EA - Moving community discussion to a separate tab (a test we might run) 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: Moving community discussion to a separate tab (a test we might run), published by Lizka on February 6, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DR: we (the Forum team) might make a pretty significant change on Frontpage for a month as a test. We’re sharing the outline of the proposal to get feedback from the community. The change we’ll test is hiding “Community” posts from the Frontpage for everybody by default, and moving those posts to a prominent tab.Where we are right now:We’re probably going to run the test, although we might not depending on the feedback we get as a result of this post and we might significantly change our approach. After the test, it’s pretty unclear to us whether we’ll keep the change — and we might want to extend the test period — but we think that we will probably want to keep something like the change after the month goes by.We will review the feedback we get, and if we decide to go for it, we’ll likely start the test within a week or two.Summary of the change we’d test: moving community discussion to a separate tabFor the test, we’d move all “Community” posts off the top section of the Frontpage for everyone by default (by setting the default topic filter for “Community” to “hidden,” meaning that people will be able to opt out of the change). We will probably also remove “Community” posts from Recent Discussion on the Frontpage (you will be able to change this back to the default in your user settings).Then we’ll probably either add a tab on the Frontpage or a section lower down on the Frontpage, which would feature a limited number of “Community” posts. You could then load more articles or visit the tab.There’s a chance that we’ll tweak our classification of what we mean by “Community” posts, but currently, it’s something like what’s described in this footnote.Here are two mockups of the layouts we’re considering testing (if we go for one of these, we’ll probably continue testing and improving it):A “Community” tabA section for “Community” posts on the FrontpageWhy consider doing this at all?We’re pretty worried about the Forum voting structure driving more engagement to some topics systematically (without the community endorsing this prioritization), and related issues.Some topics and discussions tend to get a lot more Forum karma and attention than others, as Ben and Lizka outlined in this post. These tend to be:About the community (because it interests almost everyone at least a little bit)Accessible to everyone, or on topics where everyone has an opinionThis phenomenon means that posts that interest a smaller fraction of the community — even if they interest their target readers a lot more and are more useful to their audience (and even if you consider that some other posts’ audiences are larger), will get a lot less attention than might be helpful.We want to do something to address this imbalance, and we think that separating out “Community” posts might get us a lot of the benefit while still letting important conversations happen. (We checked a lot of posts we thought were getting extra engagement via this effect; almost all were “Community” posts.)Note that this mechanism “overvalues” “Community” posts whether or not you think that “Community” posts are currently over-valued by the average Forum user (the Forum team has mixed opinions on this); given whatever the community actually cares about, things that are easier to discuss or think about will get more engagement. (See more in this comment.)We also want the Frontpage to feature different kinds of content that’s particularly interesting to different groups, instead of being full of posts that interest the majority of Forum users to at least some extent (in particular, posts about the EA community). This is how we get cross-pollination between different cause ...