EA Forum feature suggestion thread

It's still a crime that we don't support tables and it's a second crime that no one else has mentioned this yet.

I would consider something to reduce the karma users can get from commenting on controversial posts. Right now it seems easy to get very high scores by making not really that great comments in such places.

As an example, I think this comment I made is decent. It makes a true and relevant point that no-one else had mentioned . But it's not great; the topic of that thread is not that important, and the all the comments in it, let alone mine alone, do not resolve the issue. Most importantly, that comment is definitely not over 50% as good as this article I wrote. I would say the article is at least a thousand times more important, and took at least a thousand times longer to write.

I'm not sure how exactly you would do this though, as all the most obvious methods have significant drawbacks.

It would very dramatically improve my experience of the Forum if there were the option to hide posts. This would mean that the first page of the Forum would always be posts that were relevant to me. As it stands, whenever I visit the Forum most of the posts which I can see are not relevant to me (perhaps because I've already read them and don't want to read them again or check in on the ongoing discussion), whereas posts which are relevant to me and which I would want to visit again are invisible if they are more than a few days old.

I'd like users to be able to attach/link a profile picture to their EA Forum profile, and that these pictures would be viewable next to their usernames in posts or comments. I think this would make the forum a bit more human and friendly!

Dark mode.

Footnotes are great!

One feature that would make then even greater is if I could copy paste text from a Google Doc that includes footnotes, and have them be formatted correctly.

I'd like to see the experimental sequences feature rolled out to all users.

(Probably has been suggested before but thought I'd add): A small indicator for the original poster of the top-level post in the comments. Like the microphone on Reddit.

Co-authors on posts should also share the karma of the post. I don't know how they should, whether it's equal split, or some percentage of the whole (e.g. if there's 100 karma each person gets 75 or something).

(I noticed this on 1 account for a post the person had co-written ~6 months ago)

I suspect that many people don't post on the forum because they're worried about their post being poorly received and damaging their reputation in the EA community.

I believe this because I feel this way myself, because I've heard other people around me worrying a lot about posting to the forum, because Will MacAskill spoke on the 80,000 hours podcast of being anxious about their reputation being damaged after posting on the forum, and because of the existence of Aaron Gertler's talk "Why you (yes, you) should post on the EA Forum".

Perhaps, by default, new posts could be anonymous until a certain karma threshold (say 30 karma) is met. After that post meets the karma threshold, the true author of the post could become visible.

That way, authors could post knowing that their reputation wouldn't be damaged if their post wasn't well received, but that they would get the credit if the post was well received.

I'd expect this to increase the number of posts (both good and bad) from hesitant new users, and I think that the increase in the number of mediocre new posts would be a cost worth paying. It's good for people to contribute and feel valued for their contribution, especially if it encourages them to make more valuable contributions in the future.

I think it'd be important that the anonymous-until-threshold was the default (i.e. opt out), so that people didn't feel embarrassed about using it.

Can we add agreement karma to comments on all posts?

We should make it harder to manipulate your own comments' karma. My favoured approach would be to deactivate all voting on one's own comments. Also fine would be if by default, you strongly upvote and strongly agree with all of your own comments.

There was a good amount of agreement about this previously.

Level 3 headings should be supported. Unless it's changed recently, it currently jumps from Level 2 to Level 4, which makes it hard to logically format complex documents.

Option to @mention usernames.

Should have something like an autocomplete and an opt-out-able notification/mail whenever one is mentioned. 

Having recently wrote a post that got a lot of silent downvotes, I've been thinking more about the general role of silent downvotes and how we could mitigate their downsides. (See some earlier discussion here.)

Silent downvotes are important for content ranking/visibility and providing a rough high-level signal of what the Forum community values/disvalues, but they have some pretty important disadvantages, especially when they represent a preponderance of a post's karma:

• They can be badly demoralising to authors, without providing the kind of actionable feedback they could use to do better. (I've seen plenty of plaintive comments asking people to explain their downvotes, often with no responses.)
• They create an atmosphere of tension and adversariality that I think tends to degrade the quality of discourse (as well as being generally stressful for many people).

There's already a feature that allows authors to hide comment karma on selected posts. I'm not sure entirely how it works, but I think it means that if the author chooses, nobody can see karma scores on that post?

That might be what some authors want, and is maybe preferable to seeing lots of silent downvotes, but at least for me it seems way worse than seeing downvotes and knowing why. I want to be able to make that update, but it's often hard to do that based on silent downvotes alone.

It would be great to get more information from people about their downvotes, but any system for doing that needs to be super quick, simple, and easy – if a silent downvoter had time/energy/interest in providing an in-depth explanation of their downvote they'd just write a comment. But I think getting even a couple of bits more information from silent downvoters would be super valuable to authors.

The solution I have in mind for this right now is to provide a little optional pop-up next to the post karma total with a few common reasons for downvoting, plus an "Other" option (with or without the option to specify). You'd probably want to iterate a few times on the options, but my first pass would be:

• I don't like the tone (rude/tendentious/uncharitable)
• I disagree with core claims
• It has bad priorities / misses key considerations in a way that makes it unhelpful, even if its narrow claims are true (this one is obviously too long as-is)
• It's badly written / hard to read
• Other

Then show the results to the author somehow (e.g. on the analytics tab).

You could also do this for upvotes; this might be nice and would reduce asymmetry with downvotes, but I'm not too concerned about it. You could also extend it to comment downvotes, though this seems lower priority to me.

I'm guessing a new feature like this would be a fairly significant lift code-wise, but I tentatively think it would be worth it – right now I see this as a fairly big problem with quality of discourse and community on the Forum.

I'd like the Forum to support superscript and subscript.

Any thoughts or updates on implementing "two axis" voting? This feature is described here.

I don't really want to add pressure or pull things forward, I just wanted to check if there were thoughts on this.

For more context, the post below is a situation where this was useful :

The above shows one comment chain where a good idea seems to be downvoted because of disagreement, and not content.

 Basically, I didn't like (and really many others as well) how several comments in that post were treated voting wise, even if at the same time, we disagreed with the actual content. 

It seems possible this could be alleviated by the two axis voting.

BTW I also really like a bunch of other features and I have ideas, but basically you don't want to get me started. 

Effective Animal Advocacy (EAA) forum

EDIT: I made this suggestion into an EA forum post so I deleted it from here to avoid duplication. The post contains the text that was originally here.

I think the EA Forum should allow authors to pick one of the images they attached into their post as the "preview image" when the post is shared on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

I don't think this feature currently exists, and I think it would help drive traffic to the EA Forum whenever posts are shared. I'm assuming that the authors would link an image that is more enticing than the standard EA forum logo, which would result in slightly higher click-through rates. Medium.com and most other CMS's allow you to pick a preview image. I think Medium.com's UI for picking a "featured image" is a good example of how to design this feature.

Vaidehi Agarwalla @ 2022-06-13T17:05 (+4)

Adding to the better preview image for twitter, I notice other sites have top quotes from the article as a cover image, which I think is pretty interesting. 

(probably not worth implementing, but just for inspiration really)

JP Addison @ 2022-06-14T01:25 (+2)

Thanks! No worries about suggesting "inspirational" features.

Habryka @ 2020-06-26T20:23 (+3)

I am reasonably confident that we use the first image that is used in a post as the preview image, so you can already mostly do this.

BrianTan @ 2020-06-27T03:30 (+4)

Hm I tried linking a recent EA Forum post with an image (image is at the bottom) just now on Facebook, and the EA forum photo is still the one showing up. I tried running it via the Facebook sharing debugger and pressing "Scrape Again", but it still shows the same photo.

Habryka @ 2020-06-27T04:19 (+5)

Huh, you're right. I will look into it.

1. Could analytics be displayed on the forum? I think it'd be interesting to people to see how many people read different posts. This is also related to the question re: the forum prize - I reckon many authors would be more motivated by seeing that their posts are widely read than by a cash prize.

2. I often see very long posts that jump right into the introduction without summary. Could one introduce a field that is mandatory if a posts is more than 300 words long that forces the author to provide a 200 characters (or so) summary? Or something like this:

https://www.elsevier.com/authors/journal-authors/highlights

could even be added by the mods.

On-site image hosting for posts/comments? This is mostly a minor QoL benefit, and maybe there would be challenges with storage. Another benefit would be that images would not vanish if their original source does.

Can we put this page in the sidebar?

When a user moves a controversial post to drafts, other readers get worried of censorship. Two recent examples: https://mobile.twitter.com/erikphoel/status/1559527499188654085 https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sD4kdobiRaBpxcL8M/what-happened-to-the-women-and-effective-altruism-post?commentId=GpSneam3oSwaBYDWH

It might make sense to tweak the prose. Maybe let moderators add a reason, like for deleted comments (e.g. "spam", "moved to draft after a request from the author"), and for users write "the author of this post marked it as a private draft"

I'd like to have the option to make polls within a post. I recently wrote a short question post to see if an idea seems promising and I got a couple of upvotes and no comments. Having the option to get quick and cheap feedback from the community would've been useful.

An automatic jargon-explainer for commonly used jargon. This gets the best of both worlds, for readers and writers. People can use jargon more often,^[1] and not have to worry about it not landing with readers. And readers unaware of the jargon can hover over the word to see what it means, while readers who already do know can keep reading. Makes it easier to read for people within a wider range of inferential distance.

 

1. ^{^}

   Efficient communication without having to link to each jargony word, since that might get distracting and take attention away from links they do want to emphasise.

It could be cool if the EA Forum allowed for boxes of text that start off collapsed but can be expanded, in the way that e.g. Gwern's site does (here's a random example). This could be used for long sections that the author wants to signal (a) are sort-of digressions and/or (b) may be worth skipping for some people. 

There are a few things authors can already do that serve a similar purpose:

• Have a section that explicitly says at the top "I think this section will be of interest to far fewer people than the rest of this post, so feel free to skip it."
• Move a section to the end and call it an appendix
• Just link to a google doc that sort of serves as the expandable box/appendix
• Move the section into a footnote

But the first two of those options seem to less clearly signal "We really think fewer people should read this than should read the rest of this post", compared to having a collapsed but expandable box of text. 

And the third option might sometimes signal that too strongly, and also doesn't allow things to show up when you use the Forum's search function.

And the fourth option doesn't seem to work well for fairly long sections of text; more than a few paragraphs in a single footnote would be unusual and might be a little annoying (due to the small text). Also, that would remove the option of the author including footnotes within that section of text.

(I originally raised this idea here, in the context of whether it'd be best to include full transcripts from 80k podcast episodes when link posting them to the EA Forum. I think it could make sense to include the transcripts as collapsed but expandable boxes of text, so that terms from the transcript will appear when doing searches on the Forum - which wouldn't happen if the transcript wasn't included at all - but people don't feel like they have to read the whole transcript before they comment on the post.)

Can I opt out of Forum favourites? I'm sorry but I hate it

Add Agreement Karma to posts.

This comment suggesting this feature got 32 Agreement with 9 votes:

WilliamKiely @ 2022-12-01T18:49 (+2)

Perhaps it's not clear whether adding agreement karma to posts is positive on net; but I think perhaps it would be worth adding for a month as an experiment.

A counter-consideration is that many voters on the Forum may not understand the difference between overall karma and agreement karma still. Unconclusive weak evidence: This answer got 3 overall karma with 22 votes (at some point it was negative) and 18 agreement karma with 20 votes:

(It's unconclusive evidence because while the regular karma downvotes surprised me, people could have had legitimate reasons for not liking the meta-answer and downvoting it. My suspicion though is that at least some people down-voted this in an attempt to "Disagree" vote in the poll.)

Pato @ 2023-01-19T06:11 (+1)

I agree that maybe people don't get it (like kinda me) but I think both things, posts and comments, should have it or neither.

While I think LaTeX is useful, it is not very intuitive or user friendly and posting long curated articles is quite tedious. It would be nice to have a feature like Elementor.

I think there would be a lot of value in a detailed how-to document for content creators explaining each step needed to go from a GDoc or WordDoc to a forum post. This would optimally include a directory for keywords like footnotes, typographical emphasis, Title/Header/Normal text functions, etc.

Inspired by an EA Melbourne planning event yesterday, we came up with concept of having a subtle but visible visual tag for posts/replies by folks who are in the same city as you (opt in option in your profile), to help build more in-person community and potential collaboration.
 

Double the karma weight of votes made before the new karma system was implemented. All votes used to be worth one point. For example, let's take an old post like this. It currently has 43 karma and 43 votes (probably all of them are upvotes). For comparison, my newest post has 53 karma and 16 upvotes. If you think about it, that old post is clearly more endorsed by the community. There were fewer readers when it was posted and a very high percentage of them chose to upvote it and probably many would have strongly upvoted if that was an option. Nowadays, even a regular upvote by high-karma users is worth two points. Posts like that old post do not appear in forum favourites and other places like that but they should. If you doubled the karma of such old posts, the karma for that old one would be 86 instead of 43 - a much better representation of how much the community endorses that post. Ah, maybe you should even triple the karma weight. Posts like this would then actually make forum favourites and I think they should.

Sans-serif font in body text! The comments section is absolutely beautiful to read, but I find the body text of posts very difficult. Most blogs and online news sources seem to use sans-serif, probably for readability.

Alternatively, give users the option to pick their own font. Also, maybe make text black instead of a lighter grey?

i would find it helpful to establish a norm to begin posts with a short (!) 'tl;dr'-section which summarizes the main results/arguments of the article, since sometimes it is hard to tell what a post is about only from the title/the preview one gets by hovering over the link.

For Shortform:

1. The link to get here from the main page is awfully small and inconspicuous (1 of 145 individual links on the page according to a Chrome extension)
   1. I can imagine it being near/stylistically  like:
      1. "All Posts" (top of sidebar)
      2. "Recommendations" in the center
      3. "Frontpage Posts", but to the main section's side or maybe as a replacement for it you can easily toggle back and forth from
2. Would be cool to be able to sort and aggregate like with the main posts (nothing to filter by afaik)
   1. I'd really appreciate being able to see the highest-scoring Shortform posts ever, but afaik can't easily do that atm

"agree/disagree" for posts, not only comments.

Might reduce downvotes on posts

A emoticon or image next to someone's first post either on the homepage or when you click into the post so that people know that they are engaging with a potential newcomer and maybe are nicer / more welcoming?

Could be obvious downsides to this I haven't thought of

Tags for tags: We should turn the "Related entries" sections of wiki pages into native tags so we can build a crowdsourced graph of links between the wiki pages. Links can be uni- or bidirectional and specify different types of relationships such as "A is related to B" or "A is a parent of B".

I worry a bit that all the suggestions are about details, whereas the macro trend is that public discourse is moving toward Twitter, and blog content linked from Twitter. One thing that could help attract new audience would be to revive the EA Forum Twitter account, automatically, or manually.

Has anyone considered a hackernews-style section? I know there is already support for posting links, but:

• They act as posts, while their function is not at all like that in Hackernews. E.g.,
  • I don’t want my subscriptions to people show me their submitted links. At not as post notifications.
• Hackernews thrives by banning editorialization. You can only submit a link with its original title (or a sufficiently neutral title in case the original title sucks. They have guidelines on their site, iirc.). The poster has no privilege over other users.
• There is a culture of posting relevant links that the community finds useful. We do not have such a culture here, because we do not provide the medium and guidelines for it.

This links section will create a distributed content aggregator for our community. Considering finding relevant content in our current era is a hard problem, this can be very useful. I think a lot of us here are distasteful of surroundings ourselves with news outlets, for example. It’d be great if we could get a filtered important news list through the community. Adding features such as an RSS feed for links with X+ karma will be helpful in this endeavor.

Also see lobsters.

Import from HTML/gdoc/word/whatever: One feature I miss from the old forum was the ability to submit HTML directly. This allowed one to write the post in google docs or similar (with tables, footnotes, sub/superscript, special characters, etc.), export it as HTML, paste into the old editor, and it was (with some tweaks) good to go.

This is how I posted my epistemic modesty piece (which has a table which survived the migration, although the footnote links no longer work). In contrast, when cross-posting it to LW2, I needed the kind help of a moderator - and even they needed to make some adjustments (e.g. 'writing out' the table).

Given such a feature was available before, hopefully it can be done again. It would be particularly valuable for the EA forum as:

• A fair proportion of posts here are longer documents which benefit from the features available in things like word or gdocs. (But typically less mathematics than LW, so the nifty LATEX editor finds less value here than there).
• The current editor has much less functionality than word/gdocs, and catching up 'most of the way' seems very labour intensive and could take a while.
• Most users are more familiar with gdocs/word than editor/markdown/latex (i.e. although I can add $\Omega$ and other special characters with the Latex editor and a some googling, I'm more familiar with doing this in gdocs - and I guess folks who have less experience with Latex or using a command line would find this difference greater).
• Most users are probably drafting longer posts on google docs anyway.
• Clunkily re-typesetting long documents in the forum editor manually (e.g. tables as image files) poses a barrier to entry, and so encourages linking rather than posting, with (I guess?) less engagement.

A direct 'import from gdoc/word/etc.' would be even better, but an HTML import function alone (given software which has both wordprocessing and HTML export 'sorted' are prevalent) would solve a lot of these problems at a stroke.

Thanks so much to the team for their work. I really like the layout of this forum. It's clean and pleasant to use.

Expose "voting tribes" in the comments.

We could run a similar algorithm to X's Community Notes. Then, on contentious topics, we could easily see the main axis of disagreement. We could also have a comment sorting option, that upranks those upvoted by people from both sides of the disagreement.

See this thread for discussion and corresponding post for algorithm description.

On mobile, I think there's no way to remove your vote on your own comments. On desktop, I can just click my vote again, but on mobile the normal workflow is to tap to cycle between normal / strong / no vote, and I can't strong upvote my own comments, so I get "stuck" in the cycle.

edit: ok I think you can do it by just going through the cycle quickly enough, but I definitely struggled with this before, perhaps it depends on the latency of your connection to the server...

Promoting shortforms to top-level posts, preserving replies. I wanted to do that with this, because reposting it as a top-level post wouldn't preserve existing discussion.

An option to post anonymously or non anononymously with your account (instead of having to create a new account to post anonymously, and spend hours on internet anagram server finding an anonymous account name)

I'd like to be able to add pinned posts or comments to my profile. Several people have asked me about my EA origin story so I've tried to refer them to this comment, but I always have a hard time finding the link.

Pingbacks should include comments

Very specific and small comment, but I'd like to see the "Reply" button for comments be bigger and more noticeable. I would prefer it to be an actual button (with padding and an outline), and with a message icon beside it. It's happened to me twice where I couldn't figure out how to reply to a comment until ~30 seconds of searching for the reply button.

Something which has come up a few times, and recently a lot in the context of Debate Week (and the reaction to Leif's post) is things getting downvoted quickly and being removed from the Front Page, which drastically drops the likelihood of engagement.^[1]

So a potential suggestion for the Frontpage might be:

• Hide the vote score of all new posts if the absolute score of the post is below some threshold (I'll use 20 as an example)
  • If a post hits -20, it drops off the front page
  • After a post hits 20+, it's karma score is permanently revealed
  • Galaxy-brain version is that Community/Non-Community grouping should only take effect once a post hits these thresholds^[2]
• This will still probably leave us with too many new posts to fit on the front page, so some rules to sort which stay and which get knocked off:
  • Some consideration to total karma should probably count (how much to weight it is debatable)
  • Some consideration to how recent the post is should count too (e.g. I'd probably want to see a new post that got 20+ karma quickly than 100+ karma over weeks)
  • Some consideration should also go to engagement - some metric related to either number of votes or comment count would probably indicate which posts are generating community engagement, though this could lead to bikeshedding/Matthew effect if not implemented correctly. I still think it's directionally correct though
  • Of course the user's own personal weighting of topic importance can probably contribute to this as well
• There will always be some trade-offs when designing some ranking on many posts with limited space. But the idea above is that no post should quickly drop off the front page because a few people quickly down-vote it into negative karma.

Maybe some code like this already exists, but this thought popped into my head and I thought it was worth sharing on this post.

1. ^{^}

   My poor little piece on gradient descent got wiped out by debate week 😭 rip

2. ^{^}

   In a couple of places I've seen people complain about the use of the Community tag to 'hide' particular discussions/topics. Not saying I fully endorse this view.

Something that came to mind after reading recent posts by Ulrik and Sarah, along with the reaction to them - Can we do better at distinguishing downvotes and disagreevotes?

In my mind, I view downvotes as saying:

• This content violates Forum norms/content policies
• This content does not belong on the Forum
• I want to see less of this content on the Forum
• The community values this content (specifically or in general) too highly

Whereas disagreevotes are saying:

• There are particular claims in the piece which are wrong
• The argument of the post may be valid, but it does not hold
• The author is giving their opinion/experience, and this does not match mine

I think my concern is that the first two bullet points under 'downvotes' seem very different from the bottom two.^[1] It feels, to me, that we rarely see posts that are highly upvoted but also have significant disagreevotes.

So I don't have a solution for this apart from some half-baked ideas, but wonder what the Forum team's perspective was?

1. ^{^}

   I think in part I'm questioning whether the last two are valid uses of the downvote button.

Display a more detailed breakdown of karma and agreement karma by number of upvotes and downvotes rather than overall amount. 

I think that the weighted voting system is counterproductive overall (it creates perverse incentives, it ascribes false authority to users who are more prolific or who may have expertise in one area and poor understanding in others, and it is needlessly undemocratic) and makes it harder to meaningfully understand the karma of a given post or comment, but this could go someway in making the actual impact of posts and comments more legible. I think there is a difference between how to read agreement karma for a comment that has 10 agreement karma overall from, say, 8 2 point upvotes and 2 -3 minus point downvote versus one that has 10 1-point upvotes, and the breakdown of how a comment achieved its agreement karma is not currently legible, which makes agreement karma a much less useful indicator than it could be otherwise.

P.S.: Similar suggestions have been made below on how the karma and voting system can be tinkered with to make it more meaningful, but seems different enough to warrant a new top-level comment.

Couldn't see if someone already suggested this but:

• Have a separate field for org name on profile 
• Option to select if you're writing a post on behalf of an organisation or as an individual (this is very important imo often people write posts and it's not clear who they work for) 
  • Auto-tag with org name + "org updates" or similar tag
• Organisation tag shows all the people who've listed org name on their profile 

Hi there, as a fellow EA, developer and avid creator of Userscripts, here are my thoughts on first seeing the site.

The design is very different from other online communities. This makes for an awkward first impression, users like familiarity in their UI.

I believe the gold standard for forums are Reddit, Facebook, StackOverflow, Discourse. By gold standard I mean some of the best minds in software UX works on these site. I particularly love Discourse.

This is a forum, yet there are no topics / subtopics. It tries to do too much in one place. I don't think questions, articles and events belong in in the same listing. I am aware of the filters, my criticism still stands :-)

Everywhere I move the mouse I'm assaulted by a popup. Why do you hate me? :-D

Infinite scroll / load more adds uncertainty to the UX. It's hard to track context, I can't tell if I click somewhere all my "progress" will be lost.

Gray on gray! No gray background please!

Titles are long, yet the columns are narrow.

The comments font looks bold, it should be lighter.

Some pages have too much info. "How to use the Forum" shouldn't have a pages long comments section, specially with unrelated discussions.

Still, thank you for taking the time in trying to innovate and contribute to the OS community!

Sharang Phadke @ 2022-10-13T17:21 (+2)

Thanks for the discussion here. Your suggestions seem to be a mix of preferences, some generally pervasive design patterns, and some  content curation-type suggestions (eg with your reference to the vuejs forum). The Forum team is hoping to hire our first full time designer soon, and we're hoping this will help us bring a more specific set of opinions to various layers of design on the Forum.

Daniel Vanzin @ 2022-10-01T19:31 (+1)

Alright, here is a very crude preview

https://openuserjs.org/scripts/icetbr/Clearer_EffectiveAltruism.org_Forum

Habryka @ 2022-10-01T20:12 (+3)

It does sadly look very broken for me: 

It does look better on the all-posts page: 

Some thoughts

• I like the idea of making the text smaller and increasing the density of the post list. Seems good to experiment with
• I think getting rid of the grey background really breaks a lot of the recent discussion section as well as the overall navigability of the UI (and also we've gotten tons of user feedback that people found the perfect white as the whole background to feel quite straining on their eyes).
• I do overall think the font is just too small for me to read. I expect most users would zoom in a decent amount in order to actually make it comfortable to skim. 
• I think having line-breaks in the post-titles is quite bad for skimming, and also gives undue attention to posts that have longer titles, which seems quite bad.
• While I do find it easier to skim to move the post-icons to the left of the items, I think it gets the information hierarchy wrong. I think the type of post (link post, curated, personal blog) is at best a secondary piece of information, and the design you proposed gives it too much prominence. 

Daniel Vanzin @ 2022-10-02T00:17 (+4)

Yeah, it messes up a few other pages as well. To be fixed.

I think the site needs a dark mode. More and more people are favoring it. I use my monitor in a nearly yellow tone, redshift -O 2800k so I like the white background just fine. I can't get behind the gray background though. I mean, how many sites does that? I find it harder to read.

The font I used could be one size larger, I did made an alternate screenshot to compare. Yet research suggests the current font size, not the one from my script, is ideal. I still favor higher density, as I can analyze the content faster.

Regarding skimming, I read titles by rows, not lines. I think we've been conditioned for this. Just look at Reddit or Medium. I find it easy to read a few words and skip to the next row. The title is too important to be trimmed away, I would sooner hide the author, date an comments count. I think it's very hard to find a site with this few characters in a title.

I haven't used the site enough to give a proper opinion on the icons. I think they either should be used more or hidden altogether. But I mix my feelings regarding topics, something I didn't touch yet. They will either be on the left of the title, on the end of the line, or below the titles, in a smaller font. I can't tell you how much I want to see 50 titles at a time and instantly know where they fit. Blue tagged AI, green tagged Animal Wellfare, etc.

I plan on enhancing my script as I spend more time here. It might take a while. I mostly wanted to take a feel if my experiences are in line with others. I'm happy to keep my preferences as a userscript and give the users another choice.

Habryka @ 2022-10-02T02:54 (+4)

I think the site needs a dark mode. More and more people are favoring it. 

The site already has one! Or more precisely LessWrong has one, and it probably wouldn't be too hard to adapt it to the EA Forum (which shares a codebase).

The font I used could be one size larger, I did made an alternate screenshot to compare. Yet research suggests the current font size, not the one from my script, is ideal. I still favor higher density, as I can analyze the content faster.

I am generally skeptical of research in this space, but yeah, the current font size is what seems to work pretty well in user tests I've done. I do also think sometimes it makes sense to have more density and smaller font sizes (and like, comment text is already almost that small)

I can't get behind the gray background though. I mean, how many sites does that? I find it harder to read.

I mean, how about Reddit? 

Or how about Youtube (the background of the videos): 

Or how about Facebook:

The pattern of "grey background with white boxes in front, occasional header or nav element on the grey background" is as far as I can tell the standard pattern to reduce eye fatigue while also ensuring high text contrast. I actually can't think of a content heavy site that doesn't do this.

Charles He @ 2022-10-02T01:30 (+2)

I'm confused why the all white background is better, grey is easier on the eyes and the non-white color gives a natural framing to the other content. Both points seem pretty normal in design.

I disagree that those other sites are superior. Also a major issue is that they use visual/video content (reddit and FB) and have different modes of use/seeking attention. They are designed around a scrolling feed, producing a constant stream of content, showing 1-3 items at a time.

Setting the above aside, I'm uncertain why your changes reflect ideas from them. For example, your changes to text, make posts much more compact than Reddit or SO.

Daniel Vanzin @ 2022-10-02T02:45 (+1)

"Grey is easier" I don't think it is. Would you disagree that most publications use a white background? Could you provide at least some examples of ones that doesn't?

"I disagree that those other sites are superior." We would have to define superior. For me, the best (most well paid) minds in UX + the most number of users are objective measures.  That doesn't mean we have to copy them, but it beckons to the familiarity factor. 

I agree that they have a constant stream of content and this matters on design. What use is to have 50 compacted posts that I can scan in 1 second, if we have 30 posts a week? It is unfortunate that we don't have a higher traffic. I believe in reducing barriers of entry to help on this, and making a familiar site is but a very small of those.

To your third point, open a screenshot of my version, the current design here and any of them. See you can spot the ideas I try to incorporate. I don't know your background, but I can give you a a technical response. Fonts, spacing, that kind of thing. I basically copied the typography from them, while keeping the site identity and adding a few of my preferences.

