Ability to see search results in chronological order

@mentions

Any time you do this it sends a notification to the person. 

A huge part of my model of the value of the forum is about increasing knowledge density. Saying "look here" or "talk to this person". Ideally we'd be tagging each other all over the place, so we can know who is working on what and avoid duplication.

Nudge people to write shorter posts or at least to summarize them. 

For example: Have the default text of a new post be "TL;DR:"

Inline comments

Some comments should be written at the end of a piece. But some make sense embedded in context. I'd like both, with inline comments initially hidden. I'd turn them on in my own settings.

Annecdotally, a lot of busy people report visiting the Forum many times per week. Some report habitually over-consuming it. One of the biggest costs of the EA Forum might be that it reduces focussed work hours of the most talented people in the community.

So, I propose "EA Forum When Ready".

Features would be something like:

1. Block schedule: block forum from loading during a period you schedule.

2. Hide the post list on homepage by default. You have to press "Show posts" to see them. (You can still search or browse subpages, just not see the homepage list).

3. Time limit: you can spend X mins per day on Forum, after that it is blocked.

HackerNews famously has a similar feature called "no procrast(inate)" mode.

Polls in comments.

Any comment can have an 8-answer poll. Users click an answer and then get to see the results. 

A button to allow for multiple votes instead. 

Matchmaking tools

Make connections with other forum users.

Everyone is anon mode: browse Forum without seeing any usernames in posts, comments, etc.

Search among a specific user's posts/comments

Get more wiki to happen:

Wiki additions can get upvoted and karma: update -- this is already the case

New and upvoted wiki entries show up in feeds. update -- this can happen, to some extent .

Revising my comment: consider ways of making the wiki more prominent and better integrating it into the forum (I realize this is now kind of vague)

As in stackexchange: as you are posting it suggests posts that have similar content (based on ML I guess). … suggesting you make your post a comment on their post instead. (Or an edit/addition to their post if this feature is also enabled.

A better feed

Users can set posts to be editable by any logged-in user.

Emoji replies, like Slack

(Nathan, you can use this for polls!)

Nothing counts mode: browse the forum without seeing karma score and comment count.

Link articles in text by typing [[ and then it brings up a search box of all forum articles. 

Turns out this already exists using "@"

"Listen to this post" button which links to an automatically generated AI narration, and a human narration if available.

A human "epistemic spot checker" who tries to find flaws in verifiable claims made in EA Forum posts

Dark mode

Polls in shortforms 

Anyone can summarise: anyone can write a summary of anyone else's post, and the original author can choose whether to feature one of them at the top, visible by default.

The other summaries are accessible at the top of post but with a click required to view them. The summaries accumulate karma in usual way, low karma ones are hidden.

There's also some mechanism by which the author is prompted to write their own summary, either inline on the post or in a separate box, to compete with other people's summaries.

(Spitballing here, can easily imagine coming to think this is a pretty bad idea all things considered)

More powerful "customise the homepage" options.

In particular: follow a list of topics then see a list that contains only new posts (and classic posts) on those topics.

Moderate importance bug, probably applies to various situations where user uploaded images are presented:

This user's thumbnail is enormous, because an image inside of it is resized to the entire window.

Also, in comments/posts, I am having trouble controlling the size of images, they just resize horizontally to fit the screen, and this isn't ideal for many situations. This should be controllable.

A way of sharing and upvoting external content along the lines of HackerNews.

There are linkposts already but people don't post linkposts in the way people do on HN.

YouTube and TikTok.

The literal boss of CEA online suggested a video format and there's basically an EA TikTok account with 50K followers. 

Let's go!

Reminders / encouragement to do things like:

• make takeaways concrete
• put an epistemic status
• quantify some claims

Weekly forum tip

Quiet comments

The ability to submit a comment without it showing up in "Recent Discussion". Among other things, this would allow discussion of controversial content without it stealing our collective attention from good content. Moderation already helps with this, but I would still have a use for quiet comments.

Allow commenting in "tag" pages, as if they were normal posts:

And have this be the default place for an AMA, or for discussing if an AI company is net-good or net-bad, or whatever, instead of having those conversations scattered (getting lost, repeating themselves) between different posts about the org

Embed timestamped Youtube videos

Agreevote and disagreevote on posts. Sometimes I'd like to upvote a post without implying I agree with it.

