My contributions are primarily comments, it doesn’t seem to have a way to make comments the main focus of the page. Also looks a bit wonky in dark mode. With the about-me no longer at the top, my about-me details are now hard to see. It makes me want to hide my posts, they’re mostly all pretty boring, link lists mainly. It also makes me want to repost my favorite comments as posts, which I have been meaning to do anyway. Feels like it’s wasting space—it’s quite narrow on my screen. Not very dense, will be harder to find posts from the prolific posters (not me).
With the about-me no longer at the top, my about-me details are now hard to see. It makes me want to hide my posts, they’re mostly all pretty boring, link lists mainly.
Actually, I just added a button to allow hiding the whole “top posts” section on your profile, since I do think for some users it doesn’t really make sense to emphasize the posts this much.
Oh, huh, it seems pretty clear to me that it would affect everyone (given that it’s clear that your other choices in the same UI element will affect everyone), but I’ll see whether other people are also confused and adjust if so.
(There are two different reasons to hide “top posts”, one of them is that it’s a useless thing when you are looking at your own userpage. The option turns out to address the other reason, rather than specifically this one, but the possibility/hope that it would makes the alternative hypothesis salient.)
It might or might not make sense to have two slightly different versions of the profile page—for the user himself and for others. I often use my profile page to find posts I want to share and also to access drafts. And there are necessarily differences between the views eg the drafts visible for their authors only (the drafts seem to gone in Joanna’s design). But the question then is how a user can see how his profile appears to others. maybe move the drafts elsewhere entirely.
It also makes me want to repost my favorite comments as posts, which I have been meaning to do anyway.
FWIW, this seems like a win to me. Posts are the better unit of conceptual organization. I think it’s good for profiles to push people to write more posts (that said, I do think we probably want to add the option of just removing posts from the top of the profile page, instead of just allowing replacing whatever is there).
Feels like it’s wasting space—it’s quite narrow on my screen.
Now also fixed! I increased the width to a more representative width for the rest of the site.
Not very dense, will be harder to find posts from the prolific posters (not me).
Yeah, I currently think the post list at the bottom needs some work. It’s a bit better with the wider profile width that I just changed the profile to, but I do still think we want to do something to bring some density and variance back.
FWIW, this seems like a win to me. Posts are the better unit of conceptual organization. I think it’s good for profiles to push people to write more posts (that said, I do think we probably want to add the option of just removing posts from the top of the profile page, instead of just allowing replacing whatever is there).
Ah, okay. In that case I won’t consider it to be weird/defecty to repost my comments as a post.
I feel like a bunch of my negative reaction is from the watercolor slop pictures, maybe 30% to 40% of the reaction. I understand why you like them, it’s cool tech that’s able to create them, but they aren’t my artistic decision and I wish they wouldn’t get associated with my posts. If I was going to do AI art it would be quite specific, but more generally, it feels defecty for a site to show me non-greyscale pictures associated with text, because pictures activate emotions more directly. Feels very dark-arts. I’d rather that space was used for a compressed summary, ideally one that I could fill out in the post editor.
I’d like a way to hide posts from the extended list too—maybe not completely gone, but like, marked as “OP now considers this to be a Bad Post, but it’s left here for archival purposes”. right now I’ve hidden embarrassing posts entirely by moving them to drafts, but I don’t so much mind being known to have bad old posts at all, I just want them in a “view bad posts” list. highlighting a few favorites does help if I move some of my more important points to a post, but what I’m mostly reacting to (the other 60% to 70%) is feeling like the new page puts the things I was cringing about having posted forward, in the uncustomizeable part. I do like the intent, it’s just that it felt like a miss for my writing histogram.
I feel like a bunch of my negative reaction is from the watercolor slop pictures, maybe 30% to 40% of the reaction. I understand why you like them, it’s cool tech that’s able to create them, but they aren’t my artistic decision and I wish they wouldn’t get associated with my posts.
You can always change them![1] I do like that LW has a house-style, and default pictures are pretty important for communicating a vibe.
We’ve always had default pictures for lots of stuff including sequences and posts that won the review, we just historically haven’t emphasized images for other posts (but in the age of social media previews being image heavy and quite important, I do think that’s a mistake and people should think about an image associated with each post).
highlighting a few favorites does help if I move some of my more important points to a post, but what I’m mostly reacting to (the other 60% to 70%) is feeling like the new page puts the things I was cringing about having posted forward, in the uncustomizeable part.
