EA Forum feature suggestion thread

It's still a crime that we don't support tables and it's a second crime that no one else has mentioned this yet.

I would consider something to reduce the karma users can get from commenting on controversial posts. Right now it seems easy to get very high scores by making not really that great comments in such places.

As an example, I think this comment [EA(p) · GW(p)] I made is decent. It makes a true and relevant point that no-one else had mentioned . But it's not great; the topic of that thread is not that important, and the all the comments in it, let alone mine alone, do not resolve the issue. Most importantly, that comment is definitely not over 50% as good as this article [EA · GW] I wrote. I would say the article is at least a thousand times more important, and took at least a thousand times longer to write.

I'm not sure how exactly you would do this though, as all the most obvious methods have significant drawbacks.

It would very dramatically improve my experience of the Forum if there were the option to hide posts. This would mean that the first page of the Forum would always be posts that were relevant to me. As it stands, whenever I visit the Forum most of the posts which I can see are not relevant to me (perhaps because I've already read them and don't want to read them again or check in on the ongoing discussion), whereas posts which are relevant to me and which I would want to visit again are invisible if they are more than a few days old.

Dark mode.

I'd like users to be able to attach/link a profile picture to their EA Forum profile, and that these pictures would be viewable next to their usernames in posts or comments. I think this would make the forum a bit more human and friendly!

Footnotes are great!

One feature that would make then even greater is if I could copy paste text from a Google Doc that includes footnotes, and have them be formatted correctly.

I'd like to see the experimental sequences feature rolled out to all users.

(Probably has been suggested before but thought I'd add): A small indicator for the original poster of the top-level post in the comments. Like the microphone on Reddit.

Co-authors on posts should also share the karma of the post. I don't know how they should, whether it's equal split, or some percentage of the whole (e.g. if there's 100 karma each person gets 75 or something).

(I noticed this on 1 account for a post the person had co-written ~6 months ago)

I suspect that many people don't post on the forum because they're worried about their post being poorly received and damaging their reputation in the EA community.

I believe this because I feel this way myself, because I've heard other people around me worrying a lot about posting to the forum, because Will MacAskill spoke on the 80,000 hours podcast of being anxious about their reputation being damaged after posting on the forum, and because of the existence of Aaron Gertler's talk "Why you (yes, you) should post on the EA Forum".

Perhaps, by default, new posts could be anonymous until a certain karma threshold (say 30 karma) is met. After that post meets the karma threshold, the true author of the post could become visible.

That way, authors could post knowing that their reputation wouldn't be damaged if their post wasn't well received, but that they would get the credit if the post was well received.

I'd expect this to increase the number of posts (both good and bad) from hesitant new users, and I think that the increase in the number of mediocre new posts would be a cost worth paying. It's good for people to contribute and feel valued for their contribution, especially if it encourages them to make more valuable contributions in the future.

I think it'd be important that the anonymous-until-threshold was the default (i.e. opt out), so that people didn't feel embarrassed about using it.

Can we add agreement karma to comments on all posts?

Level 3 headings should be supported. Unless it's changed recently, it currently jumps from Level 2 to Level 4, which makes it hard to logically format complex documents.

We should make it harder to manipulate your own comments' karma. My favoured approach would be to deactivate all voting on one's own comments. Also fine would be if by default, you strongly upvote and strongly agree with all of your own comments.

There was a good amount [EA(p) · GW(p)] of agreement about this previously.

Option to @mention usernames.

Should have something like an autocomplete and an opt-out-able notification/mail whenever one is mentioned. 

Having recently wrote a post [? · GW] that got a lot of silent downvotes, I've been thinking more about the general role of silent downvotes and how we could mitigate their downsides. (See some earlier discussion here [EA(p) · GW(p)].)

Silent downvotes are important for content ranking/visibility and providing a rough high-level signal of what the Forum community values/disvalues, but they have some pretty important disadvantages, especially when they represent a preponderance of a post's karma:

• They can be badly demoralising to authors, without providing the kind of actionable feedback they could use to do better. (I've seen plenty of plaintive comments asking people to explain their downvotes, often with no responses.)
• They create an atmosphere of tension and adversariality that I think tends to degrade the quality of discourse (as well as being generally stressful for many people).

There's already a feature that allows authors to hide comment karma on selected posts. I'm not sure entirely how it works, but I think it means that if the author chooses, nobody can see karma scores on that post?

That might be what some authors want, and is maybe preferable to seeing lots of silent downvotes, but at least for me it seems way worse than seeing downvotes and knowing why. I want to be able to make that update, but it's often hard to do that based on silent downvotes alone.

It would be great to get more information from people about their downvotes, but any system for doing that needs to be super quick, simple, and easy – if a silent downvoter had time/energy/interest in providing an in-depth explanation of their downvote they'd just write a comment. But I think getting even a couple of bits more information from silent downvoters would be super valuable to authors.

The solution I have in mind for this right now is to provide a little optional pop-up next to the post karma total with a few common reasons for downvoting, plus an "Other" option (with or without the option to specify). You'd probably want to iterate a few times on the options, but my first pass would be:

• I don't like the tone (rude/tendentious/uncharitable)
• I disagree with core claims
• It has bad priorities / misses key considerations in a way that makes it unhelpful, even if its narrow claims are true (this one is obviously too long as-is)
• It's badly written / hard to read
• Other

Then show the results to the author somehow (e.g. on the analytics tab).

You could also do this for upvotes; this might be nice and would reduce asymmetry with downvotes, but I'm not too concerned about it. You could also extend it to comment downvotes, though this seems lower priority to me.

I'm guessing a new feature like this would be a fairly significant lift code-wise, but I tentatively think it would be worth it – right now I see this as a fairly big problem with quality of discourse and community on the Forum.

I'd like the Forum to support superscript and subscript.

Any thoughts or updates on implementing "two axis" voting? This feature is described here [LW(p) · GW(p)].

I don't really want to add pressure or pull things forward, I just wanted to check if there were thoughts on this.

For more context, the post below is a situation where this was useful :

The above shows one comment chain where a good idea seems to be downvoted because of disagreement, and not content.

 Basically, I didn't like (and really many others as well) how several comments in that post were treated voting wise, even if at the same time, we disagreed with the actual content. 

It seems possible this could be alleviated by the two axis voting.

BTW I also really like a bunch of other features and I have ideas, but basically you don't want to get me started. 

Effective Animal Advocacy (EAA) forum

EDIT: I made this suggestion into an EA forum post [EA · GW] so I deleted it from here to avoid duplication. The post contains the text that was originally here.

I think the EA Forum should allow authors to pick one of the images they attached into their post as the "preview image" when the post is shared on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

I don't think this feature currently exists, and I think it would help drive traffic to the EA Forum whenever posts are shared. I'm assuming that the authors would link an image that is more enticing than the standard EA forum logo, which would result in slightly higher click-through rates. Medium.com and most other CMS's allow you to pick a preview image. I think Medium.com's UI for picking a "featured image" is a good example of how to design this feature.

↑ comment by Vaidehi Agarwalla (vaidehi_agarwalla) · 2022-06-13T17:05:50.689Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Adding to the better preview image for twitter, I notice other sites have top quotes from the article as a cover image, which I think is pretty interesting. 

(probably not worth implementing, but just for inspiration really)

Replies from: jpaddison

↑ comment by JP Addison (jpaddison) · 2022-06-14T01:25:38.283Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Thanks! No worries about suggesting "inspirational" features.

1. Could analytics be displayed on the forum? I think it'd be interesting to people to see how many people read different posts. This is also related to the question re: the forum prize - I reckon many authors would be more motivated by seeing that their posts are widely read than by a cash prize.

2. I often see very long posts that jump right into the introduction without summary. Could one introduce a field that is mandatory if a posts is more than 300 words long that forces the author to provide a 200 characters (or so) summary? Or something like this:

https://www.elsevier.com/authors/journal-authors/highlights

could even be added by the mods.

On-site image hosting for posts/comments? This is mostly a minor QoL benefit, and maybe there would be challenges with storage. Another benefit would be that images would not vanish if their original source does.

I'd like to have the option to make polls within a post. I recently wrote a short question post to see if an idea seems promising and I got a couple of upvotes and no comments. Having the option to get quick and cheap feedback from the community would've been useful.

When a user moves a controversial post to drafts, other readers get worried of censorship. Two recent examples: https://mobile.twitter.com/erikphoel/status/1559527499188654085 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sD4kdobiRaBpxcL8M/what-happened-to-the-women-and-effective-altruism-post?commentId=GpSneam3oSwaBYDWH [EA(p) · GW(p)]

It might make sense to tweak the prose. Maybe let moderators add a reason, like for deleted comments (e.g. "spam", "moved to draft after a request from the author"), and for users write "the author of this post marked it as a private draft"

Thanks so much to the team for their work. I really like the layout of this forum. It's clean and pleasant to use.

