Oh I see, thanks! - I didn't realise this because the statement that appears after indicating you've been personally referred is: "Since you were referred to this position, the rest of the application is optional" which makes it sound like it wouldn't be optional if you weren't referred.

I just looked at the application for the role of content specialist for CEA, which seems to involve a lot of working on this forum. 

I noticed that if one indicates they have been personally referred by someone 'involved in effective altruism', one is given the option to skip 'the rest of the application' - which seems like the majority of the substantive information one is asked to give. 

This seems overtly nepotistic, and I can't think of a good reason for it - can anyone give one?

Should be fixed now, thanks for highlighting. 
There's EA VR - they're listed as inactive but I think there's some activity in their discord. Look forward to seeing you around and feel free to ping anyone with 'EAGather Steward' in their name for a tour :)

I'm not sure about this particular  case, but I don't think the value of the property increasing over time is a generally good argument for why investments need not be publicly discussed. A lot of potential altruistic spending has benefits that accrue over time, where the benefits of money spent earlier outweighs the benefits of money spent later - as has been discussed extensively when comparing giving now vs. giving later.

The whole premise of EA is that resources should be spent in effective ways, and potential altruistic benefits is no excuse for an ineffective spending of money.

It seems like setting ourselves up for selection bias if we take listen only to people with experience with "how bad journalism gets". We also  want to get advice from people with good experiences with journalism, because they might be doing things that make them more likely to get good experiences, and presumably know about how to continue to go about having good experiences, having gotten them.

There may be some parts of EA where the media don't start out nicely inclined to the area at hand, but I think on many topics we might care to engage with the media on, they likely would start out neutral or positive on anything.

We might take the points here with more weight if they are from someone with extensive experience, but a lack of experience doesn't invalidate the reasoning here.

I think it would be better if agree/disagree voting didn't follow the typical karma rules where different users have different amounts of karma. As it stands I often don't know how many people expressed agreement vs. disagreement, which feels like the information I actually want, and it doesn't make intuitive sense that one forum user might be able to "agree twice as much" as another with a comment.

Thanks for this! It wouldn't have occurred to me to consider the decline of footbinding as a case study of moral progress, 

I think you've probably noted this and perhaps didn't mention it because it's not directly relevant to the main questions you're investigating, but I think it's important to note for someone who only reads this post that having bound feet was a status symbol - it began among the social elite and spread over time to lower social classes, remained a status symbol because families who needed girls to conduct agricultural labor could not partake in the practice, and in practice an incentive to do it was to increase marriage prospects.

A suggestion that might preserve the value of giving higher karma users more voting power, while addressing some of the concerns: give users with karma the option to +1 a post instead of +2/+3, if they wish.