EA - “Community” posts have their own section, subforums are closing, and more (Forum update February 2023) by Lizka

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: “Community” posts have their own section, subforums are closing, and more (Forum update February 2023), published by Lizka on February 10, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DR: We’re kicking off a test where “Community” posts don’t go on the Frontpage with other posts but have their own section below the fold. We’re also closing subforums and focusing on improving “core topic” pages to let people go deeper on specific sub-fields in EA. And we’re sharing a few other updates.More detailed summary:We’re running a test: “Community” posts have a separate section on the Frontpage ⬇️We’re shutting down subforums, and pivoting to “core topics” ⬇️Other changes ⬇️You can now notify users by tagging or “mentioning” them ⬇️You can tag shortform posts that are related to core topics ⬇️You can upload social preview images to your posts ⬇️Coauthors can edit posts ⬇️“Community” posts have a separate section on the Frontpage — a testWe recently shared that we might test separating community discussion from posts on other topics, and outlined two approaches we might try. Based on the feedback we got and other considerations, we’re going forward with version 2: a section for “Community” posts on the Frontpage.What this meansPosts that are primarily impactful via the EA community as a phenomenon (posts that aren’t significantly relevant to a non-meta organization, field of research, etc., including posts about the community) get the “Community” tag (as before), which moves them off the top of the Frontpage and into a “Community” section below the fold (on the same page).Moderators and Forum facilitators will be applying and monitoring this tag. Other users cannot modify the tag.Readers can change this by modifying their tag filters (e.g. to still include "Community" posts).Discussions on “Community” posts will also not be showing up in the “Recent Discussion” section. (Readers can change this back by going to their account settings and looking in the "Site customizations" section.)We will run this test for around a month, and track engagement with different kinds of posts, feedback we get, subjective evaluations of how discussions go, and more.If you have any feedback on this change (or any others), we’d love to hear it. You can comment on this post or email [email protected] can see how this works by scrolling through the Frontpage right now.Why we're doing thisYou can see our full reasoning here (and in the comments). In brief, we are worried about a way in which the voting structure on the Forum leads to more engagement with “Community” posts than users endorse, we’ve been hearing user feedback on related issues for a long time, and we’ve been having lots of conversations on hypotheses that we’d like to test.Transitioning from subforums to “core topics”Very short TL;DR: we’re closing the subforums that we were testing, and pivoting to developing more polished and easy-to-use topic pages that help readers explore those topics.Slightly less brief:We were testing hosting subforums on the Forum. We launched subforums for Effective Giving, Bioethics, Software Development, and Forecasting & Estimation.We faced some issues with the subforums and decided to discontinue that project (at least for the near future — we might revisit subforums). (See more on what we learned.) The existing subforums are closing (and most will become “core topic” pages).Content from the subforums — discussion threads, posts, etc. — will still be available on the Forum. (Posts on the topic pages, discussions in the "Posts" tab.)We still want to build better topic-specific spaces on the Forum, and are developing “core topic” pages that we hope will let people keep up with content on those topics or go deeper into topic-specific content.(We also hope to suppor...