EA - Design changes and the community section (Forum update March 2023) by Lizka

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Welcome 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: Design changes & the community section (Forum update March 2023), published by Lizka on March 21, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.We’re sharing the results of the Community-Frontpage test, and we’ve released a Forum redesign — I discuss it below. I also outline some things we’re thinking about right now.As always, we’re also interested in feedback on these changes. We’d be really grateful if you filled out this (very quick) survey on the redesign that might help give us a sense of what people are thinking. You can also comment on this post with your thoughts or reach out to forum@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.Results of the Community-Frontpage test & more thoughts on community postsA little over a month ago, we announced a test: we’d be trying out separating “Community” posts from other kinds by creating a “Community” section on the Frontpage of the Forum.We’ve gotten a lot of feedback; we believe that the change was an improvement, so we’re planning on keeping it for the near future, with some modifications. We might still make some changes like switching from a section to tabs, especially depending on new feedback and on how related projects go.OutcomesInformation we gatheredWe sourced user feedback from different places:User interviews with people at EA Global and elsewhere (at least 20 interviews, different people doing the interviewing)Responses to a quick survey on how we can improve discussions on the Forum (45 responses)Metrics (mostly used as sanity checks)Engagement with the Forum overall (engagement on the Forum is 7% lower than the previous month, which is within the bounds we set ourselves and there’s a lot of fluctuation, so we’re just going to keep monitoring this)Engagement with Community posts (it dropped 8%, which may just be tracking overall engagement, and again, we’re going to keep monitoring it)There are still important & useful Community posts every week (subjective assessment)(there are)The team’s experience with the section, and whether we thought the change was positive overallOutcomes and themes:The responses we got were overwhelmingly positive about the change. People told us directly (in user interviews and in passing) that the change was improving their experience on the Forum. We also personally thought that the change had gone very well — likely better than we’d expected as a ~70% best outcome.And here are the results from the survey:The metrics we're tracking (listed above) were within the bounds we’d set, and we were mostly using them as sanity checks.There were, of course, some concerns, and critical or constructive feedback.Confusion about what “Community” meansNot everyone was clear on which posts should actually go in the section; the outline I gave before was unclear. I’ve updated the guidance I had originally given to Forum facilitators and moderators (based on their feedback and just sitting down and trying to get a more systematic categorization), and I’m sharing the updated version here.Concerns that important conversations would be missedSome people expressed a worry that having a section like this would hide discussions that the community needs to have, like processing the FTX collapse and what we should learn from it, or how we can create a more welcoming environment for different groups of people. We were also pretty worried about this; I think this was the thing that I thought was most likely going to get us to reverse the change.However, the worry doesn’t seem to be realizing. It looks like engagement hasn’t fallen significantly on Community posts relative to other posts, and important conversations have been continuing. Some recent posts on difficult community topics have had lots of comments (the discussion of the recent TIME article currently has 159 comments), and Community posts have...