A Case for Better Feeds

By Nathan Young @ 2021-08-24T16:28 (+23)

Tl;dr

• Some effective parts of EA are sets of databases (80k jobs board, forum posts)
• It can be hard to get the information from those databases to where people read them (email, twitter, RSS readers, etc) - for more types of feeds
• If many EAs agree there could be a multiplier effect on current impact by paying a small amount to improve distribution
• Some minimally controversial and maximally effective suggestions
• Questions
  • Would you apply to more jobs if you could have them just the way you wanted them?
  • Would you read more EA content if you could have it in the form you wanted it?

Introduction

Much governance is database management.

Think about any modern service organisation. It has many databases, often creating a large proportion of its value. Whether Amazon’s stock lists, your government’s driving test passers, Tinder's millions of swipers or the lists of scores that power Google’s searches, many organisations are building scoring and rearranging databases and charging you for the privilege of accessing them or the objects they track.

Databases are important to EA

Much of EAs work is on the ground, doing research or supplying antimalarials. But around and behind these operations are databases, including several of EAs leading lights:

• The 80k jobs board
• 80k’s cause prioritisation matrix
• GiveWell’s top charities and the prioritisation spreadsheets that make them function
• The EA forum’s karma system
• GiveDirecty’s huge lists of telephone numbers to fund

For a subset of these, there would be value created by making the databases easier to access and take feeds from.

Databases are like water tanks

Water isn’t useful if it sits in a tank. It needs to go somewhere eventually. Data is the same. Either it needs to be movable or we shouldn’t be storing it in the first place. And move it does:

• 80k send out newsletters
• The Karma system of the forum sends articles to eyeballs, directly, and via emails and RSS
• 80k’s cause prioritisation list has directly and indirectly caused [number] of personal career changes

But there are other spaces that it could be easier for things to move to notably:

• Easier to contribute to some of them
• Easier to receive custom emails, RSS notifications and to post to Twitter

Sounds dangerous

Giving everyone access would be bad, which is why I’ve tried to suggest a range of easy database “pipes” that would be low risk. Largely it’s about allowing more options for things that exist already. I think if this goes well there is a larger discussion about other databases under EA control.

What is happening so far

Well Niko Bosse has built two of the suggested pipelines (forum posts to twitter, twitter jobs to twitter - we worked on this together). But he’s only one man doing it in his spare time. I think this is a pretty tractable way to make a lot of EA’s stuff easier to access.

A proposed framework of some of the best ideas

• The EA forum job hub
  • A database on the forum that gets upvoted or downvoted on the basis of effectiveness using karma
  • These jobs are hidden from the forum unless you unhide the tag (like personal blogs)
  • Anyone can submit a job and other people can edit them and add additional details
  • Twitter - jobs above a certain karma get posted to twitter
  • RSS/Email feeds - anyone can take a highly specific feed of jobs. By location, qualifications karma score, etc
  • 80k can take jobs that meet their standards or ignore them. I would bet that there would be jobs on this board that 80k hadn’t seen
• 80k job board
  • RSS/Email feeds - anyone can take a highly specific feed of jobs. By location, qualifications karma score, etc
  • 80k twitter bot. An 80k branded bot that posts every 80k job to twitter
• EA hub
  • Easy online group submission and upvoting. Currently, unless I’ve misread, there is only one online group on the forum. I don’t think EA groups are as easy to find as they might be which means fewer people are as involved as they would be
• Posts
  • RSS/Email feeds - anyone can take a highly specific feed of posts. Ideally just sigh up to your personal front page settings.

Some worse but perhaps interesting suggestions

• EAs
  • Networking. Find a way to create a network that EAs can easily search. I thought this was probably Twitter, but some people said they loved the hub. Maybe EAs are mostly somewhere else? Connecting these pipes together will create more connections and I’m confident that a more highly networked community is a happier and more effective one.
  • Getting started. I wrote this I’d love to see a getting started in EA guide which talks about a range of platforms and lifestyles. I bet at least 2% of people bounce from EA because they can’t find a way of living that suits them. Making this stuff more legible is good
• Website user data
  • I suggest there should be a central place with user numbers from EA funded websites. If noone were using them, how would we know? I don’t see a clear downside of publishing the data once per year
• Funding
  • Is there an easy way to search all the funding giving within an EA remit? I’m less confident this is good, but I think it’s worth considering. EA only exists because philanthropy has such bad feedback mechanisms.

Cost

I guess a single developer could do all of the “best ideas” in a year, it’s over different orgs but you get the picture. I’ve tendered out work but maybe it’s much harder than I understand. Let’s times it by 3. $300k.

Impact

I’m not confident about how to ballpark impact for this. And I'm pretty tired, and I wanted to actually publish this. If I were going to work it out I would use the cost of the 80k jobs board here and try and find some estimate of impact from the jobs board (I haven't been able to find) and assume that this increased it by 5%. Similarly with forum views. Feel free to try a better job in the comments.

However, to finish I'd like to get a sense of the following two questions. Please write your feelings on them:

1. Would you apply to more jobs if you could have them just the way you wanted them?
   
   If they fit perfectly into your workflow, would you apply to more stuff?
    
2. Would you read more EA content if you could have it in the form you wanted it?
   
   Would you read, or be otherwise more engaged in the community if content came to you exactly how you wanted?

Thanks

Thanks to all who read this whilst I was writing it. Please notify me of mistakes and I'll correct them. Thanks for all you (yes you reading this) do, it means a lot to me. It is my job to know you all and work with you all on trying to make the world better. 💙

AlexanderSaeri @ 2021-08-25T04:30 (+7)

I use Feedly to follow several RSS feeds, including everything from the EA forum, LessWrong, etc. This lets me read more EA-adjacent/aligned content than if I visited each website infrequently because Feedly has an easy to use app on my phone.  

 

I liken it to a 'fire hose' in that I get everything, including all the personal blogs and low-effort content that would otherwise be hidden by the website sorting algorithm. There's also no (displayed) information in Feedly about the number or content of comments - instead I need to open each interesting post to find out if someone has commented on it. 

For some posts, the post content is the most valuable. In other posts, the commentary is the most valuable, and Feedly/RSS does a bad job of exposing this value to me easily. I also find that engagement is highest within the first 1-2 days of a post, but takes several hours to start. 

All of this is to say that I think the 'right' feed is probably still something like one or more RSS feeds - especially given their interoperability and ease of use - but that the user experience is likely to be highly variable depending on their needs and appetite for other- vs self-curation of what is in the feed.

Nathan Young @ 2021-08-25T09:36 (+4)

This is exactly my point. Imagine you could customise your RSS feed like you do your front page.