Huh, in what way is the page doing that more than the previous post page? If anything it’s now easier for someone to get to your comments than before (since for users who click the feed tab, that will be the default they see on profiles).
Though we should make it a bit easier to see how to change them. Right now the UI for it is quite hidden and confusing, since it’s in the social media preview section.
Sure, but previously we should show ~15 of your posts in chronological order above your comments, which seems like it’s more prominent than allowing someone to see your comments with a click right above the fold. It’s not a super obvious call, but it seems less emphasized to me.
Please make it possible for me to set my page to show comments to visitors without them clicking any buttons. Ideally, let me feature comments like posts. I have designed UIs many times, stop trying to know what I want better than me. I want to show my dang comments.
The sorting/filtering choice is a user-persistent setting. The only way to make it so that users reliably see your comments on your profile is to take away their ability to reliably see whatever they want to see on other people’s profiles. There is no easy solution here as far as I can tell.
Pre-generalized solution: show both on the same page by default.
Dynamically generalized solution: let users choose what view their page opens in by default for users who haven’t changed their preference on that user’s page, so that I can set it so that new users see my comments, instead of my posts.
Like, the tension you are expressing seems to me to be fake, arising from a view that comments and posts are a different kind of thing, that comments are lesser and need not be shown to new users. I am frustrated by this; I have done a lot of commenting, tuned my presentation as a commenter, and now the LW team has decided something that, through the coarse-graining lens of “what has actually happened to the profile page over the past two days”, they have a revealed preference of “we don’t like commenting and won’t show it to new users”; and when I try to ask for comments to be considered valuable again, I am told that it’s okay because users can click things. But the reason we care about what’s above the fold is that users don’t usually click things. Users scroll more often than they click, and I previously was able to pin comments to show what I think are the most useful things I’ve said; now, in order to influence how new users see my page, I have to go back and repost anything I’ve commented that I’d want a new user to see as a post—and in a roundabout way you say you’re happy to force this on me, but I want at least some sort of “sorry, we’re forcing this on you, deal with it, our amount of caring about this does not reach the threshold of inverting our action here” if you’re going to be like that. I understand that posts are what you consider valuable, but I think discussion is at least as valuable as posts, have participated in it, and now the site is doing a “this small group of devs has a lot of influence and has Just Decided Something Again” thing.
So like, come on dude, just put comments somewhere that is visible on first visit. Don’t treat comments like a sideshow people have to ask for. I don’t consider “some users might set comments to be their default view” to weigh on the thing I care about here, you said this page was designed to let people customize how they’re seen on first visit, but you’re dodging the question of doing that for comments.
I apologize for my visible frustration, it’s apparently not going away but I’ll at least call out that I recognize it’s annoying to have frustrated users after a shiny new redesign.
Thanks! In the Activity section, you can filter by comments. And in about 10 minutes: once you open the Feed tab, and filter for comments, then it will re-open that every time to go to profile page.
I’d like it to always open that way for others when they visit my page, ideally. Also, does it still support pinned comments?
edit: it does, comments are just hard to see on dark mode. the background is also oddly light on dark mode, should be fully black like the rest of the site, imo.
That’s not good. I feel like with the new page, I’m now limited to being seen as what other people liked about me, rather than being able to say what I want on my user page. If I had had one request for a new profile page, it would have been to let me choose what posts and comments show in a self-curated section, and then a chronological section below that. I imagine someone who primarily writes full posts wouldn’t feel as much like the new thing is bothersome, though I expect the narrowness will be bothersome.
This is likely to accelerate me moving to posting things on a separate website and linking them from lesswrong.
Note, as a figleaf—the visual design is alright; my reactions are all to UX.
I imagine someone who primarily writes full posts wouldn’t feel as much like the new thing is bothersome
No. I feel similarly.
The karma system is pretty good overall, but the tails do come apart. In particular social drama often attracts a lot of attention, but isn’t people’s most important or impressive contributions to the intellectual community.
My highest karma post is a repost of a twitter thread that I wrote about what postrats are, which was a fine thing to have written quickly, but is hardly the thing that I want to be most associated with my identity on LessWrong.
The karma system is pretty good overall, but the tails do come apart. In particular social drama often attracts a lot of attention, but isn’t people’s most important or impressive contributions to the intellectual community.
