Over the last several years, the EA Forum has been run on a volunteer-led basis. Given how much the EA community has grown, the volunteers who have been running the Forum have decided to transition primary responsibility for the EA Forum to the Centre for Effective Altruism. In practice, this should mean that things run much as they have done, but means that volunteers no longer have to be responsible for coordinating the technical maintenance of the Forum.
In the near term, we plan to maintain the Forum largely as-is. One change we do plan to make is to change the primary domain from effective-altruism.com to forum.effectivealtruism.org for more consistency across the websites that make up the effective altruism ecosystem. However, we’ll ensure that the old domain continues to work and that all existing links are redirected, as don’t want anything about this transition to disrupt the functioning of the Forum.
Who’s doing what
Trike Apps set up the Forum and will continue to provide free hosting for the Forum — we thank them for providing this!
Thanks to Ryan Carey for founding, managing, and moderating the Forum! Thanks to Rethink Charity (formerly .impact), including Tom Ash, Peter Hurford, Patrick Brinich-Langlois and many others, for maintaining and improving the Forum over the years. Going forward, volunteers from Rethink Charity will continue helping with tech maintenance.
Thanks to outgoing moderators Rebecca Raible and Alison Woodman for moderating over the past years! Larissa Hesketh-Rowe and I are coming on as the new moderators. We’d like to have more than two moderators, and especially moderators who aren’t CEA staff. If you’d like to volunteer or nominate someone, please let us know at forum@effectivealtruism.org.
We look forward to helping the Forum continue its role as a key place for original content and discussion!
The main reason moderation on the Facebook group works the way it does is that the group has 13000+ members and no ability to downvote, so the ratio of signal to noise would be pretty sad if there were no screening. It's very rare that the Facebook group moderators screen out a post for being harmful - almost everything that we screen out is because it's not relevant enough.
With the Forum, everyone can upvote and downvote, so content that readers find most interesting and relevant gets sorted up to the top that way. There's also a karma threshold to make a post (though we can help newcomers with that if they ask.) So I don't have the same worry about the front page becoming mostly noise.
We still expect to enforce the standards of discussion on the Forum, described in the FAQ ("Spam, abuse and materials advocating major harm or illegal activities are deleted.") But in general we expect that people don't take everything posted on the Forum to represent CEA's view.