Additional plans for the new EA Forum

By Julia_Wise🔸 @ 2018-09-07T15:35 (+20)

CEA is making more concrete plans for the opening of the new EA Forum, and we wanted to let users know about the next steps. Please see our prior post about updating the Forum for more background.

Our vision is that the Forum becomes the main hub for content and discussion in the community. We’d like this to be a place where community members can come to see all the key thinking happening in EA, as well as sharing their ideas with others.

Prizes

CEA is planning to fund monthly cash prizes for the best content published on the EA Forum. (We commit to doing this for at least the first 3 months.) The first prize will be $1000, second $500, and third $200. The winning posts will be determined by a vote of the moderators (Max Dalton, Howie Lempel, Denise Melchin, and Julia Wise) and the current top three Forum users (Peter Hurford, Joey Savoie, and Rob Wiblin).

Sequences

The new Forum will feature sequences of posts on particular themes or topics. You can see something similar in the “Recommended Reading” section of the LessWrong site.

We think it’s important to encourage new users to engage with some core content when they first visit the site, so that they have more context for whatever is currently being discussed. We also think it’s helpful to have some core content that most people in the community will have read, in order to create common knowledge that can be built on in discussion and debate.

We are assembling some sequences to introduce core ideas of EA. While we’ll choose a few main sequences to feature, users will also be able to put together their own sequences.

Cross-posting from personal blogs

We can set up automatic cross-posting to the EA Forum from personal blogs. Please fill in this form if you would like us to do this for you — note that you'll need to have a blog that's consistently about EA-relevant topics, or use tags that let us pull the EA-relevant posts.

Beta

We are running a small, private beta version of the Forum in order to catch bugs and fix problems before we open to the broader community. We are currently forming a list of additional people who would like to participate in the beta version of the Forum. Please fill in this form to express interest.

The rest of this post is the text that will appear as the “How to use the Forum” guide on the new Forum.

User guide and moderation policy

Effective altruism is a joint effort. Our goal is to make the EA Forum the central place for collaborative discussion about how to do the most good we can.

What we’re aiming for

We encourage:

• Writing that is accurate, kind, and relevant to the discussion at hand.

• Scout mindset: “The drive not to make one idea win or another lose, but to see what’s there as honestly and accurately as you can.”

• Clarity about what you believe, your reasons for believing it, and what would cause you to change your mind.

• Making concrete predictions where possible.

• Summary articles: Distilling previous ideas and debates can be really useful because it allows people to get up to speed quickly and build on previous knowledge.

We don’t worry much about:

• Polish: We’d rather hear an idea that’s presented imperfectly than not hear it at all.

We discourage (and may delete):

• Unnecessary rudeness or offensiveness

• Materials advocating major harm or illegal activities

• Abuse

• Spam

• Other behavior that interferes with good discourse

Other pointers:

• When you disagree with someone, approach it with curiosity: try to work out why they think what they think, and what you can learn from each other.

• When you criticize someone’s point, consider doing so supportively.

• Keep an eye out for ways you might be biased — ideologies, people, or causes that you’re particularly attached to.

• Try to focus on important questions, and the important parts of important questions to keep content useful and to the point.

• You can flag material that you think is inappropriate for the site, and the moderators will take a look.

Finding content

Frontpage posts

Posts on the frontpage have been recommended by other users (via upvotes) or have been selected by moderators as especially useful or interesting.

All posts

Select the “All Posts” section to see posts in all categories.

Sequences

Sequences of posts allow you to follow a longer train of thought on a topic.

Community

This is the place for posts about the EA community itself (including EA organizations) rather than object-level discussion.

Following users

Love someone’s work? Click their username, and you’ll see the option to “subscribe to this user’s posts.” You’ll see their new posts in your notification area.

Writing content

You can make a new post by clicking on your username in the upper right and selecting “new post.”

Personal blog post

By default, your posts will be published to your personal blog. Other users can follow your blog if they wish, and they’ll see notifications when you post.

You can use posts to share quick ideas or questions, to publish polished research, or anything in between.

A post will be more visible to other users as it gets more upvotes. If it’s upvoted enough, or if moderators curate it, it will appear on the frontpage.

Link post

We encourage you to post links to content from other sites. You can do this by selecting the link icon when you go to make a new post. When you post links, please either quote or write a summary of the content to get discussion going.

Community posts

If you’re writing about the EA community itself, giving an organizational update, or discussing specific strategies for community building, your post will be moved to the “Community” section.

Sequences

You’ll be able to add sequences of posts on a theme or topic.

Karma

When you vote articles up and down, you give the users karma points. The karma points are equal to the number of upvotes minus the downvotes, and by default, the higher rated posts are more visible. The karma is the number shown next to each post or comment.

You don’t need any karma to post, comment, or vote.

Voting

You can vote up or down on posts and comments. For content you think is especially good or bad, you can give a “strong upvote” or “strong downvote” by clicking and holding (on a computer) or double-tapping (on mobile). The strength of your votes is affected by your level of karma; more details here.

You are encouraged to also leave constructive feedback about what was helpful or unhelpful about the material you’re voting on:

“That example helped clear things up for me.”

“I didn’t find this relevant.”

“Mass voting” on large portions of a user’s content simply because it belongs to that user is not acceptable. Please judge each post or comment on its own merits.

Profile

Let other users know more about you. To edit your user profile, click your username in the upper right and select “Profile.”

It’s fine to make a pseudonymous account in order to express views you wish to keep anonymous. It’s not acceptable to vote multiple times on the same material, to use multiple accounts to express the same opinion multiple times, or to impersonate other people.

Moderators

Currently (as of September 2018), moderators are Denise Melchin, Howie Lempel, Max Dalton, and Julia Wise, using the email address forum@effectivealtruism.org. Please feel free to contact us with questions or feedback.

Moderators will be able to access

• The IP address a post/comment came from

• Voting history of users

• Identity of voters on any given post/comment

This information will only be used to identify behavior such as “sockpuppet” accounts and mass downvoting. The moderators will not view or use this information for any other purpose.