Hey Lizka! I love that memo and I agree with most of it (I don't have any particular disagreements, I just feel unsure about some things). It's been a significant influence on the Online Team overall, and on how I think about running the Forum. I also agree with the specific points in your comment.

Part of the goal of the exercise was to, as the Online Team, "stare into the abyss" and try to figure out, how much does it really make the world better for us to put capacity towards the Forum? Are we only putting resources towards the Forum because of momentum/personal interest/job security/etc, or do we think that there is actually counterfactual value?

Some additional context is that CEA is [moving toward becoming] more of a unified organization now than it has been in the past. My understanding is that we can broadly only do work that aligns with CEA's overall strategy:

Instead of optimizing for each of our team’s programs, we’ll be optimizing for EA as a whole.

And, I believe that everyone on the Online Team does want to do the work that is most impactful overall, whether or not that involves the Forum. So part of that equation is, what are the costs (in terms of "impact") of us putting less resources towards the Forum? For example, it's possible that having our product/engineers work on EA Funds would be a more impactful use of their time, and it's also possible that product/engineering work on both projects is valuable enough that we should hire enough people to cover both the EA Forum and EA Funds.

Great point — this matches my intuition, but I've never participated in any serious open source projects, so I wasn't sure how feasible it would actually be to get useful contributions. I've volunteered to help with a few coding projects in the past, and most of the time I quickly lose motivation to work on them. So I expect most volunteers to also get bored/distracted and not do anything useful.

Nice! I think LW has a work-in-progress branch with this sort of thing, though I have no idea if/when they will wrap it up. We also have an admin-facing feature where we can set up a process to automatically import posts to your Forum account from an RSS feed (although it's rarely used so it's probably buggy).

My recommendation is actually to let our team assistant manually crosspost your pieces to your Forum account. She does this for Lewis Bollard's Substack, for example. For now, I expect she will do a better job than any of the automated options.

If anyone would like us to handle crossposting their external blog to the Forum, please let us know! You can contact us in various ways, or just DM me directly.

Not sure what the disagree votes are about, but I agree that it would be nice to have more open source contributors! 😊 The Forum codebase is already open source and we do occasionally get contributions. We also have a (disorganized) list of issues that people can work on. IMO it's not the easiest codebase to dive into, and we don't have much capacity to assist people in getting set up, but now that LLM tools are much better I could imagine it being not too onerous to contribute.

If anyone wants to help, I'm happy to suggest issues for you! 🙂 Feel free to reach out to me.

I wanted to quickly add that you can also message @Toby Tremlett🔹 or contact the Forum Team if you have any questions (such as "do you think the Forum audience would like this?") or want feedback. We may be slower to respond and may not give as detailed feedback as Justis, but anyone is welcome to reach out to us. :)

I appreciate the suggestion! :) I've added it to our backlog. My current guess is that, given the limited resources we have to spend, this probably won't meet our bar for being cost-effective enough to implement.

Thanks for flagging these! And sorry for the delayed response. :)

1. Yeah I agree with this, I threw it in our task backlog earlier but we haven't had time to fix it yet
2. Interesting! I guess this is a weird edge case with our comment linking code, I'll record this as well

Thanks for flagging! :) I've updated that post, and I'll record this as a low-priority bug.

Thanks for the feedback! I think moderation is tricky and I'm relatively new at it myself. I'm sad at how long users can get stuck in the queue, and I'd love to improve how fast we resolve moderation questions, but where exactly we draw these lines will probably be a learning process for me, and we'll continue to iterate on that.

It looks like you submitted the comment on Dec 17, and our facilitator messaged you on Jan 6 (the delay partly being due to people being out for the holidays), and then they approved your comment a little over a week after messaging you. Yeah I agree that this was an edge case, and I don't think you were being malicious, but I think you could have made your point more productively by, for example, just using "torture".

I feel that using the rejected content feature would give our team more leeway to be opinionated about shaping the home page of our site (compared to now), and we'd feel somewhat free to reject things that don't fit the type of discussions we want to see. For example, it looks like LW rejects posts from new users that don't have a clear introduction. So I think if something is an edge case in the current system, then it would likely get rejected under the other system.

Hi! I just want to start by clarifying that a user’s first post/comment doesn’t go up immediately while our facilitators/moderators check for spam or a clear norm violation (such as posting flame bait/clear trolling). Ideally this process takes no more than a day, though we currently don’t have anyone checking new users outside of approximately US Eastern Time business hours.

However, some content (like your first comment) requires additional back and forth internally (such as checking with moderators) and/or with the new user. This process involves various non-obvious judgement calls, which is what caused a long delay between your submitting the comment and us reaching out to you (plus the fact that many people were out over the winter holidays). In the case of your comment, we asked you to edit it and you didn’t respond to us or edit the comment for over a week, and then our facilitator felt bad for keeping you in the queue for so long so they approved your comment.

We currently do not use the rejected content feature that LW uses. Instead, almost all^[1] of the content that may have been rejected under their system ends up appearing on the rest of our site, and we currently mostly rely on users voting to make content more or less visible (for example, karma affects where a post is displayed on the Frontpage). I plan to seriously consider whether we should start using the rejected content feature here soon; if so, then I expect that we’ll have the same page set up.

I think that, if we had been using the rejected content feature, the right move would have been for us to reject your comment instead of approving it.

1. ^{^}

   My guess is that there are edge cases, but in practice we keep our queue clear, so my understanding is that users are typically not in limbo for more than a few days. Things like spam are not rejected — accounts that post spam are banned.