Please note I did that in about 4 hours of work. The gross of it was very fast, some details took very long. 1 hour I spent fighting  the pop ups before deciding to disable them

Charles He @ 2022-10-02T04:02 (+3)

"Grey is easier" I don't think it is. Would you disagree that most publications use a white background? Could you provide at least some examples of ones that doesn't?

 

I checked two sites that you listed, FB and StackExchange, and they literally use a grey/off white background. Started with these two and I stopped after checking these two, I suspect I'll find more. 

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/101876/why-not-use-darker-backgrounds-instead-of-white

The stackexchange site literally answered this very question and one answer pointed out that the very site is off-white (although less than grey or the EA forum). The top answer here supports grey backgrounds: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/23965/is-there-a-problem-with-using-black-text-on-white-backgrounds?rq=1.

 

Before I thought this opinion about the use of grey (and avoidance of high contrast) was normal/standard before. Now I'm even more sure, and not knowing/ opposing about it seems sort of strange to me. 

 

"I disagree that those other sites are superior." We would have to define superior. For me, the best (most well paid) minds in UX + the most number of users are objective measures.  That doesn't mean we have to copy them, but it beckons to the familiarity factor. 

There's a lot going on here, but IMO neither of those things make this view very promising. This is because they are designed for MAU/growth hacking and the audience is different (and I don't think this is some elite or niche thing). Also, since the business is multiple billions are year, you naturally get top talent. 

As an analogy, tabloids are popular and well designed for their audience, but that doesn't make them dominant design choices. I do agree that the design on average is good and things work for those sites.

 

Also, I suspect some design choices from those sites have dependencies—I think having an infinite scroll or video or picture focus would affect other design choices, such as size/position/font of text, so copying those design choices to a forum might not be appropriate without more sophistication.

 

I don't want to be disagreeable or press too much here on you here. Honestly I want to learn about design and different perspectives, but I don't think I am?

Some of the other things you said suggested you have strong views that seemed more personal and also that you use some unusual color filter? This makes me speculate that you are applying a personal perspective disproportionately and ignoring "the customer", but maybe this is unfair.

Charles He @ 2022-10-02T04:13 (+3)

??? Yeah, Reddit's design literally uses a grey background. It's darker than the EA forum.

Daniel Vanzin @ 2022-10-02T12:59 (+1)

You're talking about the framing. Sorry, I didn't realize. It's not among my concerns to the site. Yes, It's a preference. There are a few main trends regarding framing, I'm on the one against it.  Gray on gray refers to the comments section, and any other place where there is a gray background and a "gray" font. It is not an unusual choice, I just don't find it the best. As an  argument, you read articles in a white background, why comments should have gray, aside from structural purposes?

Regarding audience, I kind of disagree. Yes, the audience here is not the same of that of Reddit. And I think this should change. Still I'd like to see a site like this. It literally created its own engine! Which is awesome by the way. I love VulcanJs. Here is an example of what I would like to see on hitting the main page: https://forum.vuejs.org/.

Just for reference, I have 20 years as a developer, and I have been part in maybe hundreds of design discussions, even though I'm a front/back end developer. So, no expert but I'm somewhat on the loop. The changes I propose are a mix of personal choices and experience/research based opinions.

Also, any discussion of familiarity starts with mobile, which I don't use. My focus is mainly on the 1080p 24inch desktop experience.

(Not sure if that has been suggested before, but) you should be able to sort comments by magic (the way posts are sorted on the frontpage) or some other better way to combine top+new properties for comments. Otherwise new contributions that are good are read far too rarely, so only very few people will read and upvote them, while the first comments directly receive many upvotes and so get even more upvotes later. Still, upvotes tell a bit about what comments are good, and not everyone wants to read everything.

I would definitely use it myself, but I would strongly suggest also making it the default way comments are sorted.

(That wouldn't totally remove bad dynamics, but it would be a start.)

Few UX suggestions for post edit:

Add a "publish" button in the options below:

Have a Save Draft / Publish button on the top (not just bottom) when in edit mode / or a "skip to bottom" to make it easier to save /publish 

Meta suggestion: Could be nice to start a new features thread and/or use a feature suggestion forum at some point, this one is getting a bit difficult to navigate right now. 

MVP option could be to create a copy of this thread but delete all the implemented features so that only WIP /not implemented ideas are here. 

It would be useful to schedule posts ahead of time. 

If we had a tag called "Links" for  posts that aren't displayed on the front page, then we could have a "Hackernews"/ "Reddit" style section were people can share -without comment- external links related to EA or that could be discussed in the context of EA. This would be different from current "link posts" which might have a higher (imagined) bar to posting.

Along a similar lines, there could be a low effort way for the current Shortform function to emulate Twitter, where the 'magic' sorting algorithm also takes into account the length of the post.

I think the user bio editor in Settings should be a bigger text area with rich text formatting (like the ones for posts). This would make them more WYSIWYG since user bios are displayed in a similar style to posts.

Hi, sorry to be a complainer - I've just seen a new "continue reading" feature and I don't like it. If I stopped reading a sequence or article it means I'm aware of its existence and have chosen not to read it. This feature keeps reminding me of my least favourite articles (right now it's convinced I should read Aaron's placeholder post for a new sequence). I couldn't spot any way to remove it. Okay, that's all, thanks very much for your attention.

Ability to mark items in this thread as “complete”

This thread is the best place to suggest feature requests and it's pretty hard to use because you can't tell which items have been done and which haven't.

Command + K should add a hyperlink!

An option to automatically move a shortform post to a top level post

Groups tags which users can belong to or identify with. These can be displayed publicly in the user's bio, which would allow for automatic search of people with related interest or affiliations. 

Link to profiles on the EA hub. How often do EAs use this website or the Hub to find people to work with? I guess someone tracks this?

I think that karma can be gamified more. 

In StackExchange they have an option of offering bounties for questions which can be collected by answerers. If we'd have something similar here, that could serve as a good signal that someone cares about a question and has yet to get a satisfying answer. 

I'd be curious about what kinds of trades people can do if there would be a process for (probably better publicly) exchanging karma. I can imagine bets being made, offers to help editing, seeking information, a bounty on finding mistakes or whatever. 

I think authors of a post should be able to add the "community" tag to their post.

See also this, this, and this comments. The first comment thread includes a workaround: creating the post on the http://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/community page

JP Addison @ 2023-02-14T21:47 (+4)

As an aside: I believe this will work right up until you submit it, but am not sure.

Lorenzo Buonanno @ 2023-02-14T21:59 (+2)

A non-moderator account currently sees this

for comparison I see this

I noticed that adding a tag to a post in draft mode now automatically adds the parent tag. But it's not clear to the user why two tags are being added at once. This also contributes to the overtagging of posts.

On Wikipedia, the guideline is to tag pages with the most specific categories they belong to. So if category B is a child of category A, then pages that belong to both A and B should only be tagged with B, whereas pages in A \ B should only be tagged with A.

In general, I think the EA Forum should be more thoughtful about tags. If we want to replicate what Wikipedia does, one possible approach is to automatically remove a parent tag from a post when a user adds a child tag to that post. However, this messes with the voting mechanism of tags. A less disruptive approach is to hide parent tags by default when both the child and parent are added to a post (or hide the child tags if the parent is a white tag), and then allow the user to expand the full list of tags.

If someone downvotes, suggest that they explain why

When LessWrong posts are crossposted to the EA Forum, there is a link in EA Forum comments section:

This link just goes to the top of the LessWrong version of the post and not to the comments. I think either the text should be changed or the link go to the comments section.

Let co-authors access post analytics

I can get around this by asking the main coauthor to share the analytics, but I´d rather I could access them myself.

Make it possible to only filter / see unread posts by default on the forum homepage. 

This past month I've noticed I've missed a bunch of cool and relevant posts  because they dropped off the home page too quickly for me to see them. I'd like that not to happen. Not a suggestion, but related: it seems like some good posts fall of the homepage way too quickly. It would be nice to give those posts  a chance to be seen. Often if there are a couple really high popularity posts in a week then the people who happened to post less popular posts get unfairly disadvantaged, which seems suboptimal.

I'm not sure what the actual feature would be, but make  it easy for people to cross-post from their personal blog (maybe just do substack to start) to the EA Forum. I recently saw the blog prize announcement and there were about 10 blogs linked there i'd never heard of. It would be great to get that content onto the forum.

The EA forum is one of the key public hubs for EA discourse (alongside, in my opinion, facebook, twitter, reddit and a couple of blogs). I respect the forum team's work in trying to build better infrastructure for its users.

The EA forum is active in attempting to improve experience for its users. This makes it easier for me to contribute with things like questions, short forms, sequences etc, etc. 

I wouldn't say this post provides deep truth, but it seeks to build infrastructure which matches the way EAs are. To me, that's an analogy to articles which seek to describe how reality is. If we could only build a forum which suited how people wanted to interact,  then we could do the work of EA faster.

I would like to see this article continued,  with a focus on putting the most relevant additions at the top. I've suggested as much in the comments, moving to a sorting system which moves both new and upvoted comments to the top and allows for completed changes to be hidden.

TL;DR: I'd like to have a single board where to see a summary of the analytics for all my posts.

I've been really enjoying the analytics feature!
I used it for example to notice that my post on persistence had become very popular, which led me to write a more accessible summary.

One thing I've noticed is that it is very time consuming to track the analytics of each post. That requires me to go to each post, click on analytics and have them load.

I think Medium has a much nicer interface. They have a main user board for stats, from which I can see overall engagement with my writing. It also shows my posts, ordered by recent engagement. I can click on a post to go to the page with the specific stats for that post.

I think this is great, and I'd like to have something similar in the EA forum!

Two consecutive hyphens should autocorrect to an em dash!

That way, a parenthetical clause in the middle of your sentence - like this one - isn't offset by "space hyphen space" on either side--or, even worse, by "hyphen hyphen". Instead, autocorrect two hyphens to a nice, clean em dash—like that.

I think this is a common feature for text editors - Microsoft Word definitely uses it.

Add the option to disable comments on your posts.

I'd like to be able to bookmark comments, in the same way you can bookmark posts. There's a lot of really, really well thought out and written comments, in some cases containing just as much value as articles, and I'd like to be able to bookmark a comment to come back to. 

I'd argue this is even more important than bookmarking articles, because articles have tags and titles to search for, whereas comments don't, and it's easy to loose track of what article and what thread the one you're looking for is contained in.

In-line commenting.

Invisible by default so they don't distract, but you can easily switch visibility.

So the reader particularly interested in some section could dive into the comments particularly about that section.

Also, as a further feature, you could color code different comment types, like:

• blue (default): just a comment
• yellow: fix suggestion
• brown: link to previous discussion / relevant resources
• red: critique ?

Also see @Emrik's  comment with more rationale.

Have an optional Subtitle line to add more context on forums, and have it be expandable on the front page.

E.g.  "Why The forum should have subtitles: an in-depth look into how subtitles help people get more context in less time"

We should add the ability to convert posts to questions (or back to regular posts, but that's tricky because answers would have to be converted to regular comments).

Also, the editor should automatically suggest converting your post to a linkpost or question post if the title or body text matches certain patterns. For example, if you write "Crossposted from X" or "This is a linkpost" at the top, it can infer that your post is most likely a linkpost. I see a lot of posts from inexperienced users that are classified as regular posts even though they're intended to be linkposts or questions, so I think this would be helpful to them.

It would be fantastic if we could set up RSS feeds for individual tags!

Aaron Gertler @ 2021-01-15T10:18 (+2)

There are multiple ways to accomplish something like this.

You can subscribe to a tag, which will notify you whenever a post gets that tag:

Or set a tag as "required". This will show you only posts with that tag, creating an instant "feed":

There should be a feature that points out broken links when you write posts/comments!

Categories / sub-fora / better overview of tags

I think it would be very helpful if the forum was made easier to navigate by creating categories/sub-fora, making tags more intuitively accessible, or some other method. E.g., how do I find the most-upvoted forum posts and comments about EA investing?

Could we have better help for those whose content has been (heavily) downvoted?

I often see people plaintively saying something like: "My comment has been heavily downvoted, but I have no idea why!" Can the forum be more helpful for this scenario?

Not sure what the best solution is, but here's an idea:

• if someone's comment/post has been downvoted enough for it to have net negative status, the UI allows the user to ask for feedback (e.g. it's an option when you click on the three dots on the top right hand side)
• if they ask for feedback, the forum contacts all those who downvoted it and also some high-karma people and links to the content and asks for feedback (which they don't have to give, and which would be anonymous)

The feature could perhaps incorporate additional features

• to increase the probability that people provide feedback, they could be remunerated (this could an alternative use for the Forum prize money, if it was decided that forum prizes didn't incentivise people more than the existing karma system) (perhaps there would need to be some thought given to avoiding the perverse incentive for people to give downvotes too liberally)
• the system could incorporate some mechanism to make sure that users don't overuse/abuse this feature (e.g. perhaps the user has to write out and submit to the forum what they will do differently in the future before they are allowed to use the feature again)

Having the option of suggesting edits easily, as in google docs. 

I think that it being easy for readers to add links, explanations and corrections might improve the quality of posts and enable better participation between commenters and the OP. Specifically, I think that we should link more, especially to other posts on the forum, and it would be helpful if that could be aided by commenters.

Technically, that could work by saving a history of versions (which would perhaps be a good idea anyway), perhaps by remembering the diffs in a git-like fashion. Then, readers can propose a new version which they edit just like any other post, which waits for the OP approval. 

If you allow anyone to verify edits to the post, that would be a nice way to do a mini-wiki.

Can I get email updates about a specific tag?

What would people think of adding SummaryBot functionality to some very long comments? The emergence of a new HLI/SM thread reminds me that some comments are post-length and post-complexity contributions; many of them would benefit from a summary. That can be particularly valuable where the original poster and commenter start a dialogue, with long replies to each other's comments. Those threads can take a significant time commitment to get through!

Unsure what the cutoff should be to trigger a comment summary -- maybe 500-600 words?

Check if information cascades / social influence bias is a problem on EA Forum.

If it is, maybe we could implement Emrik's idea to counter it, or some similar mechanism.

See here for the explanation of the potential problem.

