The Nonlinear Library EA - EA EDA: Looking at Forum trends across 2023 by JWS
Jun 12, 2024
18:37
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: EA EDA: Looking at Forum trends across 2023, published by JWS on June 12, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
tl;dr: AI Safety became the biggest thing in EA Forum discussion last year, and overall Forum engagement trended downards. What that means for the wider EA movement/philosophy is up for interpretation. If you have your own questions, let me know and I'll dive in (or try to share the data)
1. Introduction
This is a follow-up to my previous post using the EA Forum API to analyse trends in the Forum. Whereas that last post was a zoomed-out look at Forum use for as far back as the API goes, this is a specific look at the Forum aggregations and trends in 2023 alone.
Needless to say, last year was a tumultous year for EA, and the Forum is one of (if not the) primary online hubs for the Community to discuss issues and self-organise. I hoped to see if any of these trends could be spotted in the data available, and also see where the data led me on some more general questions.
I'm sharing this now in a not-quite-perfect state but I'd rather post and see the discussion it promotes than have it languishing in my drafts for much longer, and as noted in section 3.4.2 if you have a query that I can dive into, just ask!
2. Methodology
(For more detail in the general method, see the previous post)
On Monday 6th May I ran two major queries to the EA Forum API:
1) The first scraped all posts in Forum history. I then subselected these to find only posts that were in the 2023 calender year.
2) I ran a secondary query for all of these postIds to find all comments on these posts, and again filtered to only count comments made in 2023.
Any discrepancy with ground truth might be because of mistakes of my part during doing the data collection. Furthermore my data is snapshot as of how the 2023 Forum looked at May 6th this year, so any Forum engagement that was deleted (or users who deleted their account) at the point of collection will not be sampled. I'll leave more specific methods to the relevant graphs and tables below.
I used Python entirely for this, and am happy to talk about the method in more coding-detail for those interested. I'm trying to resussicate my moribund GitHub profile this summer, and this code may make its way up there.
3. Results
3.1 - Overall Trends in 2023
3.1.1 - Posts and Comments over time
This graph shows the a rolling 21 day mean of total posts and comments made in 2023, indexed to 1.0 at the start,[1] so be aware it is a lagging indicator.
Both types of engagment show a decline over the course of the year, though the beginning of 2023 was when the Community was still reeling from the FTX scandal, and the Forum seemed to be the primary online place to discuss this. This was causing so much discussion that the Forum team decided to move Community discussions off the front page, so while I've indexed to 1.0 at the beginning for the graph, it's worth noting that January/February 2023 were very unusual times for the Forum.
There is also a different story to be told for the individual engagement types. Posts seem to drop from the beginning of the year, tick up in the spring (due to April Fools'), and then drop away towards the end of the year. Comments, on the other hand, rapidly drop away, presumably as a result of engagement burning out after the FTX-Bostrom-Doing EA Better-FLI-Sexual Harrassment-OCB perfect storm.
They then settle to some sort of baseline around May, and then pick up again sometimes in spurts due to highly-engaging posts. I think the September-October one is due to the Nonlinear controversy, the December Spike is the response from Tracing and Nonlinear themselves. There didn't seem to be any clear candidate for the spikes in the Summer though.[2]
3.1.2 - Which topics were popular
This is just an overview, I have more topic results to sha...
tl;dr: AI Safety became the biggest thing in EA Forum discussion last year, and overall Forum engagement trended downards. What that means for the wider EA movement/philosophy is up for interpretation. If you have your own questions, let me know and I'll dive in (or try to share the data)
1. Introduction
This is a follow-up to my previous post using the EA Forum API to analyse trends in the Forum. Whereas that last post was a zoomed-out look at Forum use for as far back as the API goes, this is a specific look at the Forum aggregations and trends in 2023 alone.
Needless to say, last year was a tumultous year for EA, and the Forum is one of (if not the) primary online hubs for the Community to discuss issues and self-organise. I hoped to see if any of these trends could be spotted in the data available, and also see where the data led me on some more general questions.
I'm sharing this now in a not-quite-perfect state but I'd rather post and see the discussion it promotes than have it languishing in my drafts for much longer, and as noted in section 3.4.2 if you have a query that I can dive into, just ask!
2. Methodology
(For more detail in the general method, see the previous post)
On Monday 6th May I ran two major queries to the EA Forum API:
1) The first scraped all posts in Forum history. I then subselected these to find only posts that were in the 2023 calender year.
2) I ran a secondary query for all of these postIds to find all comments on these posts, and again filtered to only count comments made in 2023.
Any discrepancy with ground truth might be because of mistakes of my part during doing the data collection. Furthermore my data is snapshot as of how the 2023 Forum looked at May 6th this year, so any Forum engagement that was deleted (or users who deleted their account) at the point of collection will not be sampled. I'll leave more specific methods to the relevant graphs and tables below.
I used Python entirely for this, and am happy to talk about the method in more coding-detail for those interested. I'm trying to resussicate my moribund GitHub profile this summer, and this code may make its way up there.
3. Results
3.1 - Overall Trends in 2023
3.1.1 - Posts and Comments over time
This graph shows the a rolling 21 day mean of total posts and comments made in 2023, indexed to 1.0 at the start,[1] so be aware it is a lagging indicator.
Both types of engagment show a decline over the course of the year, though the beginning of 2023 was when the Community was still reeling from the FTX scandal, and the Forum seemed to be the primary online place to discuss this. This was causing so much discussion that the Forum team decided to move Community discussions off the front page, so while I've indexed to 1.0 at the beginning for the graph, it's worth noting that January/February 2023 were very unusual times for the Forum.
There is also a different story to be told for the individual engagement types. Posts seem to drop from the beginning of the year, tick up in the spring (due to April Fools'), and then drop away towards the end of the year. Comments, on the other hand, rapidly drop away, presumably as a result of engagement burning out after the FTX-Bostrom-Doing EA Better-FLI-Sexual Harrassment-OCB perfect storm.
They then settle to some sort of baseline around May, and then pick up again sometimes in spurts due to highly-engaging posts. I think the September-October one is due to the Nonlinear controversy, the December Spike is the response from Tracing and Nonlinear themselves. There didn't seem to be any clear candidate for the spikes in the Summer though.[2]
3.1.2 - Which topics were popular
This is just an overview, I have more topic results to sha...