An automatic jargon-explainer for commonly used jargon. This gets the best of both worlds, for readers and writers. People can use jargon more often,^[1] and not have to worry about it not landing with readers. And readers unaware of the jargon can hover over the word to see what it means, while readers who already do know can keep reading. Makes it easier to read for people within a wider range of inferential distance.

 

1. ^{^}

   Efficient communication without having to link to each jargony word, since that might get distracting and take attention away from links they do want to emphasise.

It could be cool if the EA Forum allowed for boxes of text that start off collapsed but can be expanded, in the way that e.g. Gwern's site does (here's a random example). This could be used for long sections that the author wants to signal (a) are sort-of digressions and/or (b) may be worth skipping for some people. 

There are a few things authors can already do that serve a similar purpose:

• Have a section that explicitly says at the top "I think this section will be of interest to far fewer people than the rest of this post, so feel free to skip it."
• Move a section to the end and call it an appendix
• Just link to a google doc that sort of serves as the expandable box/appendix
• Move the section into a footnote

But the first two of those options seem to less clearly signal "We really think fewer people should read this than should read the rest of this post", compared to having a collapsed but expandable box of text. 

And the third option might sometimes signal that too strongly, and also doesn't allow things to show up when you use the Forum's search function.

And the fourth option doesn't seem to work well for fairly long sections of text; more than a few paragraphs in a single footnote would be unusual and might be a little annoying (due to the small text). Also, that would remove the option of the author including footnotes within that section of text.

(I originally raised this idea here [EA(p) · GW(p)], in the context of whether it'd be best to include full transcripts from 80k podcast episodes when link posting them to the EA Forum. I think it could make sense to include the transcripts as collapsed but expandable boxes of text, so that terms from the transcript will appear when doing searches on the Forum - which wouldn't happen if the transcript wasn't included at all - but people don't feel like they have to read the whole transcript before they comment on the post.)

Can I opt out of Forum favourites? I'm sorry but I hate it

Add Agreement Karma to posts.

This comment [EA(p) · GW(p)] suggesting this feature got 32 Agreement with 9 votes:

↑ comment by WilliamKiely · 2022-12-01T18:49:25.239Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Perhaps it's not clear whether adding agreement karma to posts is positive on net; but I think perhaps it would be worth adding for a month as an experiment.

A counter-consideration is that many voters on the Forum may not understand the difference between overall karma and agreement karma still. Unconclusive weak evidence: This answer [EA(p) · GW(p)] got 3 overall karma with 22 votes (at some point it was negative) and 18 agreement karma with 20 votes:

(It's unconclusive evidence because while the regular karma downvotes surprised me, people could have had legitimate reasons for not liking the meta-answer and downvoting it. My suspicion though is that at least some people down-voted this in an attempt to "Disagree" vote in the poll.)

Replies from: Patricio

↑ comment by Pato (Patricio) · 2023-01-19T06:11:14.621Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

I agree that maybe people don't get it (like kinda me) but I think both things, posts and comments, should have it or neither.

While I think LaTeX is useful, it is not very intuitive or user friendly and posting long curated articles is quite tedious. It would be nice to have a feature like Elementor.

I think there would be a lot of value in a detailed how-to document for content creators explaining each step needed to go from a GDoc or WordDoc to a forum post. This would optimally include a directory for keywords like footnotes, typographical emphasis, Title/Header/Normal text functions, etc.

Can we put this page in the sidebar?

Double the karma weight of votes made before the new karma system was implemented. All votes used to be worth one point. For example, let's take an old post like this [EA · GW]. It currently has 43 karma and 43 votes (probably all of them are upvotes). For comparison, my newest post has 53 karma and 16 upvotes. If you think about it, that old post is clearly more endorsed by the community. There were fewer readers when it was posted and a very high percentage of them chose to upvote it and probably many would have strongly upvoted if that was an option. Nowadays, even a regular upvote by high-karma users is worth two points. Posts like that old post do not appear in forum favourites and other places like that but they should. If you doubled the karma of such old posts, the karma for that old one would be 86 instead of 43 - a much better representation of how much the community endorses that post. Ah, maybe you should even triple the karma weight. Posts like this [EA · GW] would then actually make forum favourites and I think they should.

Sans-serif font in body text! The comments section is absolutely beautiful to read, but I find the body text of posts very difficult. Most blogs and online news sources seem to use sans-serif, probably for readability.

Alternatively, give users the option to pick their own font. Also, maybe make text black instead of a lighter grey?

i would find it helpful to establish a norm to begin posts with a short (!) 'tl;dr'-section which summarizes the main results/arguments of the article, since sometimes it is hard to tell what a post is about only from the title/the preview one gets by hovering over the link.

For Shortform:

1. The link to get here from the main page is awfully small and inconspicuous (1 of 145 individual links on the page according to a Chrome extension)
   1. I can imagine it being near/stylistically  like:
      1. "All Posts" (top of sidebar)
      2. "Recommendations" in the center
      3. "Frontpage Posts", but to the main section's side or maybe as a replacement for it you can easily toggle back and forth from
2. Would be cool to be able to sort and aggregate like with the main posts (nothing to filter by afaik)
   1. I'd really appreciate being able to see the highest-scoring Shortform posts ever, but afaik can't easily do that atm

"agree/disagree" for posts, not only comments.

Might reduce downvotes on posts

A emoticon or image next to someone's first post either on the homepage or when you click into the post so that people know that they are engaging with a potential newcomer and maybe are nicer / more welcoming?

Could be obvious downsides to this I haven't thought of

Tags for tags: We should turn the "Related entries" sections of wiki pages into native tags so we can build a crowdsourced graph of links between the wiki pages. Links can be uni- or bidirectional and specify different types of relationships such as "A is related to B" or "A is a parent of B".

I worry a bit that all the suggestions are about details, whereas the macro trend is that public discourse is moving toward Twitter, and blog content linked from Twitter. One thing that could help attract new audience would be to revive the EA Forum Twitter account, automatically, or manually.

Has anyone considered a hackernews-style section? I know there is already support for posting links, but:

• They act as posts, while their function is not at all like that in Hackernews. E.g.,
  • I don’t want my subscriptions to people show me their submitted links. At not as post notifications.
• Hackernews thrives by banning editorialization. You can only submit a link with its original title (or a sufficiently neutral title in case the original title sucks. They have guidelines on their site, iirc.). The poster has no privilege over other users.
• There is a culture of posting relevant links that the community finds useful. We do not have such a culture here, because we do not provide the medium and guidelines for it.

This links section will create a distributed content aggregator for our community. Considering finding relevant content in our current era is a hard problem, this can be very useful. I think a lot of us here are distasteful of surroundings ourselves with news outlets, for example. It’d be great if we could get a filtered important news list through the community. Adding features such as an RSS feed for links with X+ karma will be helpful in this endeavor.

Also see lobsters.

Import from HTML/gdoc/word/whatever: One feature I miss from the old forum was the ability to submit HTML directly. This allowed one to write the post in google docs or similar (with tables, footnotes, sub/superscript, special characters, etc.), export it as HTML, paste into the old editor, and it was (with some tweaks) good to go.

This is how I posted my epistemic modesty piece [EA · GW] (which has a table which survived the migration, although the footnote links no longer work). In contrast, when cross-posting it to LW2, I needed the kind help of a moderator - and even they needed to make some adjustments (e.g. 'writing out' the table).

Given such a feature was available before, hopefully it can be done again. It would be particularly valuable for the EA forum as:

• A fair proportion of posts here are longer documents which benefit from the features available in things like word or gdocs. (But typically less mathematics than LW, so the nifty LATEX editor finds less value here than there).
• The current editor has much less functionality than word/gdocs, and catching up 'most of the way' seems very labour intensive and could take a while.
• Most users are more familiar with gdocs/word than editor/markdown/latex (i.e. although I can add $\Omega$ and other special characters with the Latex editor and a some googling, I'm more familiar with doing this in gdocs - and I guess folks who have less experience with Latex or using a command line would find this difference greater).
• Most users are probably drafting longer posts on google docs anyway.
• Clunkily re-typesetting long documents in the forum editor manually (e.g. tables as image files) poses a barrier to entry, and so encourages linking rather than posting, with (I guess?) less engagement.

A direct 'import from gdoc/word/etc.' would be even better, but an HTML import function alone (given software which has both wordprocessing and HTML export 'sorted' are prevalent) would solve a lot of these problems at a stroke.

