EA - The EA Forum should remove community posts from search-engine indexing. by devansh

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: The EA Forum should remove community posts from search-engine indexing., published by devansh on February 5, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I want to propose a common-sense reform to the EA forum - stop any post tagged "Community" from showing up in Google searches. (I believe this to be technically implementable; this not being true would be good reason not to implement this change). I think it's probably good for EA discourse right now to be able to talk about scandals etc. openly but also have, like, minimum moats preventing some of the lowest effort bad-faith targeting by external parties.The important parts of the EA forum to people who are Googling us are, like, the things that we object-level care about! The actual stuff that the majority of EAs in direct work do every day—distributing insecticide-treated antimalarial bednets, or doing research in AI alignment, or figuring out how to make vaccines in advance for the next pandemic. There are status and incentive gradients to write about and upvote community stuff on the EA forum, but we can counter that at least somewhat by removing it from search engines!)I also, for similar reasons, think that we should further decrease the default rate at which community posts show up on the frontpage, perhaps going as far as to mark community posts as Personal Blog by default. I think they make discourse norms worse and having the frontpage full of object-level takes about the world (which in fact actually tracks what most people doing direct EA work are actually focused on, instead of writing Forum posts!) is better for both discourse norms and, IDK, the health of the EA community. (This is not a hill that I want to die on, but feels like a relevant extension).Finally, I find myself instinctively censoring myself on the Forum because anything I say can be adversarially quoted by a journalist attempting to take it out of context. There's not a lot I can do about that, but we could at least make it slightly harder for discussion amongst EAs that often require context about EA principles and values and community norms to be on the public internet.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.