A lot of the goal of the redesign is actually to make it so that you have more control which content you want to represent you on LW. You can now select which posts you want at the top of your profile, and which one you want to give the most prominence, which you didn’t have previously.
There is a tradeoff here, where for users who mostly write comments and want to highlight that, we have fewer options. The previous options weren’t great. We were still showing people the full post list before we showed any of their comments, so the current situation still seems kind of better (since at least we let people choose which posts to show).
People did kind of horrendous things with their bio-styling, and I think the better choice if someone wants to make a big complicated explanation of who they are on LW is to make a post that they pin to their profile that summarizes what their deal is. But I am not sure! There are around 15 users who did anything complicated with their bio, with everyone else having stuff that makes more sense in the current design. But de-emphasizing the bio was definitely among the trickiest choices of the redesign.
A lot of the goal of the redesign is actually to make it so that you have more control which content you want to represent you on LW. You can now select which posts you want at the top of your profile, and which one you want to give the most prominence, which you didn’t have previously.
Previously, you could group the post you consider to be thematically together into sequences that would be shown at the top of the page.
I think it’s natural that user first think that having Top posts which the hover text “based on karma”, actually shows the posts with the most karma even when it sometimes doesn’t if you configure that on the profile.
One way to communicate the fact that those are switchable would be to show a button for switching when hovering over them on your own profile. Maybe renaming “top posts” into featured posts would also be helpful while changing the tooltip to mention that it also shows user selected posts.
Previously, you could group the post you consider to be thematically together into sequences that would be shown at the top of the page.
It is the case very few people actually did this, but I agree it helped in some cases. But even when people did, most sequence titles are very uninformative, and don’t really work for the purpose of “show people what I am about”. They have even less space for a title than a post-item, and are very small, and if you only had a single sequence it showed up as a kind of lonely weird-looking section on your profile that was quite unbalanced.
I think it’s natural that user first think that having Top posts which the hover text “based on karma”, actually shows the posts with the most karma even when it sometimes doesn’t if you configure that on the profile.
Oops, that’s a bug! I’ll just remove the hover text, since it’s currently definitely more confusing than clarifying.
One way to communicate the fact that those are switchable would be to show a button for switching when hovering over them on your own profile. Maybe renaming “top posts” into featured posts would also be helpful while changing the tooltip to mention that it also shows user selected posts.
Not crazy. I’ll consider changing it to “featured posts”.
A lot of the goal of the redesign is actually to make it so that you have more control which content you want to represent you on LW. You can now select which posts you want at the top of your profile, and which one you want to give the most prominence, which you didn’t have previously.
Yes, realizing this swings the redesign from “clearly bad for me” to “a change, therefore terrible, but maybe pretty good aside from that.”
My contributions are primarily comments, it doesn’t seem to have a way to make comments the main focus of the page. Also looks a bit wonky in dark mode. With the about-me no longer at the top, my about-me details are now hard to see. It makes me want to hide my posts, they’re mostly all pretty boring, link lists mainly. It also makes me want to repost my favorite comments as posts, which I have been meaning to do anyway. Feels like it’s wasting space—it’s quite narrow on my screen. Not very dense, will be harder to find posts from the prolific posters (not me).
Actually, I just added a button to allow hiding the whole “top posts” section on your profile, since I do think for some users it doesn’t really make sense to emphasize the posts this much.
It’s not clear from the UI if “hide top posts” would only affect how you see your own userpage, or also how others see your userpage.
Oh, huh, it seems pretty clear to me that it would affect everyone (given that it’s clear that your other choices in the same UI element will affect everyone), but I’ll see whether other people are also confused and adjust if so.
(There are two different reasons to hide “top posts”, one of them is that it’s a useless thing when you are looking at your own userpage. The option turns out to address the other reason, rather than specifically this one, but the possibility/hope that it would makes the alternative hypothesis salient.)
It’s how it effects all pages, but good to know that it wasn’t clear.
It might or might not make sense to have two slightly different versions of the profile page—for the user himself and for others. I often use my profile page to find posts I want to share and also to access drafts. And there are necessarily differences between the views eg the drafts visible for their authors only (the drafts seem to gone in Joanna’s design). But the question then is how a user can see how his profile appears to others. maybe move the drafts elsewhere entirely.
We have a drafts page! It’s optimized to be dense:
Should be fixed!
FWIW, this seems like a win to me. Posts are the better unit of conceptual organization. I think it’s good for profiles to push people to write more posts (that said, I do think we probably want to add the option of just removing posts from the top of the profile page, instead of just allowing replacing whatever is there).
Now also fixed! I increased the width to a more representative width for the rest of the site.
Yeah, I currently think the post list at the bottom needs some work. It’s a bit better with the wider profile width that I just changed the profile to, but I do still think we want to do something to bring some density and variance back.
Ah, okay. In that case I won’t consider it to be weird/defecty to repost my comments as a post.
I feel like a bunch of my negative reaction is from the watercolor slop pictures, maybe 30% to 40% of the reaction. I understand why you like them, it’s cool tech that’s able to create them, but they aren’t my artistic decision and I wish they wouldn’t get associated with my posts. If I was going to do AI art it would be quite specific, but more generally, it feels defecty for a site to show me non-greyscale pictures associated with text, because pictures activate emotions more directly. Feels very dark-arts. I’d rather that space was used for a compressed summary, ideally one that I could fill out in the post editor.
I’d like a way to hide posts from the extended list too—maybe not completely gone, but like, marked as “OP now considers this to be a Bad Post, but it’s left here for archival purposes”. right now I’ve hidden embarrassing posts entirely by moving them to drafts, but I don’t so much mind being known to have bad old posts at all, I just want them in a “view bad posts” list. highlighting a few favorites does help if I move some of my more important points to a post, but what I’m mostly reacting to (the other 60% to 70%) is feeling like the new page puts the things I was cringing about having posted forward, in the uncustomizeable part. I do like the intent, it’s just that it felt like a miss for my writing histogram.
While I dislike the new profile page on net, I feel positively about the pictures
You can always change them![1] I do like that LW has a house-style, and default pictures are pretty important for communicating a vibe.
We’ve always had default pictures for lots of stuff including sequences and posts that won the review, we just historically haven’t emphasized images for other posts (but in the age of social media previews being image heavy and quite important, I do think that’s a mistake and people should think about an image associated with each post).
Huh, in what way is the page doing that more than the previous post page? If anything it’s now easier for someone to get to your comments than before (since for users who click the feed tab, that will be the default they see on profiles).
Though we should make it a bit easier to see how to change them. Right now the UI for it is quite hidden and confusing, since it’s in the social media preview section.
Comments aren’t visible without clicking a button.
Sure, but previously we should show ~15 of your posts in chronological order above your comments, which seems like it’s more prominent than allowing someone to see your comments with a click right above the fold. It’s not a super obvious call, but it seems less emphasized to me.
Please make it possible for me to set my page to show comments to visitors without them clicking any buttons. Ideally, let me feature comments like posts. I have designed UIs many times, stop trying to know what I want better than me. I want to show my dang comments.
The sorting/filtering choice is a user-persistent setting. The only way to make it so that users reliably see your comments on your profile is to take away their ability to reliably see whatever they want to see on other people’s profiles. There is no easy solution here as far as I can tell.
Pre-generalized solution: show both on the same page by default.
Dynamically generalized solution: let users choose what view their page opens in by default for users who haven’t changed their preference on that user’s page, so that I can set it so that new users see my comments, instead of my posts.
Like, the tension you are expressing seems to me to be fake, arising from a view that comments and posts are a different kind of thing, that comments are lesser and need not be shown to new users. I am frustrated by this; I have done a lot of commenting, tuned my presentation as a commenter, and now the LW team has decided something that, through the coarse-graining lens of “what has actually happened to the profile page over the past two days”, they have a revealed preference of “we don’t like commenting and won’t show it to new users”; and when I try to ask for comments to be considered valuable again, I am told that it’s okay because users can click things. But the reason we care about what’s above the fold is that users don’t usually click things. Users scroll more often than they click, and I previously was able to pin comments to show what I think are the most useful things I’ve said; now, in order to influence how new users see my page, I have to go back and repost anything I’ve commented that I’d want a new user to see as a post—and in a roundabout way you say you’re happy to force this on me, but I want at least some sort of “sorry, we’re forcing this on you, deal with it, our amount of caring about this does not reach the threshold of inverting our action here” if you’re going to be like that. I understand that posts are what you consider valuable, but I think discussion is at least as valuable as posts, have participated in it, and now the site is doing a “this small group of devs has a lot of influence and has Just Decided Something Again” thing.