On mobile, I think there's no way to remove your vote on your own comments. On desktop, I can just click my vote again, but on mobile the normal workflow is to tap to cycle between normal / strong / no vote, and I can't strong upvote my own comments, so I get "stuck" in the cycle.

edit: ok I think you can do it by just going through the cycle quickly enough, but I definitely struggled with this before, perhaps it depends on the latency of your connection to the server...

An option to post anonymously or non anononymously with your account (instead of having to create a new account to post anonymously, and spend hours on internet anagram server finding an anonymous account name)

I'd like to be able to add pinned posts or comments to my profile. Several people have asked me about my EA origin story so I've tried to refer them to this comment [EA(p) · GW(p)], but I always have a hard time finding the link.

Pingbacks should include comments

Very specific and small comment, but I'd like to see the "Reply" button for comments be bigger and more noticeable. I would prefer it to be an actual button (with padding and an outline), and with a message icon beside it. It's happened to me twice where I couldn't figure out how to reply to a comment until ~30 seconds of searching for the reply button.

Display a more detailed breakdown of karma and agreement karma by number of upvotes and downvotes rather than overall amount. 

I think that the weighted voting system is counterproductive overall (it creates perverse incentives, it ascribes false authority to users who are more prolific or who may have expertise in one area and poor understanding in others, and it is needlessly undemocratic) and makes it harder to meaningfully understand the karma of a given post or comment, but this could go someway in making the actual impact of posts and comments more legible. I think there is a difference between how to read agreement karma for a comment that has 10 agreement karma overall from, say, 8 2 point upvotes and 2 -3 minus point downvote versus one that has 10 1-point upvotes, and the breakdown of how a comment achieved its agreement karma is not currently legible, which makes agreement karma a much less useful indicator than it could be otherwise.

P.S.: Similar suggestions have been made below on how the karma and voting system can be tinkered with to make it more meaningful, but seems different enough to warrant a new top-level comment.

Couldn't see if someone already suggested this but:

• Have a separate field for org name on profile 
• Option to select if you're writing a post on behalf of an organisation or as an individual (this is very important imo often people write posts and it's not clear who they work for) 
  • Auto-tag with org name + "org updates" or similar tag
• Organisation tag shows all the people who've listed org name on their profile 

Hi there, as a fellow EA, developer and avid creator of Userscripts, here are my thoughts on first seeing the site.

The design is very different from other online communities. This makes for an awkward first impression, users like familiarity in their UI.

I believe the gold standard for forums are Reddit, Facebook, StackOverflow, Discourse. By gold standard I mean some of the best minds in software UX works on these site. I particularly love Discourse.

This is a forum, yet there are no topics / subtopics. It tries to do too much in one place. I don't think questions, articles and events belong in in the same listing. I am aware of the filters, my criticism still stands :-)

Everywhere I move the mouse I'm assaulted by a popup. Why do you hate me? :-D

Infinite scroll / load more adds uncertainty to the UX. It's hard to track context, I can't tell if I click somewhere all my "progress" will be lost.

Gray on gray! No gray background please!

Titles are long, yet the columns are narrow.

The comments font looks bold, it should be lighter.

Some pages have too much info. "How to use the Forum" shouldn't have a pages long comments section, specially with unrelated discussions.

Still, thank you for taking the time in trying to innovate and contribute to the OS community!

↑ comment by Daniel Vanzin · 2022-10-01T19:31:35.070Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Alright, here is a very crude preview

https://openuserjs.org/scripts/icetbr/Clearer_EffectiveAltruism.org_Forum

Replies from: Habryka

↑ comment by Habryka · 2022-10-01T20:12:39.922Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

It does sadly look very broken for me: 

It does look better on the all-posts page: 

Some thoughts

• I like the idea of making the text smaller and increasing the density of the post list. Seems good to experiment with
• I think getting rid of the grey background really breaks a lot of the recent discussion section as well as the overall navigability of the UI (and also we've gotten tons of user feedback that people found the perfect white as the whole background to feel quite straining on their eyes).
• I do overall think the font is just too small for me to read. I expect most users would zoom in a decent amount in order to actually make it comfortable to skim. 
• I think having line-breaks in the post-titles is quite bad for skimming, and also gives undue attention to posts that have longer titles, which seems quite bad.
• While I do find it easier to skim to move the post-icons to the left of the items, I think it gets the information hierarchy wrong. I think the type of post (link post, curated, personal blog) is at best a secondary piece of information, and the design you proposed gives it too much prominence. 

Replies from: Daniel Vanzin

↑ comment by Daniel Vanzin · 2022-10-02T00:17:41.536Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Yeah, it messes up a few other pages as well. To be fixed.

I think the site needs a dark mode. More and more people are favoring it. I use my monitor in a nearly yellow tone, redshift -O 2800k so I like the white background just fine. I can't get behind the gray background though. I mean, how many sites does that? I find it harder to read.

The font I used could be one size larger, I did made an alternate screenshot to compare. Yet research suggests the current font size, not the one from my script, is ideal. I still favor higher density, as I can analyze the content faster.

Regarding skimming, I read titles by rows, not lines. I think we've been conditioned for this. Just look at Reddit or Medium. I find it easy to read a few words and skip to the next row. The title is too important to be trimmed away, I would sooner hide the author, date an comments count. I think it's very hard to find a site with this few characters in a title.

I haven't used the site enough to give a proper opinion on the icons. I think they either should be used more or hidden altogether. But I mix my feelings regarding topics, something I didn't touch yet. They will either be on the left of the title, on the end of the line, or below the titles, in a smaller font. I can't tell you how much I want to see 50 titles at a time and instantly know where they fit. Blue tagged AI, green tagged Animal Wellfare, etc.

I plan on enhancing my script as I spend more time here. It might take a while. I mostly wanted to take a feel if my experiences are in line with others. I'm happy to keep my preferences as a userscript and give the users another choice.

Replies from: Habryka, Charles He

↑ comment by Habryka · 2022-10-02T02:54:38.585Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

I think the site needs a dark mode. More and more people are favoring it. 

The site already has one! Or more precisely LessWrong has one, and it probably wouldn't be too hard to adapt it to the EA Forum (which shares a codebase).

The font I used could be one size larger, I did made an alternate screenshot to compare. Yet research suggests the current font size, not the one from my script, is ideal. I still favor higher density, as I can analyze the content faster.

I am generally skeptical of research in this space, but yeah, the current font size is what seems to work pretty well in user tests I've done. I do also think sometimes it makes sense to have more density and smaller font sizes (and like, comment text is already almost that small)

I can't get behind the gray background though. I mean, how many sites does that? I find it harder to read.

I mean, how about Reddit? 

Or how about Youtube (the background of the videos): 

Or how about Facebook:

The pattern of "grey background with white boxes in front, occasional header or nav element on the grey background" is as far as I can tell the standard pattern to reduce eye fatigue while also ensuring high text contrast. I actually can't think of a content heavy site that doesn't do this.

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-10-02T01:30:03.632Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

I'm confused why the all white background is better, grey is easier on the eyes and the non-white color gives a natural framing to the other content. Both points seem pretty normal in design.

I disagree that those other sites are superior. Also a major issue is that they use visual/video content (reddit and FB) and have different modes of use/seeking attention. They are designed around a scrolling feed, producing a constant stream of content, showing 1-3 items at a time.

Setting the above aside, I'm uncertain why your changes reflect ideas from them. For example, your changes to text, make posts much more compact than Reddit or SO.

Replies from: Daniel Vanzin

↑ comment by Daniel Vanzin · 2022-10-02T02:45:17.268Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

"Grey is easier" I don't think it is. Would you disagree that most publications use a white background? Could you provide at least some examples of ones that doesn't?

"I disagree that those other sites are superior." We would have to define superior. For me, the best (most well paid) minds in UX + the most number of users are objective measures.  That doesn't mean we have to copy them, but it beckons to the familiarity factor. 

I agree that they have a constant stream of content and this matters on design. What use is to have 50 compacted posts that I can scan in 1 second, if we have 30 posts a week? It is unfortunate that we don't have a higher traffic. I believe in reducing barriers of entry to help on this, and making a familiar site is but a very small of those.

To your third point, open a screenshot of my version, the current design here and any of them. See you can spot the ideas I try to incorporate. I don't know your background, but I can give you a a technical response. Fonts, spacing, that kind of thing. I basically copied the typography from them, while keeping the site identity and adding a few of my preferences.

Please note I did that in about 4 hours of work. The gross of it was very fast, some details took very long. 1 hour I spent fighting  the pop ups before deciding to disable them

Replies from: Charles He

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-10-02T04:02:47.833Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

"Grey is easier" I don't think it is. Would you disagree that most publications use a white background? Could you provide at least some examples of ones that doesn't?

