I'm guessing you haven't seen, so let me show off the new signup flow!

Hi Larks, thanks for taking the time to comment. I think your continuum comment is a good contribution to the considerations. I’m going to run with that metaphor, and talk about where I think we should fall. I take this seriously and want to get this right.

I’ve drawn three possible lines for what utility the Forum will get from its position on the continuum. Maybe it’s not actually useful, maybe I just like drawing things. I guess my main point is that we don’t have to figure out the entire space, just the local one:

Anyway, the story for the (locally) impersonal position is that adding profile images causes people to pay less attention to the object-level content, and more attention to the person writing. Given that epistemics are one of the top priorities of the Forum, and of EA community building writ-large, this would be quite bad. A substantial sacrifice in our group epistemics would overwhelm nearly all other considerations. I think the crux for me is how large would that effect be?

The story for the social position is that the Forum needs to be an attractive place to comment in order to be used. The Forum is growing now, but many people new to the community don’t use it. Many people experienced in EA read and occasionally comment, but the percentage of the most promising young or new people to the community on the Forum is not what I’d like. When I talk to people about it, they often say that it feels intimidating / unfriendly / cold. Having a broader reach, and broader participation, will increase the Forum’s impact. A crux related to this story is how large an effect this is. Maybe the people talking to me wouldn’t actually join the Forum anyway. It’s fairly long-form discussion, and that’s not for everyone.

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A digression into my model of the Forum’s impact: In How we think about the Forum (by now 2 years old and not entirely up-to-date), I wrote down the following methods of impact from the Forum:

• Sharing of existing ideas
  • Including making common knowledge
• Development and refinement of new ideas
• Talent discovery
• Public accountability
• Spreading of norms
• Encouraging coordination

To my mind, the path to impact that most favors the impersonal position is the second, “Development and refinement of new ideas”. Even small hits to epistemics are incredibly costly when the whole thing you’re trying to do is figure out what’s true. However the Forum does not only try to figure out what’s true. To my mind the biggest effect on the community's epistemics (and as a whole) comes from spreading our norms to newcomers to the community. This is less valuable (or even negatively valuable) if our epistemics get less good, but it is also impossible if newcomers don’t read the Forum in the first place. All of the items on that list are dependent on more people reading and writing on the Forum.

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Overall I’m not sure what my position is right now. I’ll need to think and discuss it some more. It’s plausible that there are other important features with less sign uncertainty that become more important in my mind, but I don’t want to shy away from potentially high-impact features either. I’d be appreciative of other people’s impressions of how large the effects of my cruxes are.

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Some considerations that don’t fall neatly into the continuum analysis:

• We can probably mitigate the amount that epistemics are hurt by having a “profile images off in megathreads” policy. So that when people start digging into things in posts like the Hinge of History post or emotionally-charged topics, the epistemics can stay relatively unaffected. (This probably doesn’t matter until we put profile images on comments.)
• Newbies to the community see a lot of names. Images are generally more recognizable, which can help newbies get a sense of which authors they like. This helps them get drawn in to reading more, and understanding the dynamics of the various positions held by various authors, in the same way that you or I can do because we recognize their names. (“That’s Buck arguing for position X, this makes sense because I’ve already read him supporting similar position Y”) This is I believe related to your “statistical discrimination” comment.

I think this is great. I especially like the discussion of propaganda, which feels like an important model.

Seems right. I doubt it was deliberate.

What happens if you log in in incognito?  Do you have any of these settings set?

I can't reproduce this, can you tell me what browser you were using, what settings you have for the allposts page, and whether you can still see the issue?

This is over.

Temporary site update: I've taken down the allPosts page. It appears we have a bot hitting the page, and it's causing the site to be slow. While I investigate, I've simply taken the page down. My apologies for the inconvenience.

That’s a bug, thanks for reporting.

You don't need to use the allPosts page to get a list of all the posts. You can just ask the GraphQL API for the ids of all of them.