Your house, your rules, but there are two things I dislike about the way The Feed interacts with the way I use LW. I usually visit the site once a day and scroll down the front page looking at the titles and first words of articles. Those that interest me get opened in a new browser tab to read later, and I keep scrolling until I think I’ve seen most things both important and new.
The first thing The Feed does is replace the recent discussion on the front page, seemingly at random. Sometimes I get the usual list of articles, sometimes I get The Feed. I use a VPN, don’t keep browser history, reject cookies, and other such tinfoil hattery; so I don’t think the LW site has anything to base the decision on. Just before I started this comment I was getting The Feed, then closed and re-opened my browser and got the recent discussion. Something, somewhere, seems less deterministic than it should be.
Assuming I do get The Feed, the second thing It does is use very similar text for article titles and commenter user names. Similar enough that I have to read them to know what’s an article and what’s a comment. No disrespect to those making the comments, but I want to read the article first then decide whether to continue. If the article titles were in clearly different text than the user names (e.g. larger and seriffed just like they are in recent discussion) The Feed would work a lot better for me.
Sorry for the delayed reply here, the mix of different feeds is unintended and likely to do with cookies as we had an A/B test running that depends on a cookie there, at least if you’re logged out, which is a bit odd here. We have ended the A/B test though making it all moot.
I see the case for the different sizes to differentiate. The opinionated choice I was convinced into was to go for unifying the content types, and overall this making things easier to just read. You shouldn’t be shown a comment thread unless you’ve viewed a post, though detecting of post viewing is not amazing at present.
Your house, your rules, but there are two things I dislike about the way The Feed interacts with the way I use LW. I usually visit the site once a day and scroll down the front page looking at the titles and first words of articles. Those that interest me get opened in a new browser tab to read later, and I keep scrolling until I think I’ve seen most things both important and new.
The first thing The Feed does is replace the recent discussion on the front page, seemingly at random. Sometimes I get the usual list of articles, sometimes I get The Feed. I use a VPN, don’t keep browser history, reject cookies, and other such tinfoil hattery; so I don’t think the LW site has anything to base the decision on. Just before I started this comment I was getting The Feed, then closed and re-opened my browser and got the recent discussion. Something, somewhere, seems less deterministic than it should be.
Assuming I do get The Feed, the second thing It does is use very similar text for article titles and commenter user names. Similar enough that I have to read them to know what’s an article and what’s a comment. No disrespect to those making the comments, but I want to read the article first then decide whether to continue. If the article titles were in clearly different text than the user names (e.g. larger and seriffed just like they are in recent discussion) The Feed would work a lot better for me.
I’m using Firefox 137.0 on Fedora.
Sorry for the delayed reply here, the mix of different feeds is unintended and likely to do with cookies as we had an A/B test running that depends on a cookie there, at least if you’re logged out, which is a bit odd here. We have ended the A/B test though making it all moot.
I see the case for the different sizes to differentiate. The opinionated choice I was convinced into was to go for unifying the content types, and overall this making things easier to just read. You shouldn’t be shown a comment thread unless you’ve viewed a post, though detecting of post viewing is not amazing at present.