If you want casual feedback, probably the best location currently is: https://www.facebook.com/groups/eahangout/.

I definitely think it would be useful, the problem is that building such a platform would probably take significant effort.

There are a huge number of "ideas" startups out there. I would suggest taking a look at them for inspiration.

Posting on behalf of my coworker Sam Deere (who didn't have enough karma to post):

"Thanks for the feedback. It's good to know that this is something people are thinking about — we think a lot about how to make EA's online presence best serve the needs of the community too.

For context, I'm head of tech at CEA, which runs EffectiveAltruism.org. (I have less to do with the content and structure of the site these days, but had a hand in putting it up, and am involved in a lot of decision making about which projects to priorities.)

There seem to be a few concerns, one about functionality, one about discoverability, and one about content. That is, EA needs better discussion spaces, the ones it has are too hard to find, and the easiest-to-find content doesn't represent the breadth of EA really well.

In general we agree that EA needs good discussion spaces, and that the current ones could be improved (e.g. by separating concerns of content discovery and content creation etc). This is something that's in CEA's longer-term tech projects roadmap, but we don't have the capacity to prioritise this right now. This is doubly true when there are fairly good discussion spaces available, in particular the EA Forum. However, we're working on building out more features, on top of the EffectiveAltruism.org webapp (which at the moment is functionally just EA Funds).

Individual projects will have their own coordination needs so at this point it hasn't made sense to try to build a be-all/end-all platform that encompasses all of them. You've suggested a number of tools that such a platform could draw inspiration from — in many cases people do just use these tools to coordinate on projects. The EA Forum serves a useful role to announce project ideas and seek collaborators, and this isn't the only place in the community where projects/collaboration happens — EA Grants and the .impact Hackpads were already mentioned. Another example is Effective Altruism Global, which allows people to discuss these projects and ideas in person, which is much higher bandwidth.

(It's also important to get the balance right between shiny new things that work better and continuity — there's always a new platform, a new tool that we could use that will be an improvement on existing processes. But if it doesn't complement existing tools and processes people use, then it risks either not gaining adoption, or splitting the user base. Developer time and energy is a scarce resource, and like everything, needs to be prioritised. Many projects of this scope fall into disuse.)

Regarding discoverability, as others have suggested, it's not clear that the solution is to make things more discoverable. Online communities are very hard to get right — there's a constant tension between preserving the culture and norms that make the culture great, while keeping it open and accessible to newer members who want to get involved. Newer members have less context for certain discussions (which makes people feel they can't be as open for fear of alienating newcomers), newer members may ask lots of basic questions etc (see the Eternal September effect). The solution is never perfect, but it's important to have ways for people to get involved with the community incrementally, so that they can acquire that context as they go — this necessitates having some more introductory content on places like EffectiveAltruism.org, and the selection effects of the effort required to learn a bit more about the community are likely a feature, not a bug.

In general we observe that people start reading introductory content, then those that are hooked do a deep dive and discover the rest of the community in the process. However, it's a useful data point to know that you felt that as someone who was already potentially on board, that the introductory stuff was off-putting, and we'll keep that in mind as we're considering what other content needs to be on EffectiveAltruism.org.

Regarding content breadth, CEA is currently working on a project to make the content covered on EffectiveAltruism.org more comprehensive and representative of the broader spectrum of ideas that get discussed within the community (partly building on the existing Effective Altruism Concepts project, and also drawing inspiration from things like the LW sequences — more details will be announced in time).

As with everything, we're massively constrained by staff and volunteer time. At the moment we're hiring for a number of roles that should speed up the development of some of these features (hint hint...). As someone noted, it would perhaps have been worthwhile to post this on the EA Forum to see if there are more ideas in this vein, or if others in the community are working on something like this."

Onemorenickname [LW · GW]: have you found anything like this? My nonprofit may be interested in building something similar and would love to connect.

Have you seen the dot impact hackpad? Seems to probably fit some of your requirements.

Online interaction can be costly. You start by providing an interactive forum, and before you notice, you are spending your time nitpicking the latest proposal for comment deletion policy, instead of doing what you wanted to do in the first place.

Internet debates with low cost of entry attract people with too much free time. Those are usually neither effective nor altruists.

There are already plenty of different channels for communication: http://effective-altruism.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/effective.altruists/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/eahangout/

Then there are also plenty more specialized channels. Both for causes and for geographical locations. Given your presentation I don't see what your suggestion adds to the existing structures.