Awesome job, thanks a lot for putting in the effort to make this happen. My biggest concern is that without multiple people willing and able to pump out high quality content on a regular basis the forum won’t achieve critical mass. Have you reached out to all the existing EA bloggers to see if they are willing to cross post on an ongoing basis, or at the very least if they object to someone else doing the grunt work and cross posting for them (this could maybe even be automated). This creates the additional problem of fragmented comment threads, but that is a smaller problem.
I agree that it’s important to attract contributors. For now, I’m looking to attract bloggers’ goodwill while curating content for the first month. Once I’ve attracted enough seed content, I should be able to start recruiting i) regular contributors and ii) people to use it to promote their local meetups. If people like the site, then the offer becomes more attractive as the site goes up. :)
So all else equal, I would expect that a forum devoted to effective altruism will tolerate uninformed posts better than a forum devoted to rationality would, because EAs want to spread effective altruism and one way of doing that is to educate people about it. I’ve previously hypothesized that LW has suffered from overly heavy-handed moderation that’s stifled people from posting content… it seems like trying to have a culture of encouraging contributions could be useful here (even going so far as to disable the downvote button for the first few months after launch?)
Another idea is to target specific effective altruists who aren’t already terrifically busy and ask them to write blog posts; I suspect some would be honored to be so asked and would take you up on the offer?
Awesome job, thanks a lot for putting in the effort to make this happen. My biggest concern is that without multiple people willing and able to pump out high quality content on a regular basis the forum won’t achieve critical mass. Have you reached out to all the existing EA bloggers to see if they are willing to cross post on an ongoing basis, or at the very least if they object to someone else doing the grunt work and cross posting for them (this could maybe even be automated). This creates the additional problem of fragmented comment threads, but that is a smaller problem.
Thanks!
I agree that it’s important to attract contributors. For now, I’m looking to attract bloggers’ goodwill while curating content for the first month. Once I’ve attracted enough seed content, I should be able to start recruiting i) regular contributors and ii) people to use it to promote their local meetups. If people like the site, then the offer becomes more attractive as the site goes up. :)
So all else equal, I would expect that a forum devoted to effective altruism will tolerate uninformed posts better than a forum devoted to rationality would, because EAs want to spread effective altruism and one way of doing that is to educate people about it. I’ve previously hypothesized that LW has suffered from overly heavy-handed moderation that’s stifled people from posting content… it seems like trying to have a culture of encouraging contributions could be useful here (even going so far as to disable the downvote button for the first few months after launch?)
Another idea is to target specific effective altruists who aren’t already terrifically busy and ask them to write blog posts; I suspect some would be honored to be so asked and would take you up on the offer?