so I wanted to say *that the pictures on the featured page really help to draw me in!

Hey Ronan, I agree completely.

One small thing: I wonder whether it makes sense for urban animals to have a global nonprofit? If it is research-focused, then that makes sense. But urban animals always exist locally, and I could imagine it being advantageous for an org to adopt a local branding, e.g. "New York wildlife protection" or something like that. So maybe the solutions is actually many urban animal advocacy orgs, with some coordination and one international research organization to support them?

If anyone wants to actually make this argument, I'm willing to hear it. But let's be clear: the pretend-argument in the post is very disconnected from the reality of how welfare improvements actually happen (which is fine, given that it's a parody!). To give just one example, it's not the case that welfare studies happen 'in the lab' - they do happen on farms, but they are not typically conducted by the farmers. And if they were conducted by the farmers, people probably wouldn't trust the studies.

I didn't notice at all how old the post was before I made this comment 😂

As @RyanCarey pointed out, it is true but also tautological, so I'm not sure how useful it can be. 

I would be interested in more posts about the risks new funding might bring. But I don't want people to be so worried about irreversibility that they don't use that funding, when it could do a hell of a lot of good, and there might be good reasons to spend it quickly. 

Right, but there are arguments behind those moves that this post doesn't engage with, because it remains at an abstract level. 

Oh! I had the idea that new posts start with 3 karma, but then I was wrong.

In that case, I suppose downvoting is less common than I thought. I did still see one or two new posts with 0 or -1 karma, so my argument would still stand for them. But this is clearly less of an issue than I thought.

Suggestion for the forum: prompt anyone who downvotes a (new) post to leave a comment

If you look at the newest posts on any given day, you'll see a number with 0 or 1 karma. If my understanding is correct, this means they have been downvoted. Yet a lot of these posts clearly involved a lot of work and are well intended. I imagine that to put so much effort into a post only to be immediately downvoted, and possibly have your post disappear from the front page and be read by very few people as a result, must be quite disheartening.

Of course many of these posts have flaws. But it would be good then for anyone who downvotes it - or even disagree-votes - to say why and provide feedback. I think requiring this would be too much, but if downvoting triggered a comment-box to pop up, that might help to encourage such feedback to be given. I'm imagining this working the same way voting on a poll prompts you to also add a comment. And if doing this across the board seems too annoying, it could be made to apply only to posts with, idk, <10 karma?