To test it, we could do an experiment where some bot (or server-side process) randomly upvotes or downvotes new posts. We measure final karma after some fixed time, and see if that single vote snowballed.

relevant discussion

Maybe a feature to let Google Doc headers/internal links be switched automatically to EAF headers? This will be mildly useful to me, and considering the most common type of broken links I see from others on the forum, probably to others as well!

Would it be interesting for EA Forum questions to have a feature to allow surveys and predictions? In theory, one could post a question with a link to Google Forms, but maybe some kind of integration would encourage more surveys and forecasts. Given the large number people who read the EA Forum, there is margin to collect lots of data.

Ability to include a poll in when you make a question post, à la Twitter! I know this feature has been suggested before, in response to which Aaron Gertler made the Effective Altruism Polls Facebook group, but it seems to have plateaued at 578 members after 2.5 years. Response rates in the forum would probably be much higher.

Reading time estimates on older posts.

If I'm not mistaken, posts before a certain date do not have the estimated time in minutes to read the post near the publication date and author's name at the top.

Inline draft comments
I really like the forum editor. Unfortunately, I don't end up writing posts in it very much as I almost always ask for feedback and reviewers can not easily add their suggestions.

Google doc comments are probably the gold standard here.

Vaidehi Agarwalla @ 2022-03-07T21:03 (+4)

Strong +1 the few times I have drafted a post in the forum editor i've then copypasted it into a gdoc to get comments. 

I remember a while ago this was in the LW feature pipeline, not sure if it still is?

Charles He @ 2022-03-07T23:37 (+4)

I think it's in beta. 

(As you know better than me, I guess there's several principled and mundane reasons why a LW feature won't make it to the forum for a while).

 

Update: 

From the post:

Woah, multiple users can write a doc at once? I think that's hard and impressive to achieve.

Sarah Cheng @ 2022-03-09T22:19 (+7)

LW have been working hard on this, and are still ironing out the bugs. When it's more production-ready, the EA Forum devs will figure out how we might want to enable it (ex. we might want some different functionality here).

If you're excited for collaborative editing, I recommend you beta test it on LW and give them lots of feedback! :) That will help improve both forums.

HTML injections?

I wanted to write a post with color highlighting. This would have been easy to do if I could inject some HTML code into my posts. I imagine there are other use cases where people want to do something special that the code base does not support yet.

Being able to embed OWiD interactive graphs and other visualization would be a great plus too!

Some potential improvements to the search function:

• Advanced search: filter results by tag, author, etc. as well as keywords.
• Fuzzy text matching: return posts or comments with synonyms or related words, not just the exact keywords entered. This could be implemented using a word embedding, either a generic one or an embedding fine-tuned on the EA Forum text. For example, if I search for "global development", I might also get results for "poverty" and "global health". This would help because I often remember that there was a post or comment about a certain topic but can't remember the exact words that it used.

Copying Bob Jacob's suggestion here so that people can vote: 

Right now most sequences are still displaying my name, even though I didn’t write them. The mods have thankfully already changed the name for the “moral anti-realism” sequence, but ideally the other sequences should be properly credited too. Maybe the whole sequence should just be handed over to the authors themselves, since they might not like the descriptions and images I have created (I did message them). That way they can also just add new posts to the sequence without having to contact me first.

Perhaps it would be useful to have a "Sequence author" tag or something? I have also created a few sequences I didn't write just to reference the group of posts, but it would be good if the author was somehow credited. 

As far as I can tell, it isn't possible to have line breaks in footnotes (though I may just be doing something wrong). This also precludes bulleted/numbered lists, block quotes, etc. Any chance that could be changed? 

Footnote support in the 'standard' editor: For folks who aren't fluent in markdown (like me), the current process is switching the editor back and forth to 'markdown mode' to add these footnotes, which I find pretty cumbersome.[1]

[1] So much so I lazily default to doing it with plain text.

Organisation Badges/Tags next to author names on posts/comments

(sent through Intercom before I remembered that this existed)

I generally dislike when people write posts from their organisation - I think that it's hard to know who exactly I'm talking to, it's difficult to know what messages are from the author vs from the org, and it generally feels a bit intimidating to talk to 'Givedirectly' as opposed to Sally who works at Givedireclty.

I do understand the desire for organisations to say things as the org - maybe when someone posts in a professional capacity, there could be an option to post/comment with a little organisation tag next to your name. When you mouse over it, it says whether this means that it's to be taken as the organisation's position or not or whatever capacity the person is speaking in. I'd also like a strong norm against organisational forum accounts being the sole/main post posters (though tagging it as Open Phil or Givedirectly or whatever seems good to me).

Wasn't sure where else to mention this – the search feature on the forum is pretty bad. I tried finding a post from Claire Zabel by searching "Claire Zabel". I couldn't find it because her username is actually "ClaireZabel"

Vaidehi Agarwalla @ 2023-06-25T22:06 (+3)

+1 I've found this problem a lot. Also the fuzzy search on the search bar is sometimes too fuzzy (e.g. the opposite problem)

David Mears @ 2023-07-17T17:18 (+2)

Re fuzzy search... I couldn't find this post. Search shouldn't be converting 'EA' into a separate search for the word 'effective' absent 'altruism'. Also it feels like it isn't weighting the title heavily enough relative to post body, since the correct title isn't far from my search query.

David Mears @ 2023-08-17T13:41 (+2)

more weird search behaviour

 

Up/downvoting a post shouldn’t be possible within 30 seconds of opening a (not very short) post (prevent upvoting based on title only), or should be weighted less

Make the forum available in other languages. Right now the only option is English.

Also rely less on acronyms. For example, when selecting "program participation" it shows you the acronym VP:

I happen to know that this stands for "Virtual Program" but a newcomer (especially one that isn't a native English speaker) might not know this (and might even assume it stands for something different like Vice Presidency, Virtual Profile, Video phone-call, Viewpoint, Value proposition etc).

The Search Page doesn't seem to show results for basic questions. Some examples:

• What is the difference between shortform and post?
• How to Create Posts / where is the create button
• other things explained in the forum manual
• where to write "forum feedback", this suggestions thread doesn't show up for this term

Not sure if this is an search indexing issue, or perhaps the actual "questions" user would put in the search field, aren't part of the posts answering them. This could maybe be solved by adding a new post - which basically explains the same as other informational posts (e.g. forum manual), but with a Q&A style, so search will index it.

For reference, there are some other new user navigation suggestion in this post.

This is a long series of comments (~1200 words)

TLDR; The EA forum team could transform the forum by introducing high status, high activity “focus posts” that are centered on object level discussion, at the same time greatly empowering the forum moderator.

This content below is quickly written, and tries to motivate a vision, not a specific plan. Also, “focus posts” seems like a bad name, someone please come up with another?"

Motivation/Background:

There is a sense that high quality discussions and comments on the forum are briefer and don't occur as much now.

Overall, there's sort of two types of issues people have brought up recently:

• Demand for more object level discussion, as above from Jonas Vollmer and Holly Morgan.
• Demand for modifications to the forum, where one group wants a response, maybe involving changes to karma or voting, motivated by the underlying issues of large growth.
  • (Note that there is another group that wants something close to the opposite.)

The forum has moved a bit toward being a place that demands attention. It's a place where people now enter often to make a point or react to others doing it. That's not as close to productive discussion as it could be. 

The forum should be closer to a place for productive discussions between EAs. These discussions should often reveal the landscape of object level work to its readers, or even help make progress on projects. There's several interesting but elaborate solutions that might help. 

However, this comment chain suggests a major solution that is direct and feasible.

Charles He @ 2022-05-31T23:47 (+6)

The suggestion "focus posts":

We should foster and promote high status, high quality object level discussions.  

These would be in the form of posts that involve prestigious outsiders, near-EA people, or EA leaders or small teams from strong EA projects. These people would create the content and/or star in the resulting discussion. 

For lack of a better name, we can call them “focus posts”. 

Overall, "focus posts" would:

• Generally contain deep object level discussion about their topic.
• They might star one or more subject matter experts (maybe in addition to the posters themselves).
• The discussions would combine elements of AMAs with guaranteed attention from experts, with some of the best discussions of deep, thoughtful opinions from principled people.
• Would appear prominently on the forum, for a long and predictable time. This would generate interest in forum discussion and EA principles to both longtime EAs and newcomers.

The below is a crude mockup to show how this could appear.
 

(This is a quick, crude mockup, the actual version could be very different.)
 

These “Focus posts” and the culture and general interest that drives regular participation around them, will take effort to set up (but they shouldn’t be overly difficult or delicate to create). 

Building up the supply of these posts can be done gradually, maybe by starting with relationships with existing EA leaders. There are precedents for this work, like the setup of AMAs, and series like Cold Takes, where a major EA leader wrote on the forum for a long time. 

As discussed more below, the focus posts would be fostered, curated, and maybe partially developed by the EA forum moderator, who plays a integral, leadership role in the design of this entire feature.

 

While these new posts doesn’t seem to address voting or scaling issues, I think focus posts could be highly effective. I think ultimately, the sustained, high quality discussion in the curated focus posts can have wide positive effects on the forum, and satisfy a lot of present concern. 

Charles He @ 2022-05-31T23:50 (+4)

Underlying aspects of high status and moderator empowerment

I think this idea of focus posts might at first seem like a simple UX change. 

But there are deeper aspects that I think are important to be deliberate about. These two aspects are:

1. Making Focus Posts a high status place with a high expectation for quality discussion and tie in to object level work
2. Greatly empower moderator into a high visibility, highly impactful role.

This comment and the next one talk about these points.

 

1: Making Focus Points Highly Effective and Attractive

The posts need to attract good discussion. A good supply of posters and commentors is needed, ultimately reducing active work by the moderators and create a virtuous cycle of discussion.

There are quick ideas:

• Funding might be helpful, for example, a fixed ^[1]monthly amount of $20,000 or $40,000, that is allocated in a transparent way to focus posts (maybe after passing a mild bar of participation, to encourage discussion).
  • Regarding this use of money, I think that “focus posts” will initially be from or about EAs working on established projects, or altruistic, near EA projects, so their receipt of funding seems reasonable.
  • However, the main purpose of this money is to set up the "focus post" system correctly and robustly. Given the budget and opportunity cost of the forum staff (5 FTE EAs), the amount of spend seems reasonable.
• Other ideas (more marginal because they involve technical changes to karma).
  • We could imagine an alternate, special karma that is only gainable in focus posts, or modifications to karma that increase participation.
  • Maybe this special flavor of karma can be used to govern allocation of the fixed monthly amount.

Note that slowness when starting out doesn’t seem to be a problem. There might be only 0-1 “focus posts” for a while and that’s OK.

1. ^{^}

   This is similar to the "bounty" system, which has been a really popular pattern among EAs. 

   But this use of prizes is different, as it is a fixed amount, divided monthly across "focus posts".

   The benefits of this setup are that the prize size and incentive for writing is high when there are few high quality posts. When there are numerous posts, the incentive is smaller but no longer needed. 

   Also, this funding, maybe simply divided equally among curated posts, is more stable and predictable than most prizes. This means it can be principledly secured by being curated as a "focus post", which gives agency to the moderator (to enter into planning and fostering with participants).

Charles He @ 2022-05-31T23:58 (+4)

2: Greatly empower the EA forum moderator and change its role

This second point is really important. This project will greatly change the moderators role, increasing the prominence and even real world impact of the EA forum moderator.

The moderator would be the person to curate "focus posts", deciding which posts qualify (or possibly helping to create them outright).

• The moderator will decide on the composition of these posts (e.g. breakdown by cause area).
• There are other complex issues the moderator will influence: For example, while most of these new "focus posts" might be on object-level topics, some meta posts might appear. What qualifies is tricky to decide, and at the same time, gives a niche for the moderator to express their vision and skill.

This control by the moderator is a key aspect of “focus posts” (and ultimately a major change to the forum itself). 

Note that this control has checks and balances. The moderator’s output and decisions are very visible work. Also, maybe later, additional features can be added that allow community input, such as voting that can promote (or demote) posts into focus posts. Finally, simple regular user discussions act as a check on moderators.

 

This change in the role of the moderator has additional effects:

• Sometimes the role of moderators can seem thankless or low reward, yet the role is extremely important. Now, with this change, the moderator has dramatically more prestige, such as great access to a large group of talented senior EAs. The moderator has portfolio and well funded mission of promoting discussion in a highly visible place, as well as making the entire project of focus posts more effective. This permanently improves the role of the moderator, increasing talent flows for this role, and supporting health of the EA forum.
• This new role and the focus posts can be a safeguard in periods when the Forum is entering noisy, difficult times with a lower supply of content, promoting strong writing and reducing imbalances in discussion.

Another way of looking at this: instead of seeing “focus posts” as a new prominent position for posts, you can see it as a vehicle to empower principled moderators.

 

I think both the current and past EA forum moderator are more than qualified, both in terms of subject matter knowledge, as well as virtue and judgement, for at least the control envisioned in this comment chain.

A way to report users for deletion.

There are a few spam accounts like this one (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/msreeyaa) but I see no way of reporting them to the moderators.

Since they aren't posting or commenting the way in which they have an effect is when searching the forum. (You'll just have to take my word for it that I wasn't searching for 'escorts' when I came across that profile...)

Please remove Google resources, like Google fonts, from the website. It will make it easier to visit the website from certain countries.

Aaron, can we write forum PR FAQs too?

Pros:
nice format

Cons:
Would dilute the legitimacy of current ones

Soultion 
"Unofficial PR FAQ"

But if you're okay with this could you explicitly say so. If you don't I think me writing one will feel like I'm freeriding on the current legitimacy of the concept.

The all-posts view gives excessive prominence to shortform posts: while for both ordinary posts and Wiki entries only titles are displayed, for shortform posts one gets to see the entire content. I suggest truncating such posts so as to show only the first line.

JP Addison @ 2021-08-06T10:35 (+2)

I can't reproduce this, can you tell me what browser you were using, what settings you have for the allposts page, and whether you can still see the issue?

Pablo @ 2021-08-06T11:49 (+2)

Yes. Chrome version 92.0.4515.107 (Official Build) (x86_64).

However, (1) the issue persists if I change the view settings (selecting "magic", unticking "show low karma" etc makes no difference) and (2) the issue disappears if I open the page in incognito, or in another browser. From this I conclude it is likely caused by one of the many Chrome extensions I have installed. I will keep an eye on this and will let you know if I manage to identify the cause.