 

I checked two sites that you listed, FB and StackExchange, and they literally use a grey/off white background. Started with these two and I stopped after checking these two, I suspect I'll find more. 

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/101876/why-not-use-darker-backgrounds-instead-of-white

The stackexchange site literally answered this very question and one answer pointed out that the very site is off-white (although less than grey or the EA forum). The top answer here supports grey backgrounds: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/23965/is-there-a-problem-with-using-black-text-on-white-backgrounds?rq=1.

 

Before I thought this opinion about the use of grey (and avoidance of high contrast) was normal/standard before. Now I'm even more sure, and not knowing/ opposing about it seems sort of strange to me. 

 

"I disagree that those other sites are superior." We would have to define superior. For me, the best (most well paid) minds in UX + the most number of users are objective measures.  That doesn't mean we have to copy them, but it beckons to the familiarity factor. 

There's a lot going on here, but IMO neither of those things make this view very promising. This is because they are designed for MAU/growth hacking and the audience is different (and I don't think this is some elite or niche thing). Also, since the business is multiple billions are year, you naturally get top talent. 

As an analogy, tabloids are popular and well designed for their audience, but that doesn't make them dominant design choices. I do agree that the design on average is good and things work for those sites.

 

Also, I suspect some design choices from those sites have dependencies—I think having an infinite scroll or video or picture focus would affect other design choices, such as size/position/font of text, so copying those design choices to a forum might not be appropriate without more sophistication.

 

I don't want to be disagreeable or press too much here on you here. Honestly I want to learn about design and different perspectives, but I don't think I am?

Some of the other things you said suggested you have strong views that seemed more personal and also that you use some unusual color filter? This makes me speculate that you are applying a personal perspective disproportionately and ignoring "the customer", but maybe this is unfair.

Replies from: Charles He

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-10-02T04:13:29.833Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

??? Yeah, Reddit's design literally uses a grey background. It's darker than the EA forum.

Replies from: Daniel Vanzin

↑ comment by Daniel Vanzin · 2022-10-02T12:59:54.863Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

You're talking about the framing. Sorry, I didn't realize. It's not among my concerns to the site. Yes, It's a preference. There are a few main trends regarding framing, I'm on the one against it.  Gray on gray refers to the comments section, and any other place where there is a gray background and a "gray" font. It is not an unusual choice, I just don't find it the best. As an  argument, you read articles in a white background, why comments should have gray, aside from structural purposes?

Regarding audience, I kind of disagree. Yes, the audience here is not the same of that of Reddit. And I think this should change. Still I'd like to see a site like this. It literally created its own engine! Which is awesome by the way. I love VulcanJs. Here is an example of what I would like to see on hitting the main page: https://forum.vuejs.org/.

Just for reference, I have 20 years as a developer, and I have been part in maybe hundreds of design discussions, even though I'm a front/back end developer. So, no expert but I'm somewhat on the loop. The changes I propose are a mix of personal choices and experience/research based opinions.

Also, any discussion of familiarity starts with mobile, which I don't use. My focus is mainly on the 1080p 24inch desktop experience.

Few UX suggestions for post edit:

Add a "publish" button in the options below:

Have a Save Draft / Publish button on the top (not just bottom) when in edit mode / or a "skip to bottom" to make it easier to save /publish 

Meta suggestion: Could be nice to start a new features thread and/or use a feature suggestion forum at some point, this one is getting a bit difficult to navigate right now. 

MVP option could be to create a copy of this thread but delete all the implemented features so that only WIP /not implemented ideas are here. 

It would be useful to schedule posts ahead of time. 

If we had a tag called "Links" for  posts that aren't displayed on the front page, then we could have a "Hackernews"/ "Reddit" style section were people can share -without comment- external links related to EA or that could be discussed in the context of EA. This would be different from current "link posts" which might have a higher (imagined) bar to posting.

Along a similar lines, there could be a low effort way for the current Shortform function to emulate Twitter, where the 'magic' sorting algorithm also takes into account the length of the post.

I think the user bio editor in Settings should be a bigger text area with rich text formatting (like the ones for posts). This would make them more WYSIWYG since user bios are displayed in a similar style to posts.

Hi, sorry to be a complainer - I've just seen a new "continue reading" feature and I don't like it. If I stopped reading a sequence or article it means I'm aware of its existence and have chosen not to read it. This feature keeps reminding me of my least favourite articles (right now it's convinced I should read Aaron's placeholder post for a new sequence). I couldn't spot any way to remove it. Okay, that's all, thanks very much for your attention.

Ability to mark items in this thread as “complete”

This thread is the best place to suggest feature requests and it's pretty hard to use because you can't tell which items have been done and which haven't.

Command + K should add a hyperlink!

An option to automatically move a shortform post to a top level post

Groups tags which users can belong to or identify with. These can be displayed publicly in the user's bio, which would allow for automatic search of people with related interest or affiliations. 

Link to profiles on the EA hub. How often do EAs use this website or the Hub to find people to work with? I guess someone tracks this?

I think that karma can be gamified more. 

In StackExchange they have an option of offering bounties for questions which can be collected by answerers. If we'd have something similar here, that could serve as a good signal that someone cares about a question and has yet to get a satisfying answer. 

I'd be curious about what kinds of trades people can do if there would be a process for (probably better publicly) exchanging karma. I can imagine bets being made, offers to help editing, seeking information, a bounty on finding mistakes or whatever. 

I think authors of a post should be able to add the "community" tag to their post.

See also this [EA(p) · GW(p)], this [EA(p) · GW(p)], and this [EA(p) · GW(p)] comments. The first comment thread includes a workaround: creating the post on the http://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/community [? · GW] page

↑ comment by JP Addison (jpaddison) · 2023-02-14T21:47:20.611Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

As an aside: I believe this will work right up until you submit it, but am not sure.

Replies from: Lorenzo Buonanno

↑ comment by Lorenzo Buonanno · 2023-02-14T21:59:01.639Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

A non-moderator account currently sees this

for comparison I see this

If someone downvotes, suggest that they explain why

Promoting shortforms to top-level posts, preserving replies. I wanted to do that with this [EA(p) · GW(p)], because reposting it as a top-level post wouldn't preserve existing discussion.

Let co-authors access post analytics

I can get around this by asking the main coauthor to share the analytics, but I´d rather I could access them myself.

Make it possible to only filter / see unread posts by default on the forum homepage. 

This past month I've noticed I've missed a bunch of cool and relevant posts  because they dropped off the home page too quickly for me to see them. I'd like that not to happen. Not a suggestion, but related: it seems like some good posts fall of the homepage way too quickly. It would be nice to give those posts  a chance to be seen. Often if there are a couple really high popularity posts in a week then the people who happened to post less popular posts get unfairly disadvantaged, which seems suboptimal.

(Not sure if that has been suggested before, but) you should be able to sort comments by magic (the way posts are sorted on the frontpage) or some other better way to combine top+new properties for comments. Otherwise new contributions that are good are read far too rarely, so only very few people will read and upvote them, while the first comments directly receive many upvotes and so get even more upvotes later. Still, upvotes tell a bit about what comments are good, and not everyone wants to read everything.

I would definitely use it myself, but I would strongly suggest also making it the default way comments are sorted.

(That wouldn't totally remove bad dynamics, but it would be a start.)

I'm not sure what the actual feature would be, but make  it easy for people to cross-post from their personal blog (maybe just do substack to start) to the EA Forum. I recently saw the blog prize announcement and there were about 10 blogs linked there i'd never heard of. It would be great to get that content onto the forum.

The EA forum is one of the key public hubs for EA discourse (alongside, in my opinion, facebook, twitter, reddit and a couple of blogs). I respect the forum team's work in trying to build better infrastructure for its users.

The EA forum is active in attempting to improve experience for its users. This makes it easier for me to contribute with things like questions, short forms, sequences etc, etc. 

I wouldn't say this post provides deep truth, but it seeks to build infrastructure which matches the way EAs are. To me, that's an analogy to articles which seek to describe how reality is. If we could only build a forum which suited how people wanted to interact,  then we could do the work of EA faster.

I would like to see this article continued,  with a focus on putting the most relevant additions at the top. I've suggested as much in the comments, moving to a sorting system which moves both new and upvoted comments to the top and allows for completed changes to be hidden.

TL;DR: I'd like to have a single board where to see a summary of the analytics for all my posts.

I've been really enjoying the analytics feature!
I used it for example to notice that my post on persistence [EA · GW] had become very popular, which led me to write a more accessible summary [EA · GW].

One thing I've noticed is that it is very time consuming to track the analytics of each post. That requires me to go to each post, click on analytics and have them load.

I think Medium has a much nicer interface. They have a main user board for stats, from which I can see overall engagement with my writing. It also shows my posts, ordered by recent engagement. I can click on a post to go to the page with the specific stats for that post.

I think this is great, and I'd like to have something similar in the EA forum!

Two consecutive hyphens should autocorrect to an em dash!

That way, a parenthetical clause in the middle of your sentence - like this one - isn't offset by "space hyphen space" on either side--or, even worse, by "hyphen hyphen". Instead, autocorrect two hyphens to a nice, clean em dash—like that.

I think this is a common feature for text editors - Microsoft Word definitely uses it.

I noticed that adding a tag to a post in draft mode now automatically adds the parent tag. But it's not clear to the user why two tags are being added at once. This also contributes to the overtagging of posts.

On Wikipedia, the guideline is to tag pages with the most specific categories they belong to. So if category B is a child of category A, then pages that belong to both A and B should only be tagged with B, whereas pages in A \ B should only be tagged with A.

In general, I think the EA Forum should be more thoughtful about tags. If we want to replicate what Wikipedia does, one possible approach is to automatically remove a parent tag from a post when a user adds a child tag to that post. However, this messes with the voting mechanism of tags. A less disruptive approach is to hide parent tags by default when both the child and parent are added to a post (or hide the child tags if the parent is a white tag), and then allow the user to expand the full list of tags.

I'd like to be able to bookmark comments, in the same way you can bookmark posts. There's a lot of really, really well thought out and written comments, in some cases containing just as much value as articles, and I'd like to be able to bookmark a comment to come back to. 

I'd argue this is even more important than bookmarking articles, because articles have tags and titles to search for, whereas comments don't, and it's easy to loose track of what article and what thread the one you're looking for is contained in.

In-line commenting.

Invisible by default so they don't distract, but you can easily switch visibility.

So the reader particularly interested in some section could dive into the comments particularly about that section.

Also, as a further feature, you could color code different comment types, like:

• blue (default): just a comment
• yellow: fix suggestion
• brown: link to previous discussion / relevant resources
• red: critique ?

Also see @Emrik's  comment [EA(p) · GW(p)] with more rationale.

Have an optional Subtitle line to add more context on forums, and have it be expandable on the front page.

E.g.  "Why The forum should have subtitles: an in-depth look into how subtitles help people get more context in less time"

It would be fantastic if we could set up RSS feeds for individual tags!

↑ comment by Aaron Gertler (aarongertler) · 2021-01-15T10:18:06.246Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

There are multiple ways to accomplish something like this.

You can subscribe to a tag, which will notify you whenever a post gets that tag:

Or set a tag as "required". This will show you only posts with that tag, creating an instant "feed":

Categories / sub-fora / better overview of tags

I think it would be very helpful if the forum was made easier to navigate by creating categories/sub-fora, making tags more intuitively accessible, or some other method. E.g., how do I find the most-upvoted forum posts and comments about EA investing?

Could we have better help for those whose content has been (heavily) downvoted?

I often see people plaintively saying something like: "My comment has been heavily downvoted, but I have no idea why!" Can the forum be more helpful for this scenario?

Not sure what the best solution is, but here's an idea:

• if someone's comment/post has been downvoted enough for it to have net negative status, the UI allows the user to ask for feedback (e.g. it's an option when you click on the three dots on the top right hand side)
• if they ask for feedback, the forum contacts all those who downvoted it and also some high-karma people and links to the content and asks for feedback (which they don't have to give, and which would be anonymous)

The feature could perhaps incorporate additional features

• to increase the probability that people provide feedback, they could be remunerated (this could an alternative use for the Forum prize money, if it was decided that forum prizes didn't incentivise people more than the existing karma system) (perhaps there would need to be some thought given to avoiding the perverse incentive for people to give downvotes too liberally)
• the system could incorporate some mechanism to make sure that users don't overuse/abuse this feature (e.g. perhaps the user has to write out and submit to the forum what they will do differently in the future before they are allowed to use the feature again)

Having the option of suggesting edits easily, as in google docs. 

I think that it being easy for readers to add links, explanations and corrections might improve the quality of posts and enable better participation between commenters and the OP. Specifically, I think that we should link more, especially to other posts on the forum, and it would be helpful if that could be aided by commenters.

Technically, that could work by saving a history of versions (which would perhaps be a good idea anyway), perhaps by remembering the diffs in a git-like fashion. Then, readers can propose a new version which they edit just like any other post, which waits for the OP approval. 

If you allow anyone to verify edits to the post, that would be a nice way to do a mini-wiki.

Can I get email updates about a specific tag?

When LessWrong posts are crossposted to the EA Forum, there is a link in EA Forum comments section:

This link just goes to the top of the LessWrong version of the post and not to the comments. I think either the text should be changed or the link go to the comments section.

Check if information cascades [? · GW] / social influence bias is a problem on EA Forum.

If it is, maybe we could implement Emrik's idea to counter it [EA · GW], or some similar mechanism.

See here [EA · GW] for the explanation of the potential problem.

To test it, we could do an experiment where some bot (or server-side process) randomly upvotes or downvotes new posts. We measure final karma after some fixed time, and see if that single vote snowballed.

relevant discussion [EA · GW]

Maybe a feature to let Google Doc headers/internal links be switched automatically to EAF headers? This will be mildly useful to me, and considering the most common type of broken links I see from others on the forum, probably to others as well!

Would it be interesting for EA Forum questions to have a feature to allow surveys and predictions? In theory, one could post a question with a link to Google Forms, but maybe some kind of integration would encourage more surveys and forecasts. Given the large number people who read the EA Forum, there is margin to collect lots of data.

Ability to include a poll in when you make a question post, à la Twitter! I know this feature has been suggested before, in response to which Aaron Gertler made the Effective Altruism Polls Facebook group, but it seems to have plateaued at 578 members after 2.5 years. Response rates in the forum would probably be much higher.

Reading time estimates on older posts.

If I'm not mistaken, posts before a certain date do not have the estimated time in minutes to read the post near the publication date and author's name at the top.

Inline draft comments
I really like the forum editor. Unfortunately, I don't end up writing posts in it very much as I almost always ask for feedback and reviewers can not easily add their suggestions.

Google doc comments are probably the gold standard here.

↑ comment by Vaidehi Agarwalla (vaidehi_agarwalla) · 2022-03-07T21:03:17.611Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Strong +1 the few times I have drafted a post in the forum editor i've then copypasted it into a gdoc to get comments. 

I remember a while ago this was in the LW feature pipeline, not sure if it still is?

Replies from: Charles He

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-03-07T23:37:17.591Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

I think it's in beta [LW · GW]. 

(As you know better than me, I guess there's several principled and mundane reasons why a LW feature won't make it to the forum for a while).

 

Update: 

From the post [LW · GW]:

Woah, multiple users can write a doc at once? I think that's hard and impressive to achieve.

Replies from: syc

↑ comment by Sarah Cheng (syc) · 2022-03-09T22:19:04.220Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

LW have been working hard on this, and are still ironing out the bugs. When it's more production-ready, the EA Forum devs will figure out how we might want to enable it (ex. we might want some different functionality here).

If you're excited for collaborative editing, I recommend you beta test it on LW and give them lots of feedback! :) That will help improve both forums.

HTML injections?

I wanted to write a post with color highlighting. This would have been easy to do if I could inject some HTML code into my posts. I imagine there are other use cases where people want to do something special that the code base does not support yet.

Being able to embed OWiD interactive graphs and other visualization would be a great plus too!

Some potential improvements to the search function:

• Advanced search: filter results by tag, author, etc. as well as keywords.
• Fuzzy text matching: return posts or comments with synonyms or related words, not just the exact keywords entered. This could be implemented using a word embedding, either a generic one or an embedding fine-tuned on the EA Forum text. For example, if I search for "global development", I might also get results for "poverty" and "global health". This would help because I often remember that there was a post or comment about a certain topic but can't remember the exact words that it used.

Copying Bob Jacob's suggestion here so that people can vote: 

Right now most sequences are still displaying my name, even though I didn’t write them. The mods have thankfully already changed the name for the “moral anti-realism” sequence, but ideally the other sequences should be properly credited too. Maybe the whole sequence should just be handed over to the authors themselves, since they might not like the descriptions and images I have created (I did message them). That way they can also just add new posts to the sequence without having to contact me first.

Perhaps it would be useful to have a "Sequence author" tag or something? I have also created a few sequences I didn't write just to reference the group of posts, but it would be good if the author was somehow credited. 