When I interact with someone on the Forum, encourage me to follow them on Twitter.

Ways you might do this:

1. Everywhere a Forum username is shown, add a bird icon that links to their Twitter profile.

2. When I upvote, reply or send a DM, prompt me to follow the person on Twitter.

3. Periodically email me a list of Twitter profiles of the EA Forum users I interact with the most.

I imagine (1) would get a lot of the value, and it's cheap to test.

Generally I think it would be interesting to brainstorm on ways that EA Forum could interact with EA Twitter, and vice versa.

The forum could use a "save comment" feature.

Markdown Syntax Reference

My User Story: As proficient markdown author and new EA Forum user, I want a reference guide for the forum's markdown, so that I can more quickly determine the correct syntax for features that vary across markdown implementations. (E.g., footnotes took me a loooong time to figure out.)

(I suspect there's an identical user story for new users who are NOT already used to writing markdown, but I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth.)

I suspect that a reference guide already exists, but my google-fu is failing me--I tried searching here, the general reference docs, github, and the code itself. As evidence that I'm not the only one, I see that the previous feature request thread has mentions a markdown cheatsheet as part of larger request for general markdown improvements. I'm hoping that adding just the syntax reference part is an easy win.

Make tagging mandatory.

Hide complete feature requests in the feature request forum article. 

Any number in a post can be suggested by any viewer.

Readers can see the median of suggested numbers, or weighted by upvotes. 

A bulk export feature. Something that provides the entire content of my  writing (drafts, posts, comments, questions, answers) in a suitable format.

At the moment, I do manual back-ups, but this would be nice to have for browsing or mining my own content for later use.

Regarding Copy-pasting footnotes from a Google Document, I think it would be nice if after the copy-pasting:

• Nested bullet points were not converted to non-nested bullet points.
• The text in the cells of the headers of tables were not converted to sections which appear on the left navigation panel.
• The footnote links were not broken.

I doubt it's the most important, and maybe it's not a good idea, but an option for users to hide post and comment karma from their own point of view could be interesting. 

I think my polls create value, but not this much. Writing polls on the forum is absolutely overpowered in terms of gaining karma.

Better analytics for both authors and readers:

• Readers can highlight sections of an article. The forum might then show a "featured highlight" similarly to how this works in Medium.
• The forum can also measure how much screen time each paragraph in an article gets, and show this to users (a bit like a heatmap of where readers look at). This could lead to improved writing, and incentivize shorter articles.
• An article's engagement and read time can become factors used for ranking, as a complement to Karma.

Remove the ability to strong upvote/agree on your own comments/posts and remove all existing such votes. (I think you can on posts - I haven't written any so can't check.)

Some kind of default categorisation filter that makes the frontpage more relevant to you - look to existing forum software for inspiration (currently this feels more like a zillion-author blog)

RSS feeds for tags (be surprised anyone else wants this but maybe?)

Nudge people to write shorter posts:

For example: Allow users to sort their feed by some algorithm that puts shorter posts higher up (not ignoring the karma, but also taking into account the length)

Ability to collapse comments back after opening them on the front page

Easy way for users to blind authorship of posts. And a way to see a trending feed which is only affected by blinded karma

I've shared this one before, but felt worth sharing again on this more recent thread: 

Co-authors on posts should get karma from that post. 

• Allow authors to split karma how they wish (could default to 50/50).
• Each gets some percentage of the whole which adds up to more than 100% e.g. if there's 100 karma each person gets 75 or something, so you're not discounting karma just because there's more people - presumably more authors doesn't necessarily mean a post is "worth" less per person or something, although there are ways people can game the system that are worth taking into account).

(originally posted here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NhSBgYq55BFs7t2cA/ea-forum-feature-suggestion-thread)

Sequences show up in search results

For what it's worth I think my suggested voting pattern was dumb. I think I should have said agreevote for if you agree with the reasoning. 

Ability to mute posts/comments from certain users.

(I don’t think this is done already but downvote or comment if so)

Some optional/additional way to weight karma as a percentage of total users (active users? readers?) so that sorting all posts by karma doesn’t show only newer posts at the top, and older popular posts way down with newer less-popular posts.