JP Addison @ 2021-08-06T13:44 (+2)

What happens if you log in in incognito?  Do you have any of these settings set?

Pablo @ 2021-08-06T14:23 (+2)

Ah, I had the first of those options ticked, and the issue disappeared after I unticked it. So this is the cause.

Is this behavior deliberate? I think the option should not affect how shortform posts are displayed in the "all posts" view.

JP Addison @ 2021-08-06T15:41 (+2)

Seems right. I doubt it was deliberate.

JP Addison @ 2021-08-01T08:53 (+2)

That’s a bug, thanks for reporting.

When editing a document, it would be nice to be able to link to headings/subheadings from the main editor when writing summaries or internally linking to other sections of a post, e.g. how it's done in Google Docs (see screenshot)

It would be useful to have and easy way to tag / untag job and request listings when they become open or closed (so basically binary tags?)

Would also be good to have an icon next to those posts how there is for the AMAs.

A way to get an RSS feed which is filtered int he same way as the main feed. 

The expectation that *ALL* EA resources should be in this forum. Ideally people would post books (with the tag "book") and then new users could see which resources the community thinks are worth reading first.

Soon after publishing, hide scores on comments so people aren't biased by them. Randomise the order of comments early on.

Numbers in articles which get multiplied at the end. The ability for the community to forecast these numbers and it change the overall result.

A portal for booking a call with an EA.

How often are poeple connected throught the EA hub? How often did poeple connect at EAGx virtual. If connections are valuable, this is a way they could happen more.

I've put some different use cases in the comments.

Make comments on specific sections of text which appear to the right of the text. And can be up and downvoted.

As assumption that there are some "evergreen" questions like this one, which periodically the community should spend time thinking on.

Please comment with other such questions

This thread should be linked in the intercom button under "feature requests".

If you click "submit a feature request" it should send you here.

I'd love to have a weekly/monthly open post, where everyone could ask questions and post small ideas. I imagine something similar to LessWrongs "Open & Welcome Thread". This could make some people more comfortable with starting to contribute to the forum.

It would be useful to be able to have a change log add-on that shows up as a banner on the top of a post (and ideally but this might be a bit spammy, notifies people who have read, or maybe upvoted or commented on the post) so that they know when a correction has been made. 

Many people may not go back to a post after reading, or notice the change-log (if the authors even include one) - and the changes can often be really important. 

Quick solution: Have a box where people can add their change log and make it a pinned comment (but only for the purpose of updating / correcting posts) so people know what changes have been made before digging into the comments etc. 

Ideally though it would be a banner at the top of the post (under the title / above the body) 

(Use case: I just learnt I was an order of magnitude off in my recent post on funding flows from 2012-2016, and I'd like it to be really obvious that this is the case / for people to read this with a grain of salt.)

Suggestion: Integrated search in LessWrong, EA Forum, Alignment Forum and perhaps Progress Forum posts.

Several serious posts are drowned out on April 1st each year. I half intended to write a round up of these to help them avoid being drowned out, but didn’t get around to it before the work week; now I’m requesting that the EA Forum team consider doing this. In future years (assuming your timelines are that long) I would also be in favour of having a separate section for April fools (like the community section) even though this dampens the humour.

When a comment is deleted in such a way that leaves a "comment deleted" block, it has a little [+] to expand the comment, but it doesn't do anything. I would prefer if it wasn't there so I didn't feel like I had to click on it to check if there's something I missed.

Curated posts could resurface to the frontpage at exponentially decaying intervals.

1. Counteracts recency bias. Enables longer-term discussions.
2. Increases exposure (and over a more varied reader population) to the most important ideas.
3. Efficiently^[4] increases collective memory of the best contributions.
4. We might uncover and dislodge some flawed assumptions that reached universal acceptance in the past due to information cascades. 
5. Given recency bias combined with the fact that people are very reluctant to write things that have been written about before, we could theoretically be losing wisdom over time instead of accumulating it. Especially since the movement is growing fast, and newcomers weren't here when a particular piece of wisdom was under discussion the first time around.

Wrote a shortform on it. Would be cool to have, imo! : )

Ideas coming out of a discussion yesterday evening

Problem: the eventual karma of a post depends a lot on the number of upvotes it gets in the first couple of hours/days after posting it.

Problem: The quality and relevance of new posts varies a lot nowadays. Readers need to (mentally) filter very quickly what to read. We tend to filter on easily available info, such as the karma that the post already has and the author's name (If your name is "Holden Karnofsky" and I've read many good posts from you in the past, I am much more likely to read the post than if your name is "OddHappy153"). This creates a disadvantage for newcomers and infrequent posters.

Idea: for the first X time, don't show the karma of the posts (unless it has really many downvotes). Maybe don't show the author's name on the frontpage either. Or hide it until the user explicitly clicks on "show author".

Allow registered users to post anonymous comments and generate a unique anonymous Id to track them so we can e.g. see the thread of anon1's comments.

I think ideally this should not be visible to mods / backend so it's truly anonymous.

I would prefer a more failproof anti-spam system; e.g. preventing new accounts from writing Wiki entries, or enabling people to remove such spam. Right now there is a lot of spam on the page, which reduces readability.

I like the post analytics thing! One thing that would be nice (maybe as an option) would be to see a time series of cumulative unique views as well as the time series of daily unique views that you already get. E.g. that would help with

• comparing posts that went up at different times (e.g. "does post X only have more views than post Y because it's been up for 3 months longer?")
•  answering the question "after how many days did the post accumulate 90% of its (as of today) total unique views".

Cumulative time series of all the statistics could also be pretty nice.

I would love to have more features for the Markdown editor, since I prefer it over the WYSIWYG editor. For example, I'd like to be able to upload images while editing in Markdown (like GitHub does). Also, a syntax cheatsheet would be wonderful.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to switch between the Markdown and WYSIWYG editors while editing a document, or have a rendered preview tab in the Markdown editor.

''Next" and "Previous" arrows/buttons at the bottom of a post, to move to the next/previous post - useful when you haven't read the forum for a while and want to catch up. This would obviously have to assume a certain ordering (e.g. chronological vs karma) and selection (e.g. all or excluding Community/Questions), which could perhaps be adjusted in Settings.

I'm not sure if such a feature would be worth the work it would involve, but: a very simple "editor" to very easily create probability distributions (or maybe more generally graphs that don't require mathematical formulas but just very rough manual sketching) and embed them into posts or comments could be useful. I'm not sure how often people would really use that though. Generally however, it would probably be a good thing to make probability estimates as explicit as possible, and being able to easily "draw" distributions in a few seconds and having a polished looking output could make that happen.

If this is something people would find useful, I'd be willing to spend the time to create such a component so it would theoretically just have to be "plugged in" afterwards.

I would like to suggest a rule/norm that people or orgs should not post the same article they are ready posted multiple times over the course of a few months, especially if there was already discussion in the comments the first time, unless they have significantly new points to make.

I have a feature removal suggestion.

Can the notification menu please go back to being like LW?

The LW version (which EA Forum used to have too) is more compact, which gives a better overview. I also prefer when karma and notifications are separate.  I don't want to see karma updates in my notification dropdown.

Hi JP,

I think it would be good if there was an option to make the interests (in terms of EA Forum tags) in one's own profile visible, as this could be an easy way to see the topics someone is into.

Hi JP,

I wonder whether it would be good to have a pop-up showing up each time one strongly downvoted a post or comment, saying something like, "Consider explaining what could be improved". If this was implemented, I also think there should be a way of disabling the pop-up in the settings.

Hi JP,

I have noted EA Forum's GitHub repository has 666 issues and 102 pull requests. I would be curious to know how you are prioritising what to develop.

Has anyone ever considered adding an is-an-alt-account flag to accounts, and requiring alts to be declared? When an alt account was declared, it could either be -- at the creator's option -- blocked from voting altogether, or confidentially linked to the person's main account such that double-voting could easily be identified.

I'm wondering if this could help address the multiple-account voting situations. After a transition period in which every active account would be required to declare alt/non-alt status, using two non-alt accounts itself would establish a violation of Forum norms. (Organization accounts probably shouldn't be voting because the wielder of the account probably has a personal account, so they should count as alts.) 

April fools' day request:

I was reading the openai blog post "learning to summarize with human feedback" from the AI Safety Fundamentals course (https://openai.com/research/learning-to-summarize-with-human-feedback), especially the intriguing bit at the end about how if they try to fully optimize the model for maximum reward, they actually overfit and get lower-quality responses.

My ill-advised request is that I would just LOVE to see the EA Forum's "summaryBot" go similarly haywire for a day and start summarizing every post in the same repetitive / aggressive tone as the paper:

"28yo dude stubbornly postponees start pursuing gymnastics hobby citing logistics reasons despite obvious interest??? negatively effecting long term fitness progress both personally and academically thoght wise? want change this dumbass shitty ass policy pls"

When I tried publishing a draft of this post with the cross-post to LW option, it didn't work, saying something about being able to cross-post to LW. (I instead posted directly to LW and used to the option cross-post to EA Forum.)

In comment threads, I often am much more interested in the repeated back-and-forth between the two primary interlocutors than interjections from third parties. Would it be possible to somehow prioritize replies from the author of the grandparent to promote this 'conversation' style reading?

On the wiki:

It seems like 'topics' are trying to serve at least two purposes: linking to wiki articles with info to orient people, and classifying/tagging forum posts. These purposes don't need to be so tied together as they currently are.

One could want to have e.g. 3 classification labels to help subdivide a topic (I think we currently have 'AI safety', 'AI risks', and 'AI alignment'), but that seems like a bad reason to write 3 separate similar articles, which duplicates effort in cases where the topics have a lot of overlap.

A lot of writing time could be saved if tags and wiki articles were split out such that closely related tags could point to the same wiki article.

Can my profile karma total be two numbers, one for community and one for other stuff? I don't want a reader to think my actual work is valuable to people in proportion to my EA Forum karma, as far as I can tell I think 3-5x my karma is community sourced compared to my object-level posts. People should look at my profile as "this guy procrastinates through PVP on social media like everyone else, he should work harder on things that matter". 

Hi there,

I think links to Google Doc sections are not automatically converted to links to EA Forum sections when one copy-pastes a published-to-web Doc to the EA Forum editor. It would be great if the links updated automatically, instead of continuing to point to the original Doc sections.

Currently, the EA Forum editor has 3 levels of headers, and a 4th one using bold. Google Doc has 6 levels of headers. It would be nice if the EA Forum editor also had 6 levels of headers, such that the structure of the Doc is not broken when there are 4th to 6th level headers (I have never used 5th nor 6th level, but 4th sometimes, and 5th seems possible).

The "hover over a username to see their profile preview" feature is neat. There appears to be a minor bug, however, wherein 5-digit levels of karma don't always display correctly in these previews (because the third digit gets omitted). Here's an example of an incorrect display:

And here's an example of a correct display:

The default generated slugs for posts with non-Latin script titles are absolutely useless:

私たちは毎日、毎秒、トリアージに直面している - https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WvikY6ixzcwKtKveN/unicode-52

Generally, the slug should match the post title in some human-readable way, so that it is possible to see what the post is about based on the URL alone, without a title or link preview. A sensible way to do this would be to romanize the title if it is not in Latin script, producing something like:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WvikY6ixzcwKtKveN/watashi-tachi-wa-mainichi-maibyou-toriaaji-ni-chokumen-shiteiru (this URL works by the way)

I anticipate that as more content is posted on the Forum in languages that don't use the Latin script (e.g. EA Japan's translation project), this will continue to be an issue.

Linking Jason’s feature request. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GMnbdDYoEJiXcsGpp/jws-s-shortform?commentId=hDCodcW9jANNbTDHj

How long until we can bring Anthropic's Claude on as a moderator?

I'm finding him to be very good at demonstrating cognitive and emotional empathy for views that are in disagreement with his own, updating accordingly, and then gently proposing ways forward that incorporate both perspectives.

(Maybe a little too deferential at this point, although I expect there's less of that when he's moderating human discussion rather than talking to one human, plus of course it's a live debate in EA how much epistemic integrity to sacrifice for the sake of keeping the peace.)

I imagine that moderating this forum is very emotionally taxing and that you feel pressure to monitor it 24/7. Would be nice to give you all a bit of a break.

I would appreciate being able to answer a private message by replying to the associated email notification, like I can do with e.g. Github and Discourse.

People should be notified if one of their posts is referenced in another post.

I recently realised that one of my less upvoted posts was mentioned in another post to have inspired a particular model. I then had a look at my other posts and saw more instances of having been referenced. It's nice to realise that people are using your work, but at the moment there's no easy way to know this!

Encourage short posts:

1. Make the word count visible without mouse-over
2. Allow an optional sorting algorithm that takes into account word count
3. In "new post", add a template text "TL;DR:" (which is deletable, but a small nudge to write a summary)
   1. (or perhaps explain a bit more, like "A TL;DR should contain bottom lines and not reasoning, and it should help the reader decide if this post is relevant for them or not)

'Commenting sprees' - blocks of time where discussion with more immediate replies would be encouraged.

See this comment.

This pattern of broken link, where the intended link is appended to another, distinct URL, has appeared in many comments or posts. 

This defect seems common enough that it seems to justify investigation of the root cause (or even very crude automatic fix) especially since the pattern in the defect is so simple. 

Charles He @ 2022-06-14T17:23 (+2)

It happened again!

Charles He @ 2022-06-14T22:46 (+2)

And again!

The analytics page is great!

I would like feedback on this idea: Community Posts

MVP: Change "create topic" to "create community post" and reframe wiki topic summaries as community written posts. Currently they are introductions, not summaries. 

Full change: Allow people to create posts which can be cowritten by anyone once live. Wikis produce high quality content, but the current wiki is framed around the topic tags, rather than any kind of article being able to be written.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NxWssGagWoQWErRer/community-posts-a-new-forum-post-type-unofficial-pr-faq 

Listing of “all posts I upvoted/strong upvoted”

I'm not sure if it's exactly a feature suggestion as a concern highlighted here that I agree with, which is basically: The number of Forum users seem to be growing quite a lot (congrats!), with many more posts, so some posts that might be high-effort slip under the radar or disappear quite quickly (see Ian David Moss' comment). Is there anything the Forum team is doing to mitigate this (someone suggested a higher density of posts on the front page) or other wise any thoughts on this topic? 