There should be a feature that points out broken links when you write posts/comments!

As far as I can tell, it isn't possible to have line breaks in footnotes (though I may just be doing something wrong). This also precludes bulleted/numbered lists, block quotes, etc. Any chance that could be changed? 

Footnote support in the 'standard' editor: For folks who aren't fluent in markdown (like me), the current process is switching the editor back and forth to 'markdown mode' to add these footnotes, which I find pretty cumbersome.[1]

[1] So much so I lazily default to doing it with plain text.

Upvoting a post shouldn’t be possible within 30 seconds of opening a (not very short) post (prevent upvoting based on title only), or should be weighted less

Make the forum available in other languages. Right now the only option is English.

Also rely less on acronyms. For example, when selecting "program participation" it shows you the acronym VP:

I happen to know that this stands for "Virtual Program" but a newcomer (especially one that isn't a native English speaker) might not know this (and might even assume it stands for something different like Vice Presidency, Virtual Profile, Video phone-call, Viewpoint, Value proposition etc).

The Search Page doesn't seem to show results for basic questions. Some examples:

• What is the difference between shortform and post? [EA · GW]
• How to Create Posts [EA · GW] / where is the create button
• other things explained in the forum manual
• where to write "forum feedback", this suggestions thread doesn't show up for this term

Not sure if this is an search indexing issue, or perhaps the actual "questions" user would put in the search field, aren't part of the posts answering them. This could maybe be solved by adding a new post - which basically explains the same as other informational posts (e.g. forum manual), but with a Q&A style, so search will index it.

For reference, there are some other new user navigation suggestion in this post. [EA · GW]

This is a long series of comments (~1200 words)

TLDR; The EA forum team could transform the forum by introducing high status, high activity “focus posts” that are centered on object level discussion, at the same time greatly empowering the forum moderator.

This content below is quickly written, and tries to motivate a vision, not a specific plan. Also, “focus posts” seems like a bad name, someone please come up with another?"

Motivation/Background:

There is a sense that high quality discussions and comments on the forum are briefer and don't occur as much now.

Overall, there's sort of two types of issues people have brought up recently:

• Demand for more object level discussion, as above from Jonas Vollmer [EA(p) · GW(p)] and Holly Morgan [EA(p) · GW(p)].
• Demand for modifications to the forum, where [EA(p) · GW(p)]one group [EA(p) · GW(p)]wants a response [EA · GW], maybe involving [EA(p) · GW(p)]changes to karma or voting, motivated by the underlying issues of large growth.
  • (Note that there is another group [EA · GW]that wants [EA(p) · GW(p)]something close to the opposite.)

The forum has moved a bit toward being a place that demands attention. It's a place where people now enter often to make a point or react to others doing it. That's not as close to productive discussion as it could be. 

The forum should be closer to a place for productive discussions between EAs. These discussions should often reveal the landscape of object level work to its readers, or even help make progress on projects. There's several interesting [EA(p) · GW(p)] but elaborate solutions that might help. 

However, this comment chain suggests a major solution that is direct and feasible.

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-05-31T23:47:22.397Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

The suggestion "focus posts":

We should foster and promote high status, high quality object level discussions.  

These would be in the form of posts that involve prestigious outsiders, near-EA people, or EA leaders or small teams from strong EA projects. These people would create the content and/or star in the resulting discussion. 

For lack of a better name, we can call them “focus posts”. 

Overall, "focus posts" would:

• Generally contain deep object level discussion about their topic.
• They might star one or more subject matter experts (maybe in addition to the posters themselves).
• The discussions would combine elements of AMAs with guaranteed attention from experts, with some of the best discussions of deep, thoughtful opinions from principled people.
• Would appear prominently on the forum, for a long and predictable time. This would generate interest in forum discussion and EA principles to both longtime EAs and newcomers.

The below is a crude mockup to show how this could appear.
 

(This is a quick, crude mockup, the actual version could be very different.)
 

These “Focus posts” and the culture and general interest that drives regular participation around them, will take effort to set up (but they shouldn’t be overly difficult or delicate to create). 

Building up the supply of these posts can be done gradually, maybe by starting with relationships with existing EA leaders. There are precedents for this work, like the setup of AMAs, and series like Cold Takes, where a major EA leader wrote on the forum for a long time. 

As discussed more below, the focus posts would be fostered, curated, and maybe partially developed by the EA forum moderator, who plays a integral, leadership role in the design of this entire feature.

 

While these new posts doesn’t seem to address voting or scaling issues, I think focus posts could be highly effective. I think ultimately, the sustained, high quality discussion in the curated focus posts can have wide positive effects on the forum, and satisfy a lot of present concern. 

Replies from: Charles He

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-05-31T23:50:20.213Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Underlying aspects of high status and moderator empowerment

I think this idea of focus posts might at first seem like a simple UX change. 

But there are deeper aspects that I think are important to be deliberate about. These two aspects are:

1. Making Focus Posts a high status place with a high expectation for quality discussion and tie in to object level work
2. Greatly empower moderator into a high visibility, highly impactful role.

This comment and the next one talk about these points.

 

1: Making Focus Points Highly Effective and Attractive

The posts need to attract good discussion. A good supply of posters and commentors is needed, ultimately reducing active work by the moderators and create a virtuous cycle of discussion.

There are quick ideas:

• Funding might be helpful, for example, a fixed ^[1]monthly amount of $20,000 or $40,000, that is allocated in a transparent way to focus posts (maybe after passing a mild bar of participation, to encourage discussion).
  • Regarding this use of money, I think that “focus posts” will initially be from or about EAs working on established projects, or altruistic, near EA projects, so their receipt of funding seems reasonable.
  • However, the main purpose of this money is to set up the "focus post" system correctly and robustly. Given the budget and opportunity cost of the forum staff (5 FTE EAs), the amount of spend seems reasonable.
• Other ideas (more marginal because they involve technical changes to karma).
  • We could imagine an alternate, special karma that is only gainable in focus posts, or modifications to karma that increase participation.
  • Maybe this special flavor of karma can be used to govern allocation of the fixed monthly amount.

Note that slowness when starting out doesn’t seem to be a problem. There might be only 0-1 “focus posts” for a while and that’s OK.

1. ^{^}

   This is similar to the "bounty" system, which has been a really popular pattern among EAs. 

   But this use of prizes is different, as it is a fixed amount, divided monthly across "focus posts".

   The benefits of this setup are that the prize size and incentive for writing is high when there are few high quality posts. When there are numerous posts, the incentive is smaller but no longer needed. 

   Also, this funding, maybe simply divided equally among curated posts, is more stable and predictable than most prizes. This means it can be principledly secured by being curated as a "focus post", which gives agency to the moderator (to enter into planning and fostering with participants).

Replies from: Charles He

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-05-31T23:58:13.064Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

2: Greatly empower the EA forum moderator and change its role

This second point is really important. This project will greatly change the moderators role, increasing the prominence and even real world impact of the EA forum moderator.

The moderator would be the person to curate "focus posts", deciding which posts qualify (or possibly helping to create them outright).

• The moderator will decide on the composition of these posts (e.g. breakdown by cause area).
• There are other complex issues the moderator will influence: For example, while most of these new "focus posts" might be on object-level topics, some meta posts might appear. What qualifies is tricky to decide, and at the same time, gives a niche for the moderator to express their vision and skill.

This control by the moderator is a key aspect of “focus posts” (and ultimately a major change to the forum itself). 

Note that this control has checks and balances. The moderator’s output and decisions are very visible work. Also, maybe later, additional features can be added that allow community input, such as voting that can promote (or demote) posts into focus posts. Finally, simple regular user discussions act as a check on moderators.

 

This change in the role of the moderator has additional effects:

• Sometimes the role of moderators can seem thankless or low reward, yet the role is extremely important. Now, with this change, the moderator has dramatically more prestige, such as great access to a large group of talented senior EAs. The moderator has portfolio and well funded mission of promoting discussion in a highly visible place, as well as making the entire project of focus posts more effective. This permanently improves the role of the moderator, increasing talent flows for this role, and supporting health of the EA forum.
• This new role and the focus posts can be a safeguard in periods when the Forum is entering noisy, difficult times with a lower supply of content, promoting strong writing and reducing imbalances in discussion.

Another way of looking at this: instead of seeing “focus posts” as a new prominent position for posts, you can see it as a vehicle to empower principled moderators.

 

I think both the current and past EA forum moderator are more than qualified, both in terms of subject matter knowledge, as well as virtue and judgement, for at least the control envisioned in this comment chain.

A way to report users for deletion.

There are a few spam accounts like this one (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/msreeyaa [EA · GW]) but I see no way of reporting them to the moderators.

Since they aren't posting or commenting the way in which they have an effect is when searching the forum. (You'll just have to take my word for it that I wasn't searching for 'escorts' when I came across that profile...)

Please remove Google resources, like Google fonts, from the website. It will make it easier to visit the website from certain countries.

Aaron, can we write forum PR FAQs too?

Pros:
nice format

Cons:
Would dilute the legitimacy of current ones

Soultion 
"Unofficial PR FAQ"

But if you're okay with this could you explicitly say so. If you don't I think me writing one will feel like I'm freeriding on the current legitimacy of the concept.

The all-posts view [? · GW] gives excessive prominence to shortform posts: while for both ordinary posts and Wiki entries only titles are displayed, for shortform posts one gets to see the entire content. I suggest truncating such posts so as to show only the first line.

↑ comment by JP Addison (jpaddison) · 2021-08-06T10:35:24.806Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

I can't reproduce this, can you tell me what browser you were using, what settings you have for the allposts page, and whether you can still see the issue?

Replies from: Pablo_Stafforini

↑ comment by Pablo (Pablo_Stafforini) · 2021-08-06T11:49:29.876Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Yes. Chrome version 92.0.4515.107 (Official Build) (x86_64).

However, (1) the issue persists if I change the view settings (selecting "magic", unticking "show low karma" etc makes no difference) and (2) the issue disappears if I open the page in incognito, or in another browser. From this I conclude it is likely caused by one of the many Chrome extensions I have installed. I will keep an eye on this and will let you know if I manage to identify the cause.

Replies from: jpaddison

↑ comment by JP Addison (jpaddison) · 2021-08-06T13:44:05.113Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

What happens if you log in in incognito?  Do you have any of these settings set?

Replies from: Pablo_Stafforini

↑ comment by Pablo (Pablo_Stafforini) · 2021-08-06T14:23:04.234Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Ah, I had the first of those options ticked, and the issue disappeared after I unticked it. So this is the cause.

Is this behavior deliberate? I think the option should not affect how shortform posts are displayed in the "all posts" view.

Replies from: jpaddison

↑ comment by JP Addison (jpaddison) · 2021-08-06T15:41:15.937Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Seems right. I doubt it was deliberate.

We should add the ability to convert posts to questions (or back to regular posts, but that's tricky because answers would have to be converted to regular comments).

Also, the editor should automatically suggest converting your post to a linkpost or question post if the title or body text matches certain patterns. For example, if you write "Crossposted from X" or "This is a linkpost" at the top, it can infer that your post is most likely a linkpost. I see a lot of posts from inexperienced users that are classified as regular posts even though they're intended to be linkposts or questions, so I think this would be helpful to them.

When editing a document, it would be nice to be able to link to headings/subheadings from the main editor when writing summaries or internally linking to other sections of a post, e.g. how it's done in Google Docs (see screenshot)

It would be useful to have and easy way to tag / untag job and request listings when they become open or closed (so basically binary tags?)

Would also be good to have an icon next to those posts how there is for the AMAs.

A way to get an RSS feed which is filtered int he same way as the main feed. 

The expectation that *ALL* EA resources should be in this forum. Ideally people would post books (with the tag "book") and then new users could see which resources the community thinks are worth reading first.

Soon after publishing, hide scores on comments so people aren't biased by them. Randomise the order of comments early on.

Numbers in articles which get multiplied at the end. The ability for the community to forecast these numbers and it change the overall result.

A portal for booking a call with an EA.

How often are poeple connected throught the EA hub? How often did poeple connect at EAGx virtual. If connections are valuable, this is a way they could happen more.

I've put some different use cases in the comments.

Make comments on specific sections of text which appear to the right of the text. And can be up and downvoted.

As assumption that there are some "evergreen" questions like this one, which periodically the community should spend time thinking on.

Please comment with other such questions

This thread should be linked in the intercom button under "feature requests".

If you click "submit a feature request" it should send you here.

I'd love to have a weekly/monthly open post, where everyone could ask questions and post small ideas. I imagine something similar to LessWrongs "Open & Welcome Thread". This could make some people more comfortable with starting to contribute to the forum.

Curated posts could resurface to the frontpage at exponentially decaying intervals.

1. Counteracts recency bias. Enables longer-term discussions.
2. Increases exposure (and over a more varied reader population) to the most important ideas.
3. Efficiently^[4] [EA(p) · GW(p)] increases collective memory of the best contributions.
4. We might uncover and dislodge some flawed assumptions that reached universal acceptance in the past due to information cascades [? · GW]. 
5. Given recency bias combined with the fact that people are very reluctant to write things that have been written about before, we could theoretically be losing wisdom over time instead of accumulating it. Especially since the movement is growing fast, and newcomers weren't here when a particular piece of wisdom was under discussion the first time around.

Wrote a shortform [EA(p) · GW(p)] on it. Would be cool to have, imo! : )

Ideas coming out of a discussion yesterday evening

Problem: the eventual karma of a post depends a lot on the number of upvotes it gets in the first couple of hours/days after posting it.

Problem: The quality and relevance of new posts varies a lot nowadays. Readers need to (mentally) filter very quickly what to read. We tend to filter on easily available info, such as the karma that the post already has and the author's name (If your name is "Holden Karnofsky" and I've read many good posts from you in the past, I am much more likely to read the post than if your name is "OddHappy153"). This creates a disadvantage for newcomers and infrequent posters.

Idea: for the first X time, don't show the karma of the posts (unless it has really many downvotes). Maybe don't show the author's name on the frontpage either. Or hide it until the user explicitly clicks on "show author".

Allow registered users to post anonymous comments and generate a unique anonymous Id to track them so we can e.g. see the thread of anon1's comments.

I think ideally this should not be visible to mods / backend so it's truly anonymous.

I would prefer a more failproof anti-spam system; e.g. preventing new accounts from writing Wiki entries, or enabling people to remove such spam. Right now there is a lot of spam on the page, which reduces readability.

I like the post analytics thing! One thing that would be nice (maybe as an option) would be to see a time series of cumulative unique views as well as the time series of daily unique views that you already get. E.g. that would help with

• comparing posts that went up at different times (e.g. "does post X only have more views than post Y because it's been up for 3 months longer?")
•  answering the question "after how many days did the post accumulate 90% of its (as of today) total unique views".

Cumulative time series of all the statistics could also be pretty nice.

I would love to have more features for the Markdown editor, since I prefer it over the WYSIWYG editor. For example, I'd like to be able to upload images while editing in Markdown (like GitHub does). Also, a syntax cheatsheet would be wonderful.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to switch between the Markdown and WYSIWYG editors while editing a document, or have a rendered preview tab in the Markdown editor.

''Next" and "Previous" arrows/buttons at the bottom of a post, to move to the next/previous post - useful when you haven't read the forum for a while and want to catch up. This would obviously have to assume a certain ordering (e.g. chronological vs karma) and selection (e.g. all or excluding Community/Questions), which could perhaps be adjusted in Settings.

I'm not sure if such a feature would be worth the work it would involve, but: a very simple "editor" to very easily create probability distributions (or maybe more generally graphs that don't require mathematical formulas but just very rough manual sketching) and embed them into posts or comments could be useful. I'm not sure how often people would really use that though. Generally however, it would probably be a good thing to make probability estimates as explicit as possible, and being able to easily "draw" distributions in a few seconds and having a polished looking output could make that happen.

If this is something people would find useful, I'd be willing to spend the time to create such a component so it would theoretically just have to be "plugged in" afterwards.

When a comment is deleted in such a way that leaves a "comment deleted" block, it has a little [+] to expand the comment, but it doesn't do anything. I would prefer if it wasn't there so I didn't feel like I had to click on it to check if there's something I missed.

I would appreciate being able to answer a private message by replying to the associated email notification, like I can do with e.g. Github and Discourse.

People should be notified if one of their posts is referenced in another post.

I recently realised that one of my less upvoted posts was mentioned in another post to have inspired a particular model. I then had a look at my other posts and saw more instances of having been referenced. It's nice to realise that people are using your work, but at the moment there's no easy way to know this!

Encourage short posts:

1. Make the word count visible without mouse-over
2. Allow an optional sorting algorithm that takes into account word count
3. In "new post", add a template text "TL;DR:" (which is deletable, but a small nudge to write a summary)
   1. (or perhaps explain a bit more, like "A TL;DR should contain bottom lines and not reasoning, and it should help the reader decide if this post is relevant for them or not)

'Commenting sprees [EA(p) · GW(p)]' - blocks of time where discussion with more immediate replies would be encouraged.

See this comment [EA(p) · GW(p)].

This pattern of broken link, where the intended link is appended to another, distinct URL, has appeared in many comments or posts. 

This defect seems common enough that it seems to justify investigation of the root cause (or even very crude automatic fix) especially since the pattern in the defect is so simple. 

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-06-14T17:23:15.928Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

It happened again! [EA(p) · GW(p)]

Replies from: Charles He

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-06-14T22:46:18.008Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

And again! [EA(p) · GW(p)]

Replies from: Charles He

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-06-15T19:35:20.324Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh [EA(p) · GW(p)]

 

 

 

 

 

Replies from: Charles He

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-06-15T20:31:58.458Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Ok, this issue has been picked up:

https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/issues/5057

 

Yay! The system works. 

The analytics page is great!

I would like feedback on this idea: Community Posts

MVP: Change "create topic" to "create community post" and reframe wiki topic summaries as community written posts. Currently they are introductions, not summaries. 

Full change: Allow people to create posts which can be cowritten by anyone once live. Wikis produce high quality content, but the current wiki is framed around the topic tags, rather than any kind of article being able to be written.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NxWssGagWoQWErRer/community-posts-a-new-forum-post-type-unofficial-pr-faq [EA · GW] 

I'm not sure if it's exactly a feature suggestion as a concern highlighted here [EA(p) · GW(p)] that I agree with, which is basically: The number of Forum users seem to be growing quite a lot (congrats!), with many more posts, so some posts that might be high-effort slip under the radar or disappear quite quickly (see Ian David Moss' comment [EA(p) · GW(p)]). Is there anything the Forum team is doing to mitigate this (someone suggested a higher density of posts on the front page) or other wise any thoughts on this topic? 

Other possible solutions (some already mentioned and I'm not sold of any of them) could be:

• Sub-communities like Reddit
• Greater emphasis on people using the Shortform feature for short or link posts rather than the main page
• EA Librarian or Q&A things could go into a different section (somewhat like a Shortform? I'm quite unsure about this though)

There should be a way to suggest an author cross-post a post of theirs and/or give them karma if you x post a work they've posted. 

It's quite easy to gain a lot of karma by writing questions. I think that's fair, but I thought I'd flag it cos I've been doing very well on karma for that reason.

Did we try having this post sort by magic? 

Also can we have magic as an option to sort all comments and answers? 

Also maybe call it "hot" or "vogue (new or highly rated)". 

I'd like it if I could paste a link into the editor (for either comments or posts), then click or hover over it to see an option to automatically covert the text to the name of the page, similar to how that happens in Google Docs.

This would be most valuable to me in comments, since I usually copy posts from Google Docs anyway.

I use a lot of links in comments, and think it's valuable to do so (to connect conversations to other relevant work), but sometimes I feel a bit inclined to not bother or not write the actual title (just leaving the URL) since it's a hassle.

I feel like I remember saying this somewhere else already, and it's very possible someone else has suggested it here too. 

ETA: Oh, I just stumbled upon the comment of mine that I was half-remembering [EA(p) · GW(p)], which was for a somewhat different feature motivated by a similar issue:

I'd really like this for regular Forum posts and (especially) comments too; I'd like to be able to type "[[" and then start typing the name of the post, automatically see a drop down menu with posts that include that text in their name, and then just click on it to have the name appear in the text, with the right hyperlink. At the moment, I have to open a new tab, find the post, and either copy the title and then separately the link or write title and copy the link. I do a lot of linking to other Forum posts from within Forum posts and comments, so this is a little annoying.

I think ideally this would also show LessWrong posts, since people link to them fairly often too. 

I say "(especially) comments" because I almost always draft posts in Google docs, where this feature wouldn't really help me, whereas I write comments in the Forum editor from the start.

Could we get notifications if someone comments on a thread we started, but not as a direct reply to us? Currently, if I make a comment, I get a notification if Alice replies, but not if Bob replies to Alice. And I suspect Bob's replies would often relate to what I said and be interesting to me.

I've just noticed I can subscribe to comment replies on a thread, but I'm not yet sure if that captures replies to replies, and really I'd like this to be default for every comment thread I start (rather than me having to manually opt in every time).

(Apologies if someone else already mentioned this; I haven't read the other suggestions on this page.)

I would like to promote Wei Dai's suggestion [LW(p) · GW(p)] that it would be nice if it was possible to share drafts privately and then potentially make them public at a later point. (I think there's some chance that this is already possible, but the UX doesn't seem intuitive, otherwise I would have noticed already.)

Before implementing, it seems worth talking to users to find out whether this would actually make them more likely to share their internal work publicly at some point. It could also be good to find out whether there are any other ways that could make people more likely to share their internal work publicly.

↑ comment by JP Addison (jpaddison) · 2020-06-30T18:46:22.703Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Some of this will appear with the new editor, which has collaborative editing features built in.

but the UX doesn't seem intuitive, otherwise I would have noticed already

I admire your confidence. There's a sense in which if an experienced user doesn't know about a feature, it isn't well designed. OTOH, I assign some probability you've forgotten what the new post dialogue looks like.

Replies from: Jonas Vollmer

↑ comment by Jonas Vollmer · 2020-07-02T12:27:11.553Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Very cool!

I think for me personally, this would work better if there were two buttons at the end – one called "publish", one called "share as draft with users" or something like that. That puts it more in the reference class of "this is a form of publishing my work" rather than "here's some additional feature that I don't understand how it works".

Also: I notice that my wording was a bit unfriendly – apologies, I would like to retract that. :)

EDIT: It seems that drafts don't support comments. I think this is one of the main features I was hoping for.

Replies from: jpaddison

↑ comment by JP Addison (jpaddison) · 2020-07-02T13:31:32.668Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Re: your edit - yep, that will come with the new editor, though maybe not in the first iteration.

Is it hard to make here and Lesswrong more compatible? I am thinking of a cross-posting feature that has comments of both forums. Linking the accounts (for subscriptions, for example. Karma maybe.) also seems nice.

Probably this should go on LessWrong rather than here, but: it would be great if the Markdown editor could handle basic image formatting, rather than stripping out all the HTML so all my images revert to maximum-width.

(Semi-serious), since we care about the long-term future, denote years with a 10,000 year digit, so 02023 instead of 2023, like they do at longnow.org

I think the UI for voting could be improved in the following ways:

• The arrows for voting on Karma point sideways, not up and down. It's not immediately clear which one is upvote and which one is downvote.
•  The explanation text about voting (the one that explains Karma, agree/disagree and strong votes) only appears when you hover your mouse over the arrows. This means you never see it on mobile, where there's no mouse.
• the hit boxes could be bigger for arrows on mobile.

It would be nice to be able to order search results by date and maybe some other features like karma.

So, proposing that we give everyone equal voting power gives those on the forum with more voting power an incentive to lessen mine (by downvoting this). So how about this: we make the agreement karma democratic. That way we can see what people actually agree or disagree on and since it doesn't affect karma we can make it democratic without affecting those with disproportionate voting power.

EDIT: Three people upvoted this suggestion, one person downvoted this suggestion, the result is negative karma. What we see is that the downvotes contain a lot more voting weight than the upvotes. This seems logical, people with more voting power have an incentive to use that power to make sure they don't lose it. Just keep in mind that we really cannot conclude what the EA community believes/wants based on the results of an undemocratic karma-system.

Embed iframes

Some use cases:

• interactive visualizations
• videos
• airtables (as already suggested [EA(p) · GW(p)])
• polis questions (as already suggested [EA(p) · GW(p)])
• guesstimate models
• and many many more

This feature is very versatile and would solve many things at once.

Co authors (second authors and later?) of posts don't appear to have their posts in the profile?

Sidhu has no post listed:

This seems mild, but could be bad if someone likes to co author a lot.

↑ comment by Charles He · 2022-10-29T00:21:01.295Z · EA(p) · GW(p)

Ah, maybe the above might be an async indexing thing? (e.g. async/chron tasks updates the indexes every 24 hours and the above example is too recent to be indexed)

 Amber Dawn has her posts listed:

Some suggestions [EA · GW] for making tags more usefwl. I say some reasons I think tags are important in the post, but these suggestions are easy to see usefwlness of anyaway.

Right now, you can't tag a post while you're writing it. You have to "save as draft" and then add the tags to the draft, or add the tags after you publish it. This is needlessly annoying. I suggest making it like this:

The miniscule effort encouraged by making it mandatory is probably outweighed by the benefits many times over on average. Consider that the effort is a one-time cost, while the benefits accrue every time someone finds it usefwl. The costs are consistently modest for authors, while the benefits can be enormous for some readers (e.g. I'm doing a lit review and the tags help me counterfactually find the perfect post.)

So I suggest making it mandatory. Maybe like this: