Effective Altruism Forum
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by Aaron Gertler 🔸, JP Addison🔸
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Edit from 2022: Consider checking the Forum user manual if you're not sure if something you're looking for might already be possible. 

 

Hello, Forum!

This is Aaron and JP of the EA Forum team. 

We spend a lot of time working on the Forum, and we’d like to hear your ideas for making it better. These can be new features or other kinds of requests.

Even if you don’t have suggestions of your own, consider upvoting ideas you like from the comments. That will have nonzero influence on the features we prioritize (though we also take many other factors into account).

If you’d rather make a suggestion privately, get in touch with us through this page.

Edit April 2022: This thread is still very live as you can see by the continual influx of suggestions. We have now synced our asana project with our public Github issues list, so you can see our recorded tasks there.[1] I'd still recommend suggesting features here so that other users can see and discuss them. — JP

  1. ^

    Note: there's a delay between when we write tasks down and when they get triaged into a state that gets synced with Github.

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peterhartree2
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I wish it was easier to find the best social media discussions of forum posts and quick takes.

E.g. Ozzie flagged some good Facebook discussion of a recent quick take [1], but people rarely do that.

Brainstorm on minimal things you could do:

a. Link to Twitter search results (example). (Ideally you might show the best Twitter discussions in the Forum UI, but I'm not sure if their API terms would permit that.)

b. Encourage authors to link to discussion on other platforms, and have a special place in the UI that makes such links easy to find.

  1. I actually can't

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peterhartree2
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I ~never check the "Quick takes" section even though I bet it has some great stuff.

The reason is that its too hard to find takes that are on a topic I care about, and/or have an angle that seems interesting.

I think I'd be much more likely to read quick takes if the takes had titles, and/or if I could filter them by topic tags.

Maybe you can LLM-generate default title and tag suggestions for the author when they're about to post?

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peterhartree
Another way to make me engage more with "Quick takes" is if I could get a feed of takes from users I follow. I can kinda get that in the "Notifications" list but again it's super hard to skim the list to find the ones of interest.
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peterhartree
Hmm I think Twitter-ish feed containing posts, quick takes and comments from just the users I follow would be very useful. Not sure what it'd do to the forum dynamic overall though, but could be good, actually?
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Toby Tremlett🔹
Just brainstorming here but what if quick takes from users you follow were interleaved into your forum frontpage feed? I.e. they would appear similarly to frontpage posts posts, but probably with an icon, and then expand on click. 
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peterhartree
Quick thought is that I'd want a separate section on the homepage called "People you follow". Mixing it into the current "New & Upvoted" section seems bad to me but that's really just a hot take.
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Toby Tremlett🔹
V reasonable- do you have an idea of why it seems bad?   
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peterhartree
Similar reasons that I want both of Twitter's "home" and "following" views. I want "People you follow" to include everything and it should be chronological. If quick takes are includedl, I guess the "People you follow" content could dominate the items that currently make the "New and upvoted" section.
peterhartree4
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I wish the notifications icon at the top right would have have separate icon to indicate replies to my posts and my comments.

At the moment those get drowned out by notifications about posts and comments from people I follow (which are so numerous that I've been trained to rarely check the notification inbox, because it's such a rabbit hole...), so I often see comments weeks or months too late.

I'd also like to be able to get email notifications for just replies to my posts and replies to my comments.

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Sarah Cheng
Thanks for the suggestion! I like the idea of visually distinguishing the most important notifications (i.e. the ones you might want to reply to). There are a lot of customization options for notifications, so I'd recommend looking through your account settings: For example, you can set "Comments on posts/events I'm subscribed to" and "Replies to my comments" to notify you both on-site and via email. You may also prefer to batch email notifications (rather than receive them immediately) if you get too many (for example, you could batch "Comments by users I'm subscribed to" to get an email about it once per day).
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Sarah Cheng
Though I agree that the notification customization UI is not the best — the wording is not super clear, and I think the way notifications are categorized is not ideal. I also agree that too many notifications is a UX problem, and we have a backlog item to explore better ways to batch notifications to improve this experience (though to be honest I'm not sure when we will get around to it).
Eevee🔹2
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I think it would make sense to exclude emoji from the audio narrations, especially now that a lot of users are adding diamond emoji to their usernames. The audio software currently reads aloud the emoji even if it is in a username, e.g. "Eevee orange diamond emoji".

