Effective giving subforum and other updates (bonus Forum update November 2022)

By Lizka @ 2022-11-28T12:51 (+42)

TL;DR: We’ve launched an “effective giving” subforum — the banner will be up for a couple of days. We’re announcing this and a couple other updates. 

More detailed summary: 

• We’ve launched the effective giving subforum and are working on our other test subforums ⬇️
• Narrated versions of some posts will be available soon ⬇️
• We’re testing targeted advertising for high-impact jobs ⬇️
• We’ve fixed some bugs for pasting from a Google Document ⬇️

This is a short announcement post — we mostly wanted to give more context about the subforum. It’s also an opportunity for you to comment and share feedback, which we’d really appreciate (and you can always suggest new features here). 

Effective giving subforum — and other work on subforums

We previously announced our first two pilot subforums (bioethics and software engineering). We’re now adding a third: effective giving — please feel free to join or explore it!

We hope that subforums will let users

• Explore discussions and content about the subforum’s topic
• Start discussions — including more casual threads — that will be visible only to people who have joined or are exploring the subforum 
• Keep up to date with news and ideas that are most relevant to them

We’ve made significant changes to the subforums since the first ones launched, and expect to make more (we’re aware of some bugs), so all your feedback is really valuable. You can pass that on by commenting on this post or emailing us at forum@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

Other things to know about joining a subforum

Joining the subforum will automatically subscribe you to the related topic, meaning that posts with the relevant tag will stay on the Frontpage for longer for you (as if they had 25 extra karma points). You can change that by clicking on the bell icon on the subforum page and setting your preferences accordingly (e.g. by removing “upweight on frontpage”). 

For now, joining will also add a tag to your profile. We plan to set up a way for users to opt out of this (and we might change the default settings), but it’s currently not possible. Note that you can also add more topics you’re interested in (whether or not they have associated subforums) by going to your profile and clicking “edit public profile” and finding the “My Activity” section.

Audio narrations of some Forum posts

There will likely be a proper announcement about this sometime soon, but, in addition to the Nonlinear Library, some EA Forum posts will get human narrations (that will be accessible in podcast apps and on the post pages themselves). This will be a collaboration with TYPE III AUDIO. 

Testing targeted advertisements for impactful jobs

Some of you might have seen an advertisement for an open position at Metaculus (likely because you had interacted with the “software engineering” topic). We’ll be testing different types of job advertisements over the next month or so. As always, feedback is appreciated.

Bugs fixed for pasting from Google Documents

In some situations, images in posts that had been copy-pasted from Google Documents were broken. Some links were also failing. The major bugs here have been fixed. 

Unfortunately, copy-pasting internal headers automatically (say, if you have a document with a table of contents that links to other sections in the document, and you want to copy-paste that into a Forum draft such that the table of contents links to sections in the Forum post) is currently not possible, and we might never make it work. The easiest way to create internal links to sections is outlined here. 

Please give us feedback!

You can comment here, reach us at forum@centreforeffectivealtruism.org, or comment on the feature suggestions thread. 

Ozzie Gooen @ 2022-11-28T16:32 (+10)

Really excited to see progress on subforums. They could be pretty key for scaling the EA Forum.

This might be obvious, but I wonder if all of the FTX discussion could be pushed into a certain subforum. 

Will Howard @ 2022-11-28T21:47 (+15)

There is already a topic for the FTX discussion which you can add a filter for on the frontpage to reduce how much you see it: