The EA Hub is retiring

Thanks for all the hard work that went into building/rebuilding/maintaining EA Hub!

It's always sad to see old projects get shuttered, especially ones that were a labour of love, so kudos on recognising that it's the right time to do this.

You may want to see if anyone wants the URL.

Personally, I’d love to see a resource like aisafety.com which provides a broad overview of resources.

effectivealtruism.com only links to a narrow range of resources because it’s run by the Center of Effective Altruism, so I expect a need for them to “make it official”.

I’d be happy to assist with trying to find a new home for it, if that would help.

Would it be possible to pass some of the data to the EA Forum thing, perhaps with a simple permission tick box? I? This could help kickstart things a lot building network externalities.

This also seems like a good precedent To me. People will be more likely to participate in these data gathering survey things in the future if they think that if the initiative is retired there is the opportunity to re-purpose it for its successor.

Sebastian Becker @ 2024-09-02T20:10 (+10)

We did consider this but decided against it for several reasons
- We felt the only right way to do this would have been for it to be opt-in, i.e., that users would have to actively agree to this. We assumed that very few users would have done this and that the effort would have not been worth it.
- We raised this option with the Forum team in 2023 when discussing a possible handover and they felt similarly
- The vast majority of the profiles will be quite outdated by now (the % of users returning to the Hub to update their profile was quite low), so the quality of the data would also not have been great.

In the email we're sending to users we encourage them though to use the Forum's Profile Directory, so we hope that those users who are on the Hub, but not the Forum, will migrate their (I believe this will be a rather small subset of those Hub users who are still actively involved in EA).

david_reinstein @ 2024-09-02T20:29 (+9)

I understand the logic, but I think there could be some workarounds that make this doable. If you can put a “last updated “ on profile people can judge for themselves whether the information is rusty.* I would worry a bit that not doing this makes people think “why should I fill in my information on this next thing when I’m just gonna have to do so again when they switch it up next time?

*by the way voice recognition replaced “trustworthy“ with “rusty“ but actually it works as well. :-)

Sebastian Becker @ 2024-09-02T20:34 (+6)

You're of course right, there would be some advantages to doing it. It comes down to whether it's worth the time, and we concluded it is probably not.

david_reinstein @ 2024-09-07T14:33 (+2)

That’s fair. But maybe hold onto the previous database if possible, in case the signup for this one is low and it needs a kickstart?

Sebastian Becker @ 2024-09-09T06:31 (+7)

As communicated here and to users via email, all data will be deleted after the website goes down, so this is not an option. 

However, regarding your use case (finding lawyers/accountants), I have tried using 
- free text search on the profiles directory: seems not to work so well and something that could be improved.
- the role filter feature. That seems like it might be useful to you!
 

david_reinstein @ 2024-09-07T14:35 (+3)

Eg I was looking for EA/earning to give lawyers and accountants to hire and had trouble finding them

dirk @ 2024-09-08T00:46 (+7)

Dunno if it's still helpful, but https://www.highimpactprofessionals.org/talent-directory is a directory of EAs looking for work and contained several each of lawyers and accountants on a quick search.

Ian Turner @ 2024-09-07T21:09 (+3)

Did you find them? Perhaps they should be added to the periodic EA Advertisements post?

david_reinstein @ 2024-09-08T14:24 (+2)

Helpful but to disambiguat, that is a directory of professionals who want to do impactful work.

I am also looking to favour “earning to give” professionals willing to do non-impactful work.

Ala my “corporate bake sale” post and @Brad West Introducing the Profit for Good Blog: Transforming Business for Charity 

Ian Turner @ 2024-09-08T23:15 (+2)

I was referring to this post, which I think includes services for those who are earning to give?

Thanks for all of the hard work you put into developing and maintaining it! 

Posting from an alt account...

Very disappointed that the EA hub is not at least retaining the information for future use or otherwise making any effort to convey the information. Collectively, EAs, including myself, have spent a lot of time submitting the information. EAs spend their valuable time contributing to these projects with trust that the information will be stewarded and used. Now it seems that no effort is being taken to see that there is even the possibility of future use of this information. I don't know what the cost of the information retention would be, but I would be very surprised if it was lower than either the value of the possibility of its future gainful use and/or the harm from the loss of trust caused from the fact the products of community members' time was discarded so cavalierly.

The lack of care for the information gathered will likely cause people to slightly update against spending their time to collaborate in networking projects. 

Receiving the news that the hub was shutting down is the reason I finally came here and looked around properly. 

Glad I did.

People have expressed reasons why they think this is disappointing but I will add another one. This is yet another way that the groupthink-generating karma system will distort our community.

The EA hub didn't sort people based on karma, but now this new system does. The karma system generates soft-censorship, self-censorship and groupthink. If you write a critique on a post with high-karma authors, they can just strong-downvote it and delete it from the frontpage, which just leaves you with less karma and voting power in the future (and other people can see your low comment-to-karma ratio, or the little icon indicating it, and dismiss you).

People with more voting power can downvote people they disagree with giving them less voting power (and thereby less voting power they can distribute to other people of similar sentiment... ad infinitum) while conversely upvote things they agree with giving those people more voting power (and thereby more voting power they can distribute to people they agree with... ad infinitum).

Getting sorted lower on the directory becomes yet another reason why people wouldn't want to criticize popular EA people/ideas (and the people that disregard this and go against their own self-interest to help EA as a whole will get yet another punishment for it).