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peterhartree
Thanks. We're now filtering the diamond emojis out of the narrations. I've left the others in for now.
JWS 🔸10
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Something which has come up a few times, and recently a lot in the context of Debate Week (and the reaction to Leif's post) is things getting downvoted quickly and being removed from the Front Page, which drastically drops the likelihood of engagement.[1]

So a potential suggestion for the Frontpage might be:

  • Hide the vote score of all new posts if the absolute score of the post is below some threshold (I'll use 20 as an example)
    • If a post hits -20, it drops off the front page
    • After a post hits 20+, it's karma score is permanently revealed
    • Galaxy-brain version is that Community/Non-Community grouping should only take effect once a post hits these thresholds[2]
  • This will still probably leave us with too many new posts to fit on the front page, so some rules to sort which stay and which get knocked off:
    • Some consideration to total karma should probably count (how much to weight it is debatable)
    • Some consideration to how recent the post is should count too (e.g. I'd probably want to see a new post that got 20+ karma quickly than 100+ karma over weeks)
    • Some consideration should also go to engagement - some metric related to either number of votes or comment count would probably indicate which po
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Will Howard🔹
This is a problem we have thought about, and personally I think it is quite bad, in that it causes a lot of randomness in which posts get past ~10 karma. We agree that essentially showing new posts to more people is the answer (even if they start to get downvoted). The fairly standard solution in recommendation algorithms is to view this as an explore/exploit problem, and to add some randomness to tune the tradeoff between then (see Bandits for Recommender Systems). This would mean each user would get a slightly different ordering of the list (stable per user) in order to make sure each post gets an appropriate number of views (based on the quality signal we have so far). Here's an internal doc with our plans on this. We may not get to it that soon, because of giving season and other stuff, but it is one of our priorities after that. I'm not that optimistic about this. For algorithm purposes the thing that matters is the number of opportunities a post gets to be voted on (~views) before dropping off the frontpage. Presumably the theory here is that seeing post has low karma makes you less likely to view it and/or biased towards also downvoting it. Based on my own experience I don't think this is the case. If I see a 0 to negative karma post on the frontpage I think I'm more likely to click it out of morbid curiosity, and then if it's at least ok I'll upvote it because I think the current score is overly harsh. I know a lot of people apply this logic about voting (correcting the current score rather than applying a fully independent judgement), and we generally endorse this. I think this is a good idea (thinking about comment counts specifically), although I agree it could be prone to going wrong, e.g. making doom threads even doomier. One solution I can think of is to give a boost for comments but only up to a fairly low cutoff (say, 6 comments). Thoughts on this? For a ~20 karma post I think having 5+ comments is a good signal that its a valuable-but-niche po
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Will Howard🔹
Digression but I would recommend reading about Thompson sampling :) (wikipedia, inscrutable LessWrong post). It's a good model to have for thinking about explore-exploit tradeoffs in general.
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Jason
I think number and weight of upvotes (not netted against downvotes) is an important criterion here, especially when it comes to the risk of controversial material getting buried before most users have a chance to see it. I think this may be practically much the same as what you're suggesting. * If something has a good number of upvotes and downvotes, my assumption is that we ideally want to present that content to the user and let them make their own decision on whether it is worth reading / engaging with. In other words, conditioned on there being a critical mass of upvotes, the presence of the downvotes doesn't update the probability of "this is worth showing to other users and letting them make their own decision" very much for me. * If something has had enough impressions on the front page and hasn't gotten much engagement, then the odds of future users wanting to engage with it seems fairly low.
Kevin Ulug3
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As a group organizer, I want to know how many people are following our city group on the forum and find out when a new person starts following it. E.g., how many people are following our city group on the forum now compared to before a recent EAGx event?

As a group organizer, it might be nice to be able to DM people who follow our local group, though this may have privacy implications I have not thought through.

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Sarah Cheng
I appreciate this suggestion, and the really helpful context! I'll add it to our backlog. The Groups features of the site haven't gotten any love in a while and I hope we can circle back to them soon.
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Kevin Ulug
The "free mailing list for new events" aspect of following a city group (depending on your notification settings) could be pretty useful. I wonder if we could make posts in a city group and have that be emailed to group followers (depending on settings), basically as a mailing list? I don't currently have something like a mailing list. Our group has an increasing number of platforms - a mailing list would be one more ... signing up to the forum and following the group is a bit more work than signing up for than a mailing list but would save me one additional platform and potentially a monthly fee, etc.
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Kevin Ulug
Thank you very much!
Eevee🔹2
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I think the EA Forum software does a poor job at communicating the license terms of forum posts. (For context, all new forum content published on or after 1 December 2022 has been licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.)

The current license statement is buried in the forum terms of use which can be reached from the "How to use the Forum" page in the navigation sidebar, so many readers may be unaware of the license terms if they have not registered on the forum and clicked through the license agreement. By contrast, many sites that use CC licenses, ... (read more)

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Eevee🔹
Somewhat relatedly, the forum terms of use addendum currently does not mention the ForumMagnum software, which is GPL-v3. CEA itself might have obligations under the GPL to other contributors to the forum software (i.e. anyone who contributed to it and was not a CEA employee), like informing forum users of the terms and conditions of the GPL and not imposing further restrictions on them. I suggest looking into this to see if the EA Forum terms of service need to be modified in order to comply with the GPL. [edit: reworded to avoid being interpreted as legal advice]
Vasco Grilo🔸2
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Hi JP,

Nice that user interests are now visible on the profile page. I think it would be good if they were sorted alphabetically.

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Larks4
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I would like to suggest a rule/norm that people or orgs should not post the same article they are ready posted multiple times over the course of a few months, especially if there was already discussion in the comments the first time, unless they have significantly new points to make.

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