It’s always been a core part of LessWrong April Fool’s that we never substantially disrupt or change the deep-linking experience.
So while it looks like a lot of going on today, if you get linked directly to an article, you will basically notice nothing different. All you will see today are two tiny pixel-art icons in the header, nothing else. There are a few slightly noisy icons in the comment sections, but I don’t think people would mind that much.
This has been a core tenet of all April Fool’s in the past. The frontpage is fair game, and April Fool’s jokes are common for large web platforms, but it should never get in the way of accessing historical information or parsing what the site is about, if you get directly linked to an author’s piece of writing.
I initially noticed April Fools’ day after following a deep-link. I thought I had seen the font of the username all wacky (kind-of pixelated?), and thus was more annoyed. But I can’t seem to reproduce this now and conclude it was likely not real. Might have been a coincidence / unrelated site-loading bug / something temporarily broken on my end.
I initially noticed April Fools’ day after following a deep-link. I thought I had seen the font of the username all wacky (kind-of pixelated?), and thus was more annoyed.
You are not imagining things! When we deployed things this morning/late last night I had a pixel-art theme deployed by default across the site, but then after around an hour decided it was indeed too disruptive to the reading experience and reverted it. Seems like we are both on roughly the same page on what is too much.
It’s always been a core part of LessWrong April Fool’s that we never substantially disrupt or change the deep-linking experience.
So while it looks like a lot of going on today, if you get linked directly to an article, you will basically notice nothing different. All you will see today are two tiny pixel-art icons in the header, nothing else. There are a few slightly noisy icons in the comment sections, but I don’t think people would mind that much.
This has been a core tenet of all April Fool’s in the past. The frontpage is fair game, and April Fool’s jokes are common for large web platforms, but it should never get in the way of accessing historical information or parsing what the site is about, if you get directly linked to an author’s piece of writing.
I largely retract my criticism based on this. I had thought it affected deep-links more than it does. [1]
I initially noticed April Fools’ day after following a deep-link. I thought I had seen the font of the username all wacky (kind-of pixelated?), and thus was more annoyed. But I can’t seem to reproduce this now and conclude it was likely not real. Might have been a coincidence / unrelated site-loading bug / something temporarily broken on my end.
You are not imagining things! When we deployed things this morning/late last night I had a pixel-art theme deployed by default across the site, but then after around an hour decided it was indeed too disruptive to the reading experience and reverted it. Seems like we are both on roughly the same page on what is too much.