So like, come on dude, just put comments somewhere that is visible on first visit. Don’t treat comments like a sideshow people have to ask for. I don’t consider “some users might set comments to be their default view” to weigh on the thing I care about here, you said this page was designed to let people customize how they’re seen on first visit, but you’re dodging the question of doing that for comments.
I apologize for my visible frustration, it’s apparently not going away but I’ll at least call out that I recognize it’s annoying to have frustrated users after a shiny new redesign.
I think the comments are under Feed which took me a while.
The top post may bei more useful for guests not for yourself.
Thanks! In the Activity section, you can filter by comments. And in about 10 minutes: once you open the Feed tab, and filter for comments, then it will re-open that every time to go to profile page.
I’d like it to always open that way for others when they visit my page, ideally. Also, does it still support pinned comments?
edit: it does, comments are just hard to see on dark mode. the background is also oddly light on dark mode, should be fully black like the rest of the site, imo.
Sorry about dark mode. I’ll fix that next.
I don’t currently plan to always open it that way for other users. But their preferences of how to open profiles will globally persist.
That’s not good. I feel like with the new page, I’m now limited to being seen as what other people liked about me, rather than being able to say what I want on my user page. If I had had one request for a new profile page, it would have been to let me choose what posts and comments show in a self-curated section, and then a chronological section below that. I imagine someone who primarily writes full posts wouldn’t feel as much like the new thing is bothersome, though I expect the narrowness will be bothersome.
This is likely to accelerate me moving to posting things on a separate website and linking them from lesswrong.
Note, as a figleaf—the visual design is alright; my reactions are all to UX.
No. I feel similarly.
The karma system is pretty good overall, but the tails do come apart. In particular social drama often attracts a lot of attention, but isn’t people’s most important or impressive contributions to the intellectual community.
My highest karma post is a repost of a twitter thread that I wrote about what postrats are, which was a fine thing to have written quickly, but is hardly the thing that I want to be most associated with my identity on LessWrong.
You can select which posts go there using the ‘edit’ button in the top right!
Ok. Great. I feel much happier with my selection of posts than with the default selection.
A lot of the goal of the redesign is actually to make it so that you have more control which content you want to represent you on LW. You can now select which posts you want at the top of your profile, and which one you want to give the most prominence, which you didn’t have previously.
There is a tradeoff here, where for users who mostly write comments and want to highlight that, we have fewer options. The previous options weren’t great. We were still showing people the full post list before we showed any of their comments, so the current situation still seems kind of better (since at least we let people choose which posts to show).
People did kind of horrendous things with their bio-styling, and I think the better choice if someone wants to make a big complicated explanation of who they are on LW is to make a post that they pin to their profile that summarizes what their deal is. But I am not sure! There are around 15 users who did anything complicated with their bio, with everyone else having stuff that makes more sense in the current design. But de-emphasizing the bio was definitely among the trickiest choices of the redesign.
Previously, you could group the post you consider to be thematically together into sequences that would be shown at the top of the page.
I think it’s natural that user first think that having Top posts which the hover text “based on karma”, actually shows the posts with the most karma even when it sometimes doesn’t if you configure that on the profile.
One way to communicate the fact that those are switchable would be to show a button for switching when hovering over them on your own profile. Maybe renaming “top posts” into featured posts would also be helpful while changing the tooltip to mention that it also shows user selected posts.
It is the case very few people actually did this, but I agree it helped in some cases. But even when people did, most sequence titles are very uninformative, and don’t really work for the purpose of “show people what I am about”. They have even less space for a title than a post-item, and are very small, and if you only had a single sequence it showed up as a kind of lonely weird-looking section on your profile that was quite unbalanced.
Oops, that’s a bug! I’ll just remove the hover text, since it’s currently definitely more confusing than clarifying.
Not crazy. I’ll consider changing it to “featured posts”.
I do want the line spaces in my bio to show up, tho. They are a few distinct paragraph, not a wall of text.
I don’t think “using paragraph breaks” should count as “horrendous things with bio-styling.”
Yep, sorry, that’s definitely a thing we will fix. Let me actually do it right now.
Edit: Done! Should be live within 5 minutes.
Yes, realizing this swings the redesign from “clearly bad for me” to “a change, therefore terrible, but maybe pretty good aside from that.”
You can choose which 4 posts appear! Hit “edit” in the top right and a menu will appear (currently takes a few seconds to load).