Karma overrates some topics; resulting issues and potential solutions

Thanks for trying to fix this, I agree it's a significant problem with the status quo. 

I think you've identified two issues, one of which is significantly easier to fix than the other. For community topics being too prominent on the frontpage, you could (e.g.) impose a cap on how many can appear, and then list them in a "Community" section of the frontpage after general topics. 

To the extent you think that the showering of karma on Community posts skews poster/commenter incentives, I think that is much harder to fix. Karma is designed to measure the degree of appeal to the entire audience, and so posts that only can engage a fraction of the audience aren't going to score as well without some "help" from the formula.

• You could try applying a deflator to karma on Community posts and/or a multiplier on other posts, although that is going to make classification as Community or non-Community more significant and possibly contentious. 
• You could also see what happens if you incorporate the percentage of upvotes (as a fraction of all votes) into the karma formula somehow. The current system thinks 50 up / 30 down is equivalent to 20 up / 0 down (assuming all have equal weight). I don't think that's quite right; I think reaction to the first example was mixed to positive, while the second post probably had near-universal positive reaction from its smaller intended audience. That also has the effect of reducing the relative rank of controversial posts, which may be a drawback.
• Finally, I would be curious if a greater percentage of karma from Community posts comes from strong upvotes due to the sometimes emotional subject matter, and if so whether some sort of strongvote reform (e.g., limits on frequency) or moderating the effects of strongvotes on Community posts specifically would be somewhat equalizing.

I think this does a good job of describing the problem.

The solution is hard. I've certainly found myself getting sucked into reading EA Forum posts about community topics and felt that my time was used poorly.

On the other hand, some of the posts were really valuable (George's post on big-spending EA and some of the very posts in the aftermath of the FTX crisis spring to mind).

I think that means I want a UX which does allow me to see community posts, but somehow gives posts which have more substantive/subject-matter content more prominence. 

I'm really very unclear about exactly what this looks like, which is why this seems hard.

I think one of the more underused features of the forum is the ability to adjust the visibility of posts according to their tags. If everybody used this feature and wanted to see fewer community-tagged posts, they could downweight their visibility. The fact that they don't could mean that most people do want to see these posts, but it could also mean that they're unaware of this feature, haven't had the idea of turning it on for community posts, or just haven't gotten around to it.

I could see you doing either of these:

• Making this feature more visible. Perhaps a hovertext option to adjust the visibility of certain tags, a pinned post explaining how to use it, etc. Edit: hovertext adjust is already a feature. What might be a nice add would be some common "adjust bundles." For example, there are a lot of community-related tags ("criticism of EA culture") for example, and posts aren't reliably tagged with all applicable tags. It's kind of tedious to manually search for and enter adjustments for each relevant tag. Having a single button to adjust all tags related to community by say 100 karma increments would be nice.
• Nudges, such as enabling this feature for new users by default, or even for all users. Potentially you could turn it on for everyone, but send everybody a PM saying what you did and how to reverse it if desired.

A subforum also seems fine, it just seems like a potentially more expensive and buggy option that adds complexity to the forum structure.

Somewhat ironically, given all the strong upvotes that this is getting, I want to (gently) push back a bit. I would ask those who disagree with me to not downvote me too strongly^[1] or at least explain why (disagree vote away though).

I feel like there's a mostly unstated opinion in this post that the posts getting high karma are actually not the highest quality ones, or the ones that the community cares about, or the ones that Forum readers should care about. I think terms like "lowest common denominator" and "bikeshedding" imply this quite heavily. But my fear is that this could be used, perhaps unintentionally, to shut down debates on issues, especially from newer users or those new to EA.

For example, the top-voted comment on the Wytham Abbey post writes the whole community response off as bikeshedding^[2]. This comment seems linked to the use of 'bad epistemics' which I feel often assumes a conclusion. See this post, which I mostly agree with, for further discussion on this issue. My emotional reaction is that it all feels a bit like subtweeting^[3], unless there are examples given of "this specific post had too much karma and was over-rated by the forum" and "this specific post was undervalued and dropped from the frontpage too quickly".

Furthermore, it's not clear that valuing community-oriented topics is bad in-and-of-itself. "Building effective altruism" is currently number 3 on 80,000 Hour's list of most pressing problems. To the extent that these posts involving the whole community lead to community improvement, then it might be positive. I'm not necessarily arguing that this is true, but I do dispute that the issues discussed in community posts are not 'real-world' issues. 

As for the practical solutions proposed, I think 2 & 3 sound fine. Potentially you could add a section similar to 'Recommendations' that might be something like 'CEA Online Choice' or 'Curated' or something - where the Online Team selects high-quality, valuable niche posts that aren't getting viewed and displays them more prominently?

Finally, this reminds me of the discourse around 'Open EA Global' and the CEA response. There seemed to be a misunderstanding between a large part of the community and CEA regarding what the purpose of EAG was, and perhaps this is true of the forum as well? I would welcome thoughts on this or any of the above, or people providing more information and corrections to what I've written

1. ^{^}

   Yeah, I hate how much this sounds like "I know I'll get downvoted for this but..." too smh

2. ^{^}

   Though I was pleased to see that there was strong pushback to this characterisation in the replies

3. ^{^}

   Personal to me. I don't want to imply that 'subtweeting' is actually happening

Thanks for this!

My take on this is: maybe this is fine actually, because, for precisely the reasons you said, high karma is a sign of high accessibility and high popularity...which is useful for users! If I see that a post has high karma, that's a reliable signal to me that it's both interesting and accessible to the general reader (i.e., to me). If all the highest-rated posts were highly-technical, long treatises on niche topics, even if they were very good quality, then high-karma wouldn't be such a good signal that I would get something out of reading it, if that makes sense? So karma would then be a less good tool at nudging people to read stuff that they might actually enjoy/get something out of. 

I do take your point that there can be a snowball effect where high-quality but high-effort-to-read posts can just get completely pushed off the frontpage before anyone has even seen them, while middling community posts just hang around forever, accumulating more karma. That is a problem. 

I guess a question underlying all of this is 'what is karma for?' An implication of this post seems to be that karma should reflect quality, or how serious people think the issues are, all things considered. But I think that's too big a responsibility to place on upvotes and downvotes.  I don't think the Forum norms say that you should use them this way (they say you can upvote if 'you want others to see it' and 'generally like it', not only if you think it's objectively really important), and even if they did, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that people really would use them that way, because people don't have that much brainspace to devote to "is this post really impactful/serious?" And the majority of EA Forum readers are never going to be qualified to say whether a niche post is high-quality or not, because they don't have the expertise (they can say if they found it interesting, but things can be interesting, accessible, and also wrong). 

Interestingly this very post is probably an example of what you describe - a post that everyone in EA can find interest in, have an opinion on, and weigh in!

Create something like a subforum or separate tab for “community opinion” posts, and filter them out from the Frontpage by default

I'm pretty in favor of this. I think it's also really weird for newcomers seeing the EA Forum for the first time to immediately be exposed to all the community discussion at the expense of object-level issues. It seems like a weird community experience which is best handled by a subforum.

I love that you have text describing the images, making this post more accessible to people that use screen readers. It makes me happy to see that accessibility was a considering for you in writing this post.

Another angle on this (I think this is implied by the OP but didn't quite state outright?)

All the community-norm posts are an input into effective altruism. The gritty technical posts are an output. If you sit around having really good community norms, but you never push forward the frontier of human knowledge relevant to optimizing the world, I think you're not really succeeding at effective altruism. 

It is possible that frontier-of-human-knowledge posts should be paid for with money rather than karma, since karma just isn't well suited for rewarding it. But, yeah it seems like it distorts the onboarding experience of what people learn to do on the forum.

Worth pointing out a potential benefit of this imbalance:

Most work in 3 of EA's main cause areas, development, animal welfare and pandemic preparedness, takes place outside of EA, and it may be good for object level discussions in these areas to take place in places other than the EA Forum, to benefit from external expertise and intellectual diversity.

This is probably true for engineered pandemics and AI safety too but to a lesser extent because a high proportion of the work in these areas is done by EAs.

I think it is overall a good thing for the EA Forum to focus on the community, and for the community to act as a co-ordinating forum for people working in different high impact cause areas. I think it's better for an object level discussion on development, for example, to take place somewhere where feedback can be obtained from non-EA development economists, over somewhere like the EA Forum,  where a lot of feedback will be from students, animal welfare activists, AI researchers, etc.

I really like this post and would support a change in the direction stated. But when this post goes high karma, there's at least a smidgen of irony :D.

What about the ability to "pass vote" ie say this is neutral. Then you could look at the % of upvotes out of all votes. Feels like that would be more accurate.

I would be in favor of karma given in community posts not counting towards a user's overall karma, but I expect it to be at the very least technically annoying to implement (and I'm not that strongly in favor of it).

A downside of both this approach and other ways of separating "community" and "object-level" posts is that it might require some tricky decisions about which "community building" posts count as "community".

Maybe an upvote of a post could instead become an upvote of each (post, tag) tuple – e.g., (dDudLPHv7AgPLrzef, Building effective altruism), (dDudLPHv7AgPLrzef, Community), (dDudLPHv7AgPLrzef, Software engineering), (dDudLPHv7AgPLrzef, Public interest technology), etc. The final score of the post could then be calculated as (say) median of the quantiles of the scores of the (post, tag) tuples of the post.

This would make it hard for a post to reach any but a low quantile among Community-tagged posts but should make it easy for posts to reach a high quantile among niche posts.

It could introduce a bit of an incentive for people to mistag their posts with obscure tags and leave out common tags, but using the median should make this effect relatively mild. Plus anyone can add the common tags. One could also exclude tags with < 10 posts from the calculation, so some other suitable threshold.

I haven’t tested this, so it might not work at all!

When I first started using the forum in 2019, "Community" was a separate tab, and posts could be on either Frontpage or Community. Why was this changed?

This makes sense. Upvotes are fundamentally anonymous, and we have no idea what kinds of people are upvoting what things. I'm pretty surprised at how mathematically obvious and explanatory your findings are in hindsight, and yet it never occurred to me or anyone else until now.

I'd like to add that, just like how auctions tend to be won by bidders who got carried away and accidentally bid more than what the object was worth to them, it makes sense to think that 80% of the upvotes could potentially be coming from 20% of the forum readers, and some of those people might spend a little too much time getting invested into the forum instead of feeling obligated to go to events and connect with lots of people and see what they're spending their time working on.

I hope that sharing papers and getting feedback still works well or even better with the new solution, e.g. I'm really glad I chanced across Akhil's research and can now share it with all sorts of people I meet in my line of work, even though my own priority is AI and AGI policy and I would never have encountered it if not for the forum.

May I upvote this post, or would that be counter productive? 🫣

This subthread here, with heavy involvement by Kelsey Piper, exemplifies a lot of things wrong with the forum in one place. It is a good note that is relevant for this post.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/JCyX29F77Jak5gbwq/ea-sexual-harassment-and-abuse?commentId=cDnhvShDFhPfFBEpJ

Kelsey Piper is making a valid point that it's wrong, evil and bad to try to police individual conduct and impugn her valid choices, but everything else about the thread is cursed:

• It's a high temperature digression ("poly bad/good") that isn't substantive to the main point, and people are talking past eachother
  • E.g., the relevant point would be poly producing a vehicle for predators or not, and how we can solve this
• It's probably only because of Jeff K's involvement that the thread ends up balanced, Piper's gravitas and her (justifiably strong) emotional appeal would otherwise carry the thread
• Few people in the post show depth about how to solve the root issue or even steer discussion to it: that one community in EA dominates and produces absurd norms:
  • It's ridiculous that in this community, it is normal to have sexual relationships between people of different power in EA (much less "senior people pressuring newcomers into poly relationships" !)
• There's a deeper comment here about "rationalism": 
  • Piper's appeal is emotional, pulls the discussion into a perceived threat to her values and lifestyle, and uses rationalist jargon ("frame"). As the subsequent comments point out, this isn't that substantive or helpful. 
  • As a statement calibrated to the baseline/counterfactual of what talented HYPS grad like Piper could think and communicate, I argue that "rationalist" ideas and discussion were bad here—I believe this culture and norms produce long, surface level writing that seems good, but that ultimately fails larger goals and has negative effect in communication and reasoning (sometimes blatantly obvious to everyone outside the forum). This is one example of it (though not particularly severe).

Yeah I agree this is a problem. Thanks for looking at it.

What if there were a way to say "I know about this and it's good". That seems the core issue here. Even if all the forecasters say "this is worth reading" that forecasting post still won't get as much karma as a community post that 1/3rd of people think is worth reading.

This shortform from two years ago might be of interest.

1. If this is an issue at all, I don't think this is an issue with karma, I think it's an issue with mass communication in general.

2. You argue that this brings attention to posts in a way that does not correspond to importance. For example, you talk about it misrepresenting the quality of the forum, and leading authors to disengage from real world issues. To this I reply - who are you to decide which posts are actually more important?

There are actually very few posts on the forum dealing with real world issues - they are mostly those looking at cause areas and interventions in global health and in policy, plus maybe some biosecurity org updates. The rest, are about the community and its priorities (even those about AI for example, because they deal with how to manage work by community members, and only deal with hypothetical reality). I don't think it can be said that among those there's inherently more value in a post about a specific cause area than in a meta post.