EA - Supporting online connections: what I learned after trying to find impactful opportunities by Clifford

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Supporting online connections: what I learned after trying to find impactful opportunities, published by Clifford on November 4, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I’ve been exploring ideas for how the Forum could help people make a valuable connection over the course of 4+ months. In this doc, I share the different areas I’ve been thinking about, how promising I think they are and what I’ve learnt about them.Overall, I don't think any of the ideas meet the bar for focusing on connections via an online platform. My bar for an idea was that it could facilitate roughly an EAG’s worth of quality-adjusted connections each year (~10,000). I’m now more excited about meeting this bar by targeting high-value outcomes (e.g. collaborations, jobs), even if that means a lower number of total connections.I cover:Overall takeWhy did we explore connections?What ideas have we explored?FAQ: Why don’t you build a year-round Swapcard?Other ideas we didn’t exploreOverall takeI’m more excited about targeting high-value outcomes that come from connections (e.g. collaborations, jobs) rather than trying to broadly facilitate conversations online.I wanted to find a product that could plausibly match a single EAG (Effective Altruism Global) in terms of the number of connections made in a year.A single EAG costs roughly 2 FTEs a year to run (excluding other costs)If Sarah (my colleague) and I are choosing what to work on, you could imagine that the alternative we’re trying to beat or match is running another EAG.Note: this is a relatively ambitious target. I think it would be more achievable to build something that’s still cost-effective but which has less potential for scale. For example, some of the ideas I explore below would be much more cost-effective than an EAG, because it's much cheaper to run online services than in-person conferences but would generate far fewer connections. [Related Forum post.]I’ve found it hard to compete with EAG on number of “connections”, where a connection means someone you feel you can ask a favour of (likely after a half-hour conversation).At an EAG, each attendee makes an average of 8 connections via lots of 1:1 chats in an environment (in-person) optimised for good conversations.To match this, we’d need 10% of our monthly active readership to make 4 connections a year, which isn’t crazy but feels like a stretch as only 8% of that number have ever sent a message on the forum.I think it might be easier to compete with EAG on the downstream effects of connections, e.g. a person ended up collaborating on a paper, a person ended up getting hired.My best guess is that EAGs get outcomes like this for something like 1-5% of connections. I think it’s much easier for the Forum to get 100-500 additional concrete outcomes (like collaborations or jobs) a year, than 10k connections.The rest of this contains details on what we explored, why and our assessment of each idea.Why did we explore connections?We thought we should work on connections because:Connections are valuableThey are cited as an important reason that people get involved in EA in the Open Phil EA/Longtermist Survey35% of people said personal contact with EAs was important for them getting involved38% said personal contacts had the largest influence on their personal ability to have a positive impactWe had some evidence that people are making valuable connections through the Forum, even though the Forum wasn’t designed well for thisThe 2020 EA Survey revealed that a surprising number of people found connections through the EA Forum5.9% of people said they found a valuable connection through the Forum, where 11.3% said this of EAG (an event optimised for connections)Having followed up with a subset of the forum users who said this, I think it’s more like that ~2% of respondent...