Other possible solutions (some already mentioned and I'm not sold of any of them) could be:

• Sub-communities like Reddit
• Greater emphasis on people using the Shortform feature for short or link posts rather than the main page
• EA Librarian or Q&A things could go into a different section (somewhat like a Shortform? I'm quite unsure about this though)

There should be a way to suggest an author cross-post a post of theirs and/or give them karma if you x post a work they've posted. 

It's quite easy to gain a lot of karma by writing questions. I think that's fair, but I thought I'd flag it cos I've been doing very well on karma for that reason.

Did we try having this post sort by magic? 

Also can we have magic as an option to sort all comments and answers? 

Also maybe call it "hot" or "vogue (new or highly rated)". 

I'd like it if I could paste a link into the editor (for either comments or posts), then click or hover over it to see an option to automatically covert the text to the name of the page, similar to how that happens in Google Docs.

This would be most valuable to me in comments, since I usually copy posts from Google Docs anyway.

I use a lot of links in comments, and think it's valuable to do so (to connect conversations to other relevant work), but sometimes I feel a bit inclined to not bother or not write the actual title (just leaving the URL) since it's a hassle.

I feel like I remember saying this somewhere else already, and it's very possible someone else has suggested it here too. 

ETA: Oh, I just stumbled upon the comment of mine that I was half-remembering, which was for a somewhat different feature motivated by a similar issue:

I'd really like this for regular Forum posts and (especially) comments too; I'd like to be able to type "[[" and then start typing the name of the post, automatically see a drop down menu with posts that include that text in their name, and then just click on it to have the name appear in the text, with the right hyperlink. At the moment, I have to open a new tab, find the post, and either copy the title and then separately the link or write title and copy the link. I do a lot of linking to other Forum posts from within Forum posts and comments, so this is a little annoying.

I think ideally this would also show LessWrong posts, since people link to them fairly often too. 

I say "(especially) comments" because I almost always draft posts in Google docs, where this feature wouldn't really help me, whereas I write comments in the Forum editor from the start.

Could we get notifications if someone comments on a thread we started, but not as a direct reply to us? Currently, if I make a comment, I get a notification if Alice replies, but not if Bob replies to Alice. And I suspect Bob's replies would often relate to what I said and be interesting to me.

I've just noticed I can subscribe to comment replies on a thread, but I'm not yet sure if that captures replies to replies, and really I'd like this to be default for every comment thread I start (rather than me having to manually opt in every time).

(Apologies if someone else already mentioned this; I haven't read the other suggestions on this page.)

I would like to promote Wei Dai's suggestion that it would be nice if it was possible to share drafts privately and then potentially make them public at a later point. (I think there's some chance that this is already possible, but the UX doesn't seem intuitive, otherwise I would have noticed already.)

Before implementing, it seems worth talking to users to find out whether this would actually make them more likely to share their internal work publicly at some point. It could also be good to find out whether there are any other ways that could make people more likely to share their internal work publicly.

JP Addison @ 2020-06-30T18:46 (+3)

Some of this will appear with the new editor, which has collaborative editing features built in.

but the UX doesn't seem intuitive, otherwise I would have noticed already

I admire your confidence. There's a sense in which if an experienced user doesn't know about a feature, it isn't well designed. OTOH, I assign some probability you've forgotten what the new post dialogue looks like.

Jonas Vollmer @ 2020-07-02T12:27 (+4)

Very cool!

I think for me personally, this would work better if there were two buttons at the end – one called "publish", one called "share as draft with users" or something like that. That puts it more in the reference class of "this is a form of publishing my work" rather than "here's some additional feature that I don't understand how it works".

Also: I notice that my wording was a bit unfriendly – apologies, I would like to retract that. :)

EDIT: It seems that drafts don't support comments. I think this is one of the main features I was hoping for.

JP Addison @ 2020-07-02T13:31 (+4)

Re: your edit - yep, that will come with the new editor, though maybe not in the first iteration.

Is it hard to make here and Lesswrong more compatible? I am thinking of a cross-posting feature that has comments of both forums. Linking the accounts (for subscriptions, for example. Karma maybe.) also seems nice.

Probably this should go on LessWrong rather than here, but: it would be great if the Markdown editor could handle basic image formatting, rather than stripping out all the HTML so all my images revert to maximum-width.

As a group organizer, I want to know how many people are following our city group on the forum and find out when a new person starts following it. E.g., how many people are following our city group on the forum now compared to before a recent EAGx event?

As a group organizer, it might be nice to be able to DM people who follow our local group, though this may have privacy implications I have not thought through.

I think having a separate section for community posts has greatly improved my experience of the forum. However I think there are still quite a lot of posts that stay on the front page for a long time for similar reasons to why community posts did - because they '[interest] everyone at least a little bit' and/or are 'accessible to everyone, or on topics where everyone has an opinion'. 

I want to see posts that do things like present the results of significant work get more attention, and to a lesser extent posts that are topical - i.e. announcements about recent news, events, and achievements also get more attention. I think these posts suffer from not having either of the above properties.

Could have filters/tags that promote these posts? 

Hi JP, 

In recent days I've come to think I would appreciate being able to sort the posts I have saved for later (by date posted, time to read, karma, tags, etc). Is this possible?

Thanks!

If you press a footnote link in a post and the footnote is hidden in the 'View more footnotes' collapsable list the page scrolls to a footnote you can't see. I found it confusing until I realised you have to press 'view more footnotes' to expand them. It would be good if it opened automatically when you follow a footnote link

Hi. I started drafting a reply but had to stop and now a week later I cannot find where I was drafting it. I would love to be able to see all the places where I have draft comments/replies autosaved. Thank you! 

Hi,

Michael Aird suggested some time ago:

getting the EA Forum - and maybe other sites - to have a clearly visible option for putting a badge there if one is a GWWC member

I do not think this ended up being implemented, but it sounds like a good idea. Currently, it is already possible to say in the user profile whether one has attended EA virtual programs, and conferences.

Didn't read through all comments so unsure if this was suggested already, but could the karma / agree votes be located at the bottom of comments rather than at the top (or both)? For very long comments (especially in gnarly threads) it's a pain to scroll up to agree/disagree vote, and it incentivises liking based on the author or first few lines rather than reading through.

it would be nice to exclude text e.g. the appendix / pre-amble / introduction from the "time to read" estimate.

E.g. in our upcoming post the time to read the core pieces is 22 minutes, but the total read time is showing 39 minutes (almost double) because of our lenghty appendix and some introductory context.

This is my current frontpage, logged in and logged out

It would be nice to have a way to post sequences without having all the posts show up on the frontpage, we would definitely use it for EA Italy

I'm planning to write a piece on animal welfare, as part of that post it will help to post a picture of a dead animal. I'd like to have it blurred until users choose to see it, is there a way to do that? 

Side note: I can't see anything about this circumstance in the user manual or guide to norms.

We’re trying out moving our Italian translation of the EA Handbook to the forum, to see if participants of the next round of our virtual program prefer it that way compared to google docs. (most of the first chapter is now here)

1. Is there a way to un-draft ~80 posts without taking over the home page for people that opted into seeing personal blogposts? For now, we’re just temporarily downvoting them
2. Is there a way to have “Chapters” in sequences, like in https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/B79ro5zkhndbBKRRX, or is that hardcoded?

Thanks

On https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts, clicking on a shortform expands it, but there is no way to unexpand/contract it

This is not the case with topic page edit and discussion, where clicking on the topic title toggles between expanding it and unexpanding it

Ideally shortforms could be toggled unexpanded in a similar way

(Semi-serious), since we care about the long-term future, denote years with a 10,000 year digit, so 02023 instead of 2023, like they do at longnow.org

I think the UI for voting could be improved in the following ways:

• The arrows for voting on Karma point sideways, not up and down. It's not immediately clear which one is upvote and which one is downvote.
•  The explanation text about voting (the one that explains Karma, agree/disagree and strong votes) only appears when you hover your mouse over the arrows. This means you never see it on mobile, where there's no mouse.
• the hit boxes could be bigger for arrows on mobile.

It would be nice to be able to order search results by date and maybe some other features like karma.

So, proposing that we give everyone equal voting power gives those on the forum with more voting power an incentive to lessen mine (by downvoting this). So how about this: we make the agreement karma democratic. That way we can see what people actually agree or disagree on and since it doesn't affect karma we can make it democratic without affecting those with disproportionate voting power.

EDIT: Three people upvoted this suggestion, one person downvoted this suggestion, the result is negative karma. What we see is that the downvotes contain a lot more voting weight than the upvotes. This seems logical, people with more voting power have an incentive to use that power to make sure they don't lose it. Just keep in mind that we really cannot conclude what the EA community believes/wants based on the results of an undemocratic karma-system.

Embed iframes

Some use cases:

• interactive visualizations
• videos
• airtables (as already suggested)
• polis questions (as already suggested)
• guesstimate models
• and many many more

This feature is very versatile and would solve many things at once.

Co authors (second authors and later?) of posts don't appear to have their posts in the profile?

Sidhu has no post listed:

This seems mild, but could be bad if someone likes to co author a lot.

Charles He @ 2022-10-29T00:21 (+2)

Ah, maybe the above might be an async indexing thing? (e.g. async/chron tasks updates the indexes every 24 hours and the above example is too recent to be indexed)

 Amber Dawn has her posts listed:

Some suggestions for making tags more usefwl. I say some reasons I think tags are important in the post, but these suggestions are easy to see usefwlness of anyaway.

Right now, you can't tag a post while you're writing it. You have to "save as draft" and then add the tags to the draft, or add the tags after you publish it. This is needlessly annoying. I suggest making it like this:

The miniscule effort encouraged by making it mandatory is probably outweighed by the benefits many times over on average. Consider that the effort is a one-time cost, while the benefits accrue every time someone finds it usefwl. The costs are consistently modest for authors, while the benefits can be enormous for some readers (e.g. I'm doing a lit review and the tags help me counterfactually find the perfect post.)

So I suggest making it mandatory. Maybe like this:

For events it would be useful to get notifications a fixed amount of time before the event rather than when they are uploaded to the system. Right now I get 2-8 notifications at a time often for the same recurring event.

Please let me search within my bookmarks.

In general, I read something and bookmark it if I liked it. Then that thing that I read comes up in conversation. I go into my bookmarks to find it so that I can share it with the other person mid-convo quickly but then I can't retrieve it from the bookmarks list as fast as I thought I could! This happens to me in almost every session as a facilitator of the EA Virtual programs!

A way to see what you have previously voted on with karma.

Categorized upvoting suggestion

Easy and credible way to add a bounty and prizes for questions (like this one )

There should be a polis questions feature, where you can embed (or better it's a full feature) a polis question and people can write comments for it/see the visualisation. Not having to go to another page would give polis questions significantly more traction and they are a useful tool

Some basic functionality I would benefit a lot from:

• Add functionality for footnotes in the WYSIWYG editor
• Make both editors interoperable
• Have a way to toggle between the markdown and the WYSIWYG editor on the fly

Footnotes are a thing that I would use more often if it was easy to do so.

I love editing using the WYSIWYG editor, which does not support them. So when I want to add footnotes I would need to: 1) copy paste my article into a google doc, 2) run a plugin to turn the text to markdown, 3) change my editor settings to Markdown, 4) create a new article with the markdown editor, 5) copy paste the markdown generated by the plugin to the new article. And any edition afterward would need to be done on the markdown editor, which I like less. In practice, I just never do this and do not include footnotes or add them at the end of the article, to the detriment of the content.

In general I have the expectation that both editors should implement the same functionality. And ideally they should be completely interoperable, so that  I could change between them at any time while editing.

Spaced repetition cards

Ability to add spaced repetition cards to forum posts so that once you've read it, you can add the cards to a deck, which can either be exported or reviewed in the forum.

edit  Ideally anyone could create these for any post, rather than it having to be the author

Option to donate to author.

Some blog articles are really good and I would pay a bit to authors I liked.

Vaidehi_agarwalla and I thought it might be a good idea to have sequences within sequences. For example: Vaidehi created sequences for the ea-survey results per year, because sometimes you want to only look at the survey results for that one year. Other times you want to look at all the survey results. If we add a new survey sequence every year it will clutter up the sequence page, but if you put them in one larger sequence it will take up less space and it will allow people to either read everything in one go, or select the "sub-sequence" they want to read and stop there.

I like listening to articles on "Voice aloud reader." I think that the easiest way to use this is to open a PDF file. So some method of converting forum posts into PDF's might be useful, even if it stripped out images, graphs etc.

(Pretty low priority, feel free to ignore if not common. It's also possible I just haven't played around with Voice Aloud Reader and similar software enough)

Post and comment previews in search results!

When sending a message to a user, it should open an old instance of the conversation instead of a new conversation

Ability to add postive or negative citations to points in an article.

The ability to request a citation on a specific point.

I think it would make sense to exclude emoji from the audio narrations, especially now that a lot of users are adding diamond emoji to their usernames. The audio software currently reads aloud the emoji even if it is in a username, e.g. "Eevee orange diamond emoji".

I think the EA Forum software does a poor job at communicating the license terms of forum posts. (For context, all new forum content published on or after 1 December 2022 has been licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.)

The current license statement is buried in the forum terms of use which can be reached from the "How to use the Forum" page in the navigation sidebar, so many readers may be unaware of the license terms if they have not registered on the forum and clicked through the license agreement. By contrast, many sites that use CC licenses, like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow, display a link to the license in the footer:

I suggest adding a footer to each new post or the sidebar stating something like the following:

EA Forum user content posted on or after 1 December 2022 is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. This license only covers content created by Forum users; third-party content may be subject to other copyright restrictions.

The second part of this statement is relevant for content such as linkposts and posts that incorporate quotes, where there has been confusion about whether the CC license would apply to third-party content incorporated into forum posts (the license text explicitly states that it does not grant rights that the licensor does not control).

Note that rel="license" should be added to the license link. If it's necessary to explain more, you could link to another page, like how Stack Overflow links to this page stating that content from different periods of time are subject to different versions of CC BY-SA.

Hi JP,

Nice that user interests are now visible on the profile page. I think it would be good if they were sorted alphabetically.

Hi JP,

It would be nice to have the possibility of filtering the posts of a user by a given tag. As of now, it is not possible.

Hi JP,

I think it would be nice to have the possibility of filtering content by user. As of now it is not possible.

My use case was trying to find something I said.

