Community posts: The Forum needs a way to work in public

By Nathan Young @ 2022-04-08T09:32 (+31)

This is a work in progress. Like everything else

Summary^[1][2]

• Some people do all their writing in one go, others like to iterate. The Forum should support both styles^[3]
• An MVP would just be to allow people to create wiki pages but without them being post categories (currently every wiki page is also a forum category, by default)
• They should get karma and appear on the front page, like normal posts, but anyone can edit them
• Exampes of posts where people seem to want the ability for public editing

Introduction

• We should want a forum where errors are corrected
• We should want a forum with the most up-to-date discussion on a variety of topics
• I would like to allow people to suggest edits to my posts. We have the technology to support this
• People don't have to do this, but if they wanted to, it is more important that the text of a post is up to date than that it says exactly what it did initially
• What about a "drafts" section of the forum where all drafts are public, but the posts don't have karma yet. Perhaps that just matches the style in which I write things

Problem

Current posts centre the author’s voice and make it hard and time consuming to correct errors. Often an article will have significant errors found in the comments, but some people don’t see them.

Wiki functionality currently exists but it is framed about giving intro to topic tags rather than co-written articles around new subjects.

Model estimating size of problem^[4]

Solution

Minimal Viable Product:

• Change the create new wiki page from "create new topic" to "create new wiki page" 
   

Full solution. A new type of post - a community post:

• Anyone can edit them
• They still have comments (for things people want to add or discuss which are meta to the page itself)
• An author writes the post initially, but anyone who edits with an account gets their name added (or there is no author listed if the former is hard)
• They can get karma (which either goes nowhere or gets split among authors)
• In the long run they will use the google docs editor that Lightcone are building

How they are different from forum wiki pages:

• Anyone can create any community post (wiki pages are only allowed on a small selection of topics
• They get karma and can appear on the front page (wiki pages don't have karma for whole page, only edits)

More detail

I have run a couple of discussions recently anxiety about money, EA and global dev. These would have been easier had there been a way to fold people’s comments back into the original post and improve it. Likewise, it seems inappropriate to have written these as "topic tags" since it's a new discussion. I am confident that community posts will facilitate better discussions. They provide this in three ways.

Functionality. I want to let anyone edit these discussions. I trust EAs and so I want to test out whether we can have much better discussion if anyone can edit the main content. If you spot an error or new argument, don’t leave it languishing in the comments - add it to the post.

Norms. Sometimes taking people ideas from the comments and adding them to a piece looks like intellectual theft. But that’s only because my name is at the top. With a community post it would be normal is normal for many people to collaborate. 

Concision. Wikipedia articles are great for quickly summarising issues. People can cut text they think is unnecessary. The same is not true of EA forum posts. And that’s okay, but it would be good to have a form where if the community thinks it can be shorter, it is.

Quotes

“This post has rapidly become a well-referenced discussion and is helping bring community consensus” Nathalie Olds

“I noticed an argument was missing so I added it” Maxine Franks

“I thought the phrasing was confusing to EAs outside the UK so I replaced it with more consensus language” RHaton62

“There was an argument which was emotional, rather than a moral point, so I made this clearer” Stephen Smulpaj

“I still regularly post standard posts but on an issue where I want to give information rather than narrative, I use a community post” Sudip Agarwal

FAQ

There is already an EA forum wiki. Why is this change necessary?

The wiki doesn’t really get used for developing discussions. I think that’s because pages on it can’t get karma and so don’t appear on the front page - there is no way to create “buzz” around a page. 

If anyone could create a wiki page on any topic and they could gain karma and comments then the issue would be solved.

People might deface articles

The EA community is very conscientious. I am don’t think this will happen.

What kinds of community posts will people write?

Articles on breaking discussions. Technical articles attempting to encapsulate an issue. Summaries of a number of different articles.

Why can't the author just make changes?

As I say above some of this is a norms issue. It feels weird to make significant changes to an article. It feels weird to add arguments from the comments without flagging them. 

But also, it's hard. It's hard to write community discussions, even though they get a lot of karma. This would be a feature that I think might allow me to create and manage those discussion better because I could allow the community to help me correct my errors (It's largely worrying about looking stupid that makes me write fewer articles than I otherwise would).

I see an error in this piece, can I edit it?

Sadly not

 

1. ^{^}

   Needs work

2. ^{^}

   I wish I could write comments to the side of text

3. ^{^}

   Support the middle ground between drafts and published works

4. ^{^}

   If you want to suggest this, feel free

Vaidehi Agarwalla @ 2022-05-02T14:59 (+15)

Alternative MVP

• Copying the Wiki feature and renaming it "Community Posts Beta" 
• Appears in menu sidebar
• It's another category of post like short forms but it appears in the regular homepage with an icon to signal that it's collaborative.   E.g. something like this (this is Spotify collaborative playlists icon for the curious): 

• The launch could be as simple as getting 3 EA groups to use the feature as part of their next group activity 
  • E.g. spend 2 hours in groups of 3-4 people choosing a question of interest (e.g. like Nathan's examples in the "more detail section") basically try to make progress on it. It could be good to find a list of questions we actually think are important. 
  • maybe they try to find the main arguments for and against around a cause, and then try to find evidence to evaluate the strength of the claims 
  • groups can then publish the results, and future groups could either choose to improve existing posts if the topic is interesting or just make their own. 

 

• Once LW's realtime editing feature is more developed that would be the ideal thing for community posts