Sarah Cheng 🔸

EA Forum Project Lead @ Centre for Effective Altruism
3191 karmaJoined Working (6-15 years)Cambridge, MA, USA

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I worked as a software/product engineer at the Centre for Effective Altruism for three years before becoming the EA Forum Project Lead. I'm also the EA Forum's head moderator. If you'd like to support our work, sign up for a 30 min user interview with someone on our team. Hearing about your experience with the Forum helps us improve the site for everyone.

In general, we'd be happy to hear any feedback you have! :) Feel free to contact us or post in this suggestion thread. You can also give us anonymous feedback via this form.

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Topic contributions
110

Hey, thanks for asking! I'm not sure if there's a specific reason — it's likely that simply no one prioritized doing it. Note that I think many of the posts in the EA Handbook besides the first one do have audio, it's just not consistent.

The Forum Team has manually enabled audio on all the posts, but some of them will require additional work from Type III Audio (who provides the AI narration), so it may take some time for them to appear on the site.

In the meantime, you're welcome to make your own audio or video versions of the posts! I think it would be great for them to reach a wider audience. :)

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q4.1 (the next six weeks).

Quick warning: crossposting from here to LessWrong is currently buggy, due to some ongoing infrastructure changes on their side. If you run into any issues saving or publishing your post with "Crosspost to LessWrong" checked, that may be the reason.

We're working with LW to resolve any bugs, but they have higher priority issues right now so I'm unsure how long it will take to fix. In the meantime, you can try unchecking that box and manually posting in both places. You can help us diagnose the issue by reporting any bugs you see. 

There should be a little x if you hover over your icon, clicking that should remove your vote.

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q3.2 (the next six weeks).

During last year’s Giving Season, I started up an EA Forum Instagram account as an experiment to see if the Forum Team could help spread important ideas outside of the Forum. In particular, I think there’s interesting and nuanced discussion on the Forum that is representative of EA in a way that other popular media does not capture about EA. I mostly ran it myself, and while it was fun, it took up more of my time than I could justify, so I stopped updating it earlier this year.

Now that the CEA Comms Team is larger and has hired a Marketing Manager, they’ve renamed the account to effectivealtruismofficial and will be taking it from here. They’ll be using it as part of broader plans to share high-quality EA content across multiple platforms to grow the EA movement and brand. They're happy to hear your questions and collaboration ideas — you can reach out to the CEA Comms Team via email comms@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Jason! We'll take this into account when we review the rate limits, after we have a bit more data on its effects in practice.

The EA Forum moderation team has decided to enable the same automatic rate limits here as on LessWrong (see this post from the LW team for more info and reasoning).

Previously we had a couple automatic rate limits, and we've simply replaced those. Our codebase is open source, so you can see all the current automatic rate limits described in this file. Broadly they affect users who have low karma, or whose most recent content got downvoted by many others. In particular, we've noticed more new users who post a lot of lower-quality AI-generated content, so we hope that these automatic rate limits help to maintain a higher signal:noise ratio on the site.

Personally I think there's a good chance that we'll want to tweak the exact limits/criteria for our site, so we plan to monitor how often people hit the rate limits. Feel free to share your thoughts, concerns, and suggestions with me! :)

Mini EA Forum Update

We've added two new kinds of notifications that have been requested multiple times before:

  1. Notifications when someone links to your post, comment, or quick take
    1. These are turned on by default — you can edit your notifications settings via the Account Settings page.
  2. Keyword alerts
    1. You can manage your keyword alerts here, which you can get to via your Account Settings or by clicking the notification bell and then the three dots icon.
    2. You can quickly add an alert by clicking "Get notified" on the search page. (Note that the alerts only use the keyword, not any search filters.)
    3. You get alerted when the keyword appears in a newly published post, comment, or quick take (so this doesn't include, for example, new topics).
    4. You can also edit the frequency of both the on-site and email versions of these alerts independently via the Account Settings page (at the bottom of the Notifications list).
    5. See more details in the PR

I hope you find these useful! 😊 Feel free to reply if you have any feedback or questions.

I've updated the public doc that summarizes the CEA Online Team's OKRs to add Q3.1 (sorry this is a bit late, I just forgot! 😅).

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