Hi JP,

I imported this Doc to the EA Forum editor, and noted the 2nd to 4th bullets of the section "Cost-effectiveness of the Climate Change Fund" were not imported.

Hi JP,

This comment and my personal experience (example) made me wonder whether it would be nice to have an option to hide the karma in comments or posts of others or ourselves.

Could we have a no-frontpage tag that authors can apply that would (e.g.) give -99999 karma adjustment to a post for frontpage purposes?

I think breaking up larger posts into appendices or parts (cf. the new alcoholism sequence) can be helpful but also could clog the frontpage.

Hi JP,

Minor. In the messages' page, the screen is currently broken down into 2, with my past conversations on the left, and the one I am focussing on on the right. I would rather have an option to expand the screen on the right such that I do not see the conversations pane on the left, or have an option to hide the conversations pane on the left.

Hi JP,

I have just accidentaly published one post. It was not a big deal, as I moved it to drafts, and then published it again 45 min later. Have you considered having a pop-up saying "Are you sure you want to publish?" after one clicks on the button "Publish"? Relatedly, if one moves a published post to the drafts, and then publishes it again, what determines its positition in the front page is:

• The date the post was 1st published? I guess so.
• The date the post was last published? I think this would be too spammy.
• The time for which the post has been publicly accessible? If yes, there would be no need for the pop-up I mentioned above.

Hi JP,

I think it would be nice to have an option to subscribe to sequences, such that one can be notified of new posts.

Hi JP,

Have you though about adding an option to filter the comments made by a given user by karma? Checking the comments from someone may be a good way of getting a better understanding about their worldview, and sorting them by karma would facilitate this process.

I have said this before but, I do feel like LW and the EA Forum should have ways to quickly input probability distributions to help prevent double illusion of transparency-type dynamics and help people be more concrete without making the text hard to follow.

One format that I like is people can mouse of a word and there will be a little tool tip pop-up thing with prob distribution. The UI for making it could be a cross between making a hyperlink and the metaculus prob distribution mixture creator.

Hi JP,

When I copy-paste a published-to-web Doc to the EA Forum editor, all bullet points are converted to 1st level bullet points, so I typically have to manually update all higher than 1 order bullets. If I copy-past the Doc (instead of its published-to-web version), the formatting of the bullets is maintained, but then I lose all the footnotes. It would be nice if both bullets formating and footnotes were maintained!

Unclear: arguably deleted comments should not provide positive karma (e.g. this user, who has deleted almost all of her comments).

Add a 😂 emoji reply!

1)

In links to tags, like this:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/HqxvGsczdf4yLB9FG

Also add a human-readable (slug) part to the url, similarly to what you do with posts:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NhSBgYq55BFs7t2cA/ea-forum-feature-suggestion-thread

2)

If someone enters a link that doesn't have the human-readable part, like 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NhSBgYq55BFs7t2cA

then redirect to a url that does have the human readable part

P.S

I really can't think of anything lower priority than this :P but thought I'd write it anyway

There appears to be a bug where a question post cross-posted from LessWrong goes up on this Forum as a regular post, as happened here.

I'd expect clicking on my profile picture to take me to my profile (currently the click doesn't do anything) (but it does have a pretty animation)

We should be able to add tags to sequences and have them cascade to the posts in those sequences.

I would like to be able to subscribe to notifications for sequences like this one: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/FxFwhFG227F6FgnKk

There are some posts, for example this "EA Forum feature suggestion thread", the "List of EA funding opportunities", and "Propose and vote on potential EA Wiki articles / tags", which I think could be pages in their own right, findable via the home page's left menu. I make this suggestion because:

1. These posts are harder to find, in my opinion, than they should be given that they're essentially living documents that'd benefit from having more contributors.^[1]
2. A comments section seems like not the best interface for handling suggestions/contributions.
   1. For instance, I imagine a different interface could make it easier for site developers to keep track of the suggestions that have been made here.
   2. Additionally, it'd be nice if suggestions were categorized, and it'd be nice if the site developers could indicate which suggestions have now been implemented, which they've rejected, and which they're still working on.

1. ^{^}

   Case in point: I only found out about this post/thread after I wrote a forum-feature themed shortform, a site developer replied, I asked if there's a channel for making feature suggestions in my subsequent reply, and then I was pointed here. (Though I acknowledge the possibility that this post/thread is well signposted somewhere and that I'm in the minority who missed it.)

The "Library" page, accessible from the home page's left menu, appears to be a list of all(?) the sequences on the Forum. But the order in which the sequences are listed—I think it's just recency—isn't very friendly, in my opinion. My vision for this page has the sequences listed in order of (some combination of) importance and quality. This ordering could be determined by a site admin, or maybe it could be automated (e.g., based on the combined karma of each sequence's posts). Sequences are also filterable by topic in my vision: for this, sequence pages would probably need to be taggable.

Also, sequence pages don't appear to show up in the top right search bar. I think sequences should be searchable.

Reformat all shortforms so they have agreevotes.

I unhid community posts on the main posts section  to see what would happen but now I can't rehide them. But I'd like to.

Sarah Cheng @ 2023-03-02T17:08 (+1)

You can re-hide them from that section by opening "Customize Feed" and setting "Community" to be "Hidden":

Nathan Young @ 2023-03-02T20:23 (+2)

I don't see an option:

 

 

And your image isn't showing to me.

Nathan Young @ 2023-03-02T20:23 (+2)

Also resizing images never works for me.

Sarah Cheng @ 2023-03-02T21:08 (+1)

Oh sorry, a recent change to images caused a bug, but it should be fixed now. (You can fix your image by editing and submitting your comment.)

You can add "Community" as an option by clicking on the + button and searching for it.

Nathan Young @ 2023-03-02T21:31 (+2)

It is not listed here. And I tried to resubmit my image. Still looks massive.

Sarah Cheng @ 2023-03-06T17:34 (+3)

Interesting, thanks for flagging this bug! It should be fixed now - please let us know if you run into any related issues.

Nathan Young @ 2023-03-06T18:19 (+2)

Though it only shows up at the start. If you search "community" it still doesn't.

Reformat this comment section so that it has agreevotes. 

You can subscribe to other users' new posts from their profile, but I would like to be able to subscribe to users' new comments which I don't see a way to do

@Matt Goodman  thanks for all your suggestions. I think they all make sense or have been suggested before, and we'll have to prioritize them against our other work!

When using search, the date on the search result card doesn't seem to always match up with the published date on the post itself.

For example, this post was published yesterday, 24th January, but when it appears in search it looks like:

which might be the date it was first created in draft form, and not published?

Which also leads to counter-intuitive things like:

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.

Hi! I didn’t realize this thread existed until just now. Just wanted to make sure you were aware of my feature suggestion, “Fine-Grained Karma Voting”

This is minor, and probably not relevant to most people, but my work (Rethink Priorities) would definitely use an RSS feed version of the Forum so we can get notifications of when things with certain tags are posted in Slack. I think we could do this now with an account / notifications to email / email to Slack, but instead are using Greater Wrong for now for simplicity (e.g. this feed goes to our comms Slack channel) https://ea.greaterwrong.com/topics/rethink-priorities?format=rss). Thanks for all you do!

Allowing for photos to be smaller /  in-line with text so you can have image on the left and text on the right. 

I have had a request for uploading a PDF. 

The LessWrong API does not seem to work using HTTP requests from a remote host (my machine).

To be specific, the following Python code shows an HTTP request for the GraphQL API.

# Python 3.9 code 
import requests

query_text = """
{
  comments {
    results {
      _id
    }
  }
}
"""

headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}

url = 'https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/graphql'
requests.post(url, json={'query': query_text}, headers=headers)
# <Response [200]>

url = 'https://www.lesswrong.com/graphql'
requests.post(url, json={'query': query_text}, headers=headers)
#  <Response [403]>

The code demonstrates that the request returns the information correctly for the EA forum, but the same code does not work for LessWrong (see the response 403 versus response 200).

• Can the LessWrong team confirm that there are differences, or a current access restriction to using the GraphQL API? 
• If this is unintended, what is the current method to access the LessWrong API using remote HTTP requests?

Note that the "visual" GraphQL API for LessWrong works fine, which suggests there is something wrong/unintended about the above behavior.

We should have at least one dedicated "megathread" for EAG-related questions each year, so it's easier to ask such questions in public without creating dedicated posts for each of them.

The lesswrong way of dealing with lost and recovered text is much more pleasant on firefox. On the EA forum I have to tick through two boxes every time I edit anything.

On lesswrong there is a little box that I can click if I want to 

I'd like to be able to permanently set the front page to sort by "top (inflation adjusted) unread"

Embed high impact jobs related to [the tags of] the post that the person is currently reading.

"You're reading an article about biosecurity, here are some open biosecurity jobs you might be interested in"

We can build a filter based on this, I don't consider it production-ready in that level yet, but if CEA is interested, it could be.

(I somehow don't predict you'll say "yes" to this, but I'm not sure what's the reason you'll say "no", so asking)

Allow users to embed Airtables in forum posts, such as this

When clicking on a tag, sort the post by "new" instead of by "relevant" by default. (What does "relevant" even mean? the newer posts are almost certainly more relevant)

I would love it if I could scroll through all the comments and posts I have upvoted (so I can easily revisit/revise my own curated list of content that my past self thought was worth others seeing).

1. Add a sorting option for Occlumency so people can find the posts with the most enduring value historically (sorting by total karma doesn't do it due to the sharp increase in karma allocated towards newer posts due to influx of new forum users).
2. Add a tag for "outdated" that people can vote up or down, so that outdated but highly upvoted past posts don't continually mislead people (e.g. based on research that failed to replicate). I can't think of any posts atm, but if you can think of any, please mark them.
3. Consider hiding authorship and karma for posts 24 hours after publication to decrease how sensitive final karma is to slight variations in initial conditions that are amplified by information cascades. I don't actually advocate doing this, I just recommend considering it to see if it makes sense to people who could know better. My intuition is that it's not worth the cost.

There's been murmurs about adjustments to the forum about voting and volume and this probably reflects broader sentiment. 

Some considerations:

• With more content, there's more eyeballs, so the net effect is maybe ambiguous? But yes, it seems plausible it is negative (something something dilution).
• There's only so much attention that comes from any given user, so you can't fix things by showing more posts

I think there might be a number of solutions that immediately come to mind that haven't been written about, and these solutions do account for the above considerations (and sort of do a lot more). 

Maybe someone will write them out^[1]. But for these solutions that come to mind, it probably isn't the best thing to just do them right away.

Note that in order to do this, for structural reasons, it might need to pull on some threads or open up one small can of worms^[2].

1. ^{^}

   spoilers: this is "voting federations" and "transferrable views" (views in like, the Airtable sense of a set of filters/rules/parameters that induce different presentations, is there a better word for this?). These ideas can be codified, and developed in sophisticated and transparent ways and can be really powerful and game changing

2. ^{^}

   spoiler: this can of worms is—who can see the vote and view graphs for LW and the EA forum?

Add a tag: "Volunteering listing (open)"

(Just like "Job listing (open)")

In the forum main page, have a new title:

Help building our community:

This post has no comments yet: ...

This post is from a new user, help welcome them: ...

...

After editing Swapcard: "Do you want to update your EA Forum profile too?"

At least if it was done through a CEA form

"I'm open to job proposals" : Yes / Maybe / No

This will really help with EA orgs hiring, and is so easy, and CEA already asks this question for EAGx events

A chatroom

A moderated chat room that runs the whole time so you can chat to other poeple currently looking at the forum.

This might make the forum more welcoming.

Suggest posts to link to when inserting a link in the rich text editor

Contest mode (random order for comments) for use cases like the Future Fund's Project Ideas Competition

Ability for OP to pin comments to the top of the comment thread

(not actually sure about this - could have bad negative consequences) 

Use case: I write a post about a project and a team member makes a comment that I want to make sure people see, or I make an update comment 

Ways to reduce risk: 

• If the OP of the post is in good standing karma-wise, or has X karma (100+? 1000+) they should be able to pin certain comments.
• People can still filter by the existing filters and ignore the pins 

Why not just edit the post itself? I think sometimes people won't notice extra things that are added into the body of a post, but they would notice comments.

Case against: if there is good criticism of the post, it may get buried under pinned comments. 

Mouse over probability distributions
Likelihood qualifiers (likely, unlikely) are a common source of miscommunication. Lots of content on the forum feels pretty nuanced to me and subtle differences in priors can often be cruxes e.g. most important century.

A step in the right direction could be being able to add prob. distributions as tooltips (maybe using an elicit like interface or maybe just 'freehand') to illustrate these qualifiers better. The user can highlight a word in their draft and press a button, this will being up the prob. distribution entering interface. When published the words appear in a different colour and mousing over them shows you the probability distribution (think creating and mousing over hyperlinks but for prob distributions).

EA Forum single sign-on (SSO)

Rough idea: You can use your EA Forum login on other EA websites that aren't affiliated with CEA, such as EA Hub and Impact CoLabs. This would be enabled using an OAuth2 interface that any developer can integrate into their apps.

Benefits: The main advantage of SSO is that users would not have to create new logins; they'd just need to create one for the EA Forum and could then use it on other EA community websites. This would make it easier to create and scale up new digital infrastructure for the EA community.

The ability to add links in bios would be great!

If we could make it so I can edit my bio like I would edit a post it would be even better.

EDIT: ohh the bio uses markdown, noted.

Some suggestions regarding sequences:

• Have sequences show up in search results
• A way to see which sequences a post belongs to, especially if a post belongs to multiple sequences (e.g. display the sequences at the bottom of the post body under tags)
• A search function on the library page

Button to automatically translate posts that aren't in the reader's preferred language.

• This could help readers understand posts that aren't in a language they understand. Even though the majority of EA Forum content is in English, we have an increasing number of community of event posts that aren't, like this post in Italian and this one in Swedish.
• This could also benefit readers whose native language isn't English.

A text box to add your preferred pronouns to your profile in Settings (e.g. she/her or they/them). Here's an example of how to do it.

A problem for me is that I don't often use the evergreen questions (like this one)

I've written feature suggestions elsewhere, but I sense people don't find them compelling, so I thought I'd just flag the problem as I see it:
- new answers get added to the bottom and are hard to find
- the question itself will never be seen for the first time again and receive the flood of interest it first did
- old questions are sometimes poorly phrased or framed

Do you think this is a problem, if so, how should we solve it?

