Thanks for flagging! It looks like they took the board down so I've removed the link. (For future reference, I believe anyone who has earned any karma can edit topic descriptions, so I think you could also remove any broken links directly.)

Thanks! I basically landed on using my personal account since most people seem to prefer that. I suppose I'll accept the karma if that's what everyone else wants! :P

Honestly I think it's somewhat misleading for me to post with my account because I am posting this in my capacity as part of the Forum Team, even though I'm still an individual making a judgement. It's like when I get a marketing email signed by "Liz" — probably this is a real person writing the email, but it's still more the voice of the company than of an individual, so it feels a bit misleading to say it's from "Liz". On the other hand, I guess all my Forum content has been in my capacity as part of the Forum Team so no reason to change that now! :)

(I also agree with your points about "LinkpostBot" feeling like it should be an automation, and that having a team account for linkposting runs the risk of making those seem privileged.)

Interesting, why's that? :)

For context: I want the Forum team to be able to do more active crossposting in the future, so it seems reasonable to have a sort of "placeholder" account for when the author of the original piece doesn't have a Forum account. Personally when I see a linkpost, I generally assume that the author here is also the original author (outside of obvious cases like a NYT article link), and it's kinda confusing when that's not the case (I'm more used to this now but it was extra confusing when I was a new user). I also personally feel kinda weird getting karma for just linking to someone else's work, and probably don't want my Forum profile to mostly be links to other articles.

On the other hand, I do want users to feel free to linkpost external articles that they didn't write, especially if they add their own commentary, or even just make some editorial decisions on which parts to quote. (That's why I was fine with crossposting this using my own account, for example.)

Gosh yeah that's reasonable. I was hoping to avoid making another team account to do this kind of crossposting but that's probably the best solution. I guess it's time for SummaryBot to get a sibling, maybe LinkpostBot?

I crossposted this because it was an interesting read, and it makes an argument that I've never heard before. I'd be curious if anyone with more expertise has takes on this! :)

I think the dip in ~May 2022 is most likely simply a data issue, if that's what you're referring to. Probably the real usage data is smoother.

There's a lot I could say here, but I'll try to keep it brief, so this is a bit of a disorganized list. :)

Pros:

• I think the Forum UX takes bits from other platforms, which enables a bunch of different kinds of interactions (like Question posts, quick takes, longform posts, and reacts).
• In general we are able to build the UX in such a way that respects users more than most other platforms (like we don't have paid ads and we are not optimizing for clicks or engagement hours).
• I think separating out karma voting from agree/disagree is important for enabling productive discussions and disagreements.
• I value openness and accessibility and I appreciate that the Forum is extremely open by default (for example, relative to slack).
  • I think this is also good for "Writing on the Forum is so high quality and relevant that it often gets republished and quoted elsewhere".
• The fact that discussions here are less transient than say, Twitter, means that we're better able to build common knowledge, and I think it makes discussions feel more like they matter (so people are more willing to put effort into their writing and adhere to high standards).
• Personally, I think it's good to keep the Forum broadly a unified space (rather than having channels or subreddits for cause areas) because I want the project of EA to be open to new ideas, and I would worry that too much structured separation would encourage silos.

Cons:

• Not much of the Forum UX updates in realtime, which to me makes it feel a bit old-fashioned or something, but it's hard to say if that matters.
• I think it's good to keep the Forum broadly a unified space, but this can be confusing for users, and can cause content that has a niche audience to be overlooked.
• I think optimizing for engagement/fun would potentially build more community here, but at the cost of our actual goals (something like, "being the version of the Forum that most improves the world").
• There's probably more we can to do make the Forum UX feel delightful and immediately satisfying without harming users.

Thanks for the suggestions!

• I agree that emailing users more often will probably get them to return to the site more often.
• I'm less confident than you [sound] that this will have a major effect.
• Since our team has been focused on software/product for a while and haven't noticeably increased MAUs, I am skeptical that further work in this space will be the magic bullet. For example, we made significant improvements in site speed and didn't see metrics improve as much as we expected.
• Our team has been more willing to email users recently (for example, about Forum events) and I want to be careful about going too far and annoying users/causing unsubscribes.
  • Honestly I'm not totally sure why basically none of the default notifications include an email, which makes me somewhat nervous to significantly change this. My guess is that you are a bit unusual in finding lots of email notifications fun, and probably more people would find that overwhelming or annoying.
• That said, we do plan to test out making our default notification settings more in line with other sites (for example, making karma notifications realtime by default instead of batched daily) and sending a delayed email to new users explaining how they can customize their notification settings.
  • We'll certainly consider changing other notification default settings, but again I want to be careful with this, not just because some people would dislike it, but also because ultimately our goal is not to increase usage. I want people to have a healthy relationship with the Forum, and only use it to the extent that they think is worthwhile.
• I feel like changing the notification settings for existing users is probably crossing a line.

Thanks for the suggestions!

1. We do this to some extent. Users can "Opt into experimental (beta) features" via their account settings, and we will sometime release features early for them and ask for feedback or see how they interact with it. We also do normal user interviews during feature development.
   1. We also encourage people to comment here if they have ideas for the Forum, or reach out to us directly.
   2. I will also reiterate that we are looking for volunteers to help us do cause-specific community building, and we would very likely reach out to those volunteers for quick feedback about Forum things.
2. My colleague Emma has done one of these. We'd be interested to do more of this but we need help figuring out who to interview, so we'd welcome more suggestions!
   1. Our Content Manager Toby has done these for people more closely associated with EA, but he is our only person working on Forum content so he is quite busy. It's hard to prioritize doing a single interview over spending the same time encouraging multiple authors to write content.
   2. I think that interviewing knowledgable people and sharing on the Forum is quite valuable, so I want to encourage other users to do this! :) I've also considered having our team commission this kind of work, which we may do at some point.

Yeah, I think it's hard (and maybe not worth our resources) to build one space that fulfills all of those criteria. I think it would be fun for the Forum to have a more casual space, but there exist many other places that can fill that need:

• The EA subreddit
• EA Anywhere's slack workspace and virtual events
• EA Gather (a virtual space to hang out and co-work)
• The EA community on Twitter
• The Effective Altruism Facebook group
• The EA Hangout Facebook group
• The EA Corner Discord

Personally I don't use any of these very often so I don't have much opinion on them.