Can this thread be tagged with the words "features" and "requests". I often struggle to find it because I can't remember what exact formulation of words are in the title.

A different default sorting on this page

I have used this page about once a month for several years and only today decided to sort by new. It showed loads of great new comments. 

I suggest a sorting which balances scores and newness (like reddit's "Hot")

When adding new posts to a sequence everytime I add a post, my search disappears and I have to type it in again to add the next one. Would be useful to just have the search not disappear. 

1. The option to tag individual shortform posts (not just a user's whole shortform page, which may feature a large number of shortform posts on a variety of very different topics)
2. Previews for shortform posts showing up when the shortform posts are linked to elsewhere on the Forum, in the same way previews for regular posts show up [ETA: as Habryka notes below, this is already the case]

(I find the shortform feature really valuable, and I think these two things would make it even more valuable.)

Can we have a nice "Community Events" section like in LW? Can it integrate automatically with the International EA Events Calendar?

If I am on the main page, it might be nice if center-clicking on the 'Show Previous Comment' button opened that comment tree in a new tab. At the moment you can center-click the date to open a comment in a new tab, and then separately need to click 'Show Previous Comment'.

I am curious, why isn’t the greaterwrong frontend getting adopted as the primary UI? It’s much faster, much more touch-friendly, customizable, and generally rocks. Its only downpoint is that it lacks features compared to LW, which should be solved in, say, 6 months? That would be a major QoL improvement. The LW UI frequently hangs on my iPad, it’s so bloated.

Option to reply to personal messages directly from email. Say, some form of a widget in the email notifications with a text box.

WebMonetization - this takes about 30 minutes to add to a website, ask me how. Then anyone who has Coil would give money to this site - (maybe then just give it to charity).

Comment guidelines which suggest single points per comment to allow more effective upvoting.

Be able to edit the text of articles which leaves hidden suggestions. Others can turn this feature on and upvote them. Highly upvoted suggests appear as comments.

Perhaps this feature would only be available for people above a certain karma.

I quite like the summary bot, and think it would often be useful (particularly for posts without author-written summaries) to read the summary first before deciding to read the whole post. Of course, it is easy to scroll all the way down, read the summary, and then decide whether to read the post. But humans are lazy and to make the user experience as frictionless as possible, how about the AI-written summary goes at the top, above the post? Not everyone would like this, so I think there should be an option for each user whether they want the summary at the top or at the bottom as a normal comment. And then an author of a post should be able to turn a summary off (or better yet move the default position of the AI-summary from top to bottom) if they give a good summary of their own at the top.

Within the community tab 'New and Upvoted' seems to still be the same posts, month after month. Perhaps new should gain more weight, given the current posting frequency and upvoting?

Within-post bookmarks

I often start posts but they are too long to read them in one go and the fact that I have to do that (or forever forget where I am) creates a big ugh field for me. Solution: Within-post bookmarks! I think it would be amazing if we could mark where we are in a post and the next time, we can just click to get ourselves back there!

(FWIW, I think that's a major feature of printed media, which I have much less ugh feelings about reading. You can always put it away without it being annoying later on.)

I would love an option to switch off the total karma count from one's profile. I've found myself noticing that it can occasionally create perverse incentives.

###karma-info

It would be great to have some way to filter for multiple topics.

Example: Suppose I want to find posts related to the cost-effectiveness of AI safety. Instead of just filtering for "AI safety", or for just "Forecasting and estimation", I might want to find posts only at the intersection of those two. I attempted to do this by customizing my frontpage feed, but this doesn't really work (since it heavily biases to new/upvoted posts)

JP Addison @ 2023-08-03T16:10 (+2)

You can do this! Filter by topics on the left hand side of the search page.

Tom Barnes @ 2023-08-03T18:29 (+1)

My bad, thanks so much!

I was going to write a short suggestion about profile wikis, but it ended up long so I made it into a post. In a picture:

One feature I really like on forums like Hacker News is the ability to traverse comments by having options to jump to a comment's parent, or next or previous sibling.

When you are deep in a gnarly comment thread, I find it useful to be able to hop up a couple of levels and then minimise a comment and its children

This is what comments looks like on Hacker News for example:

JP Addison @ 2023-03-22T19:24 (+4)

You can do both of these things.

You can click to the left of a comment to get to the parent comment, and then collapse by clicking on the minus icon next to the username.

Rasool @ 2023-03-29T10:05 (+1)

Cool thanks, I did not know about that first one.

I note that that is different to how it works on substack comments, where clicking to the left of a comment collapses the parent comment rather than scrolling to it like here

JP Addison @ 2023-03-29T11:33 (+2)

I did not know that, that's useful.

The link from linkposts like this one, don't work, I assume because the link needs to be prefixed with https://

Can this be added automatically if it is missing, or do linkposts need to go via https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/out?url=

I'd like to be able to hide the amount of karma and agreement points a comment or post has. I think seeing how many people have upvoted a statement affects how likely I am to agree with or upvote that statement. I think it makes me more likely to vote in accordance with social agreement, rather than whether or not I think a statement is true or well written.   I'd like to be able to turn this off from time to time. Strongly downvoted comments should probably still be hidden.

The formatting toolbar doesn't appear until after you highlight text. This means you can only format text after you've written it - you can't for example, select bold and have your text appear in bold as you write it. This is something I find unintuitive. It took me a a few minutes of looking for the toolbar and googling how to do it before I realised the toolbar only appears when you highlight text. I'd like the formatting toolbar to always be on the page when I'm writing. 

I'd like to be able to highlight a word or phrase in text I'm writing and Ctrl-V a URL link directly into that phrase. This is something that other platforms, like Slack do.

Yes, you can highlight a phrase and bring up the toolbar to add a link, but being able to do it immediately through a well known keyboard shortcut is easier.

Quiz as a Service for posts

I stumbled upon this service:

https://quizgecko.com/

That can generate a quiz out of anything. 

Having a "quiz me!" or "did you fully get the article?" button on every forum post where it would provide an AI-generated multiple-choice quiz would probably be very valuable for everyone.

I'd be happy to work on the development of this.

Recommend posts using collaborative filtering ("people who like the same posts as you, also like:")

MVP could be done quite easily using some of these techniques.

I have some ideas how to do better. If you consider implementing this feature, hit me up to talk!

Bookmark folders.

There should still be the default one, but if you choose you could put the post in some other folder (sorta like youtube does with saving videos to playlists).

It can have many use cases, like:

• prioritizing things to read
• topic specific folders
• maybe even curation, if you could also make those folders public

Right now I'm doing something along these lines, but with an external editor and lists of links, so it's a bit awkward to use.

An optional reading time indicator, like here: working example (and that tool's description).

The bar at the right of each post is the reading time indicator. Full bar means 30 min, half bar means 15 min, and so on.

You can find the code that implements that bar here: html, css

The post length is often the deciding factor in whether I want to read something, so it's nice to have it at a glance. Also I admit I kinda want to incentivize people to write more concise posts :)

Add an option for drafts: "Anyone with a link can read", but make it really anyone, not only forum users, as it is now.

(Recently I wanted to get feedback from some people who are not on the forum, and I had to copy draft to google doc, and later copy it back, and fix all the footnotes :/ )

Next step (but probably harder), would be to let anyone comment. If they aren't logged into forum, these comments are anonymous.

Also collaborative editing in markdown mode would be useful.

Allowing for selective shared list for post that may be drafts and or info hazards in a similar way in which I can do Facebook posts to close friends etc.

The reading time estimates on lesswrong crossposts seem to be wrong.  For example, this says 1 but should be 5-10 (I would guess):

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fH5adhXF377Bt6fWj/public-facing-censorship-is-safety-theater-causing

In addition to enabling drop-down boxes for commonly used jargon, it would be great if drop-down boxes were an editable feature. I frequently try to balance my explanations so that they're able to cover the inferential gaps without being too longwinded. One way of dealing with this is to make separate articles for people with different backgrounds like what Arbital does. But I think I prefer just having drop-down boxes for deeper or alternative explanations that not everyone needs.

Automatically create a bibliography with all the links in a post.

Tagging users to notify them (@[username]). People should be able to ‘authorize’ friendly tags but ‘professional’ tags should be possible by default. Users should be able to turn on-off notifications for ‘friendly’ and ‘professional’ tags. In this way, people could make and maintain connections via the Forum.

Also, orgs (or departments) could have their own tags. For example, if someone does not make a writing contest deadline, they should still be able to notify the org about an idea. Organizations could be also able to filter their tag and another set of tags or keywords (for example, 'Open Philanthropy, Worldview Diversification, DALY' could allow an OPP researcher to skim collective intelligence related to their calculation methodology and possibly delegate further research to people who had thought about it already).

A page for current contests/prizes, just like there's a page for events. Been quite a few of them lately, and they seem to (anecdotally) generate quite a bit of interest for writing usefwl things. 

The ones I know about:

1. OpenPhil's Cause Exploration Prize
2. EA Criticism Contest
3. Retroactive Funding Contest
4. Clearer Thinking's Regranting Program
5. New Blog Prize

Quite a few on LessWrong that recently ended too. I expect there are more that I just haven't seen.

Oh, there's a Topic for it. Another thing I didn't have the bell set to the right colour on. Black! But uh, I still think it could be usefwl to have a section on the sidebar for it.

An option to subscribe (notifications on email or otherwise) to search terms.

Currently I'm hesitant to even glance at the Frontpage because there are so many potentially interesting things I would eagerly read and get nerdsniped by. So looking at it predictably wastes my time when I know I should (for now) be concentrating on the topics I'm currently focusing on. But I do want to catch the forum post I'm most likely to benefit from. Hence I want to be able to customize what I get sent by email (or the bell top-right).

This is probably a better way to match high-quality posts along some dimension with the readers who are looking for quality in that dimension. And in a system quality is a high-dimensional space, it's probably more important to optimize matching the qualities pairwise rather than optimizing a global metric (karma) for estimating latent quality.

It was suggested to add the 'looking for a job' checkbox on the EA Forum (see MVP ideas 2.)

I would like the ability to sort search results by date. Often, I want to know who mentioned something in the past few weeks or months, this is currently not possible. (I'm guessing the current sort order is by magic, but there is nothing indicating this.)

It would be great if I could link to a comment.

(And sorry if this was already suggested. I couldn't find it when I searched "link to")

Bunch of visual accessibility stuff. In particular:

*Night mode.

*The ability to make textblocks narrower for smaller saccades and thus easier reading. (I'm not sure this is more comfortable for everybody, so a variable-width widget like Royal Road or Fanfiction dot net have at the top of their display pages might be optimal? This might require experimentation.)

*Ability to change text size.

*Better visual distinction between widgets like the Tags, Post, Pingback, and Comments. Panel borders? Width variation?

On another note, I'm using uMatrix, and it's blocking 14,000 scripts - most of them Google stuff, I imagine; that aggressively-hegemonizing adware megacorp is fingering a downright inappropriate number of pies right now. Might be worth fixing?

Ability to submit questions to a monthy poll. Then everyone who has signed up gets the poll.

Feature Request: Allow users to make their comments display as collapsed-past-a-certain-point by default.

Why? Sometimes I want to post a long comment, but feel that it's not one that everyone needs to see/read. I'd happily post the comment if I could write a summary of what it's about at the top and have the rest hidden/collapsed-by-default, but without this ability I'm often reluctant to post the comment. This is especially true when there are many comments on a post (or when I expect there will be), since I don't want the experience of other users who are scrolling through the comment section to scan it to have to see the large body of a comment that is just taking up space. It'd be much easier to navigate the comments if long-comments were mostly collapsed, and I think giving users the ability to decide exactly when their long comments collapse would be even better.

I sometimes think of an idea for a forum post that I want someone other than me to write about, perhaps because I don't have the expertise or time to write it.

An idea could be to have a dedicated area to suggest posts for someone else to write. These suggestions could be upvoted or downvoted so that we can see what the community would most like to see written about.

It would be good to have a way to stop say twenty people then writing the same post at the same time. Perhaps people could put their name next to the suggestions that they are interested in taking on. I'm not saying that we can't have more than one person writing on a specific topic, but this could give some indication of how many people feel like they can write on the topic and are interested in doing so.

Would be interested in hearing thoughts on this idea.

On mobile, you could shrink the menu bars on the top and bottom of your screen (where the top has the Forum logo, and bottom has “all posts” and other navigation bars). Smaller navbars -> More screen space for reading -> easier to read and comment.

Have a nice format for linkpost in shortform.

With the goal of having the forum fully replace the EA subreddit at some point.

It has taken me a long time to find the EA online events calendar (thanks @EdoArad) could this be displayed more prominently

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/embed?src=ie5uop71imftf4ut2htbv789v8@group.calendar.google.com

I posted some things in this comment, and then realized the feature I wanted already existed and I just hadn't noticed it - which brings to mind another issue: how come one can retract, overwrite, but not delete a comment?

Making it possible for people to add a bio in their profile (that supports external links) so people can get a better idea of someone's background and interests when reading posts and comments.

Is there an equivalent post on lesswrong for this discussion?

Perhaps include a short form subsection under the Forum Favorites section? It seems to me that most short form posts have very low visibility.

If the forum admins have traffic statistics, they should be able to get a better sense of the visibility issue than I can. In particular, I suspect the short form section receives a fraction of the traffic of the frontpage, but this should be verified empirically.

Can tags be linked to (this page) for easy access? How about grouping the tags into a hierarchy for ease of use and discovery, rather than just organizing them alphabetically?

When performing a search, the search results page uses "LW Search - EA Forum" as the contents of the title tag. I doubt this is an intentional reference to this forum being a fork of the lesswrong forum, so I assume the "LW" part should be removed.

By the way, I looked for 60 seconds to find where to post this small bug report, but the only options I saw was the unlisted contact us page, which seems to send a message to content people rather than the people that work on the codebase of the forum. This page is the only place where I could quickly find a way to get a message to whomever does the technical side of the forum.

So I suppose my feature request is: Provide a new place for users to quickly submit bug reports; or, if such a place already exists, make it more prominent.

Community threads on each of impact, tractability and neglectedness of different cause areas. Would be interesting to see if their ordering agrees with 80k.

Ability to split comments into multiple seperate comments. This could be limited to poeple who are higher karma.

Icons on pages to show that other, anonymous people are reading them. I think this would increase engagement. This can be cheaply tested.

Examples, googledocs.