Namely, it allowed me to quickly eyeball the user and see their recent fine-grained history, i.e., their comments, which are a good proxy of what they’ve recently been up to, LessWrong-wise.
I am pretty confident you actually pretty reliably care more about what the highest karma/self-curated posts from a user are, than what their most recent posts are (which is what we’ve always shown first so far)
and I need to click “feed” to see the comments, where checking out recent comments is often the reason why I revisit somebody’s profile.
This is a user setting that persists. So if you clicked on “Feed” for any profile, you will now always see the feed as the default list in everyone’s profile.
or exercise small mental effort to ignore non-title text (which I have to do now)
Your brain is really good at parsing images! There is a reason why every other website on the internet uses images to convey context and content about a story. An image really conveys a lot!
Many posts on LW don’t have well-chosen images, but now that image generation is cheap and can be reasonably high-quality, I think that’s a bug, and I want to make images as a way to convey the topic and context and vibe of a post more common across the site.
I am pretty confident you actually pretty reliably care more about what the highest karma/self-curated posts from a user are, than what their most recent posts are (which is what we’ve always shown first so far)
Hm, for newish-to-me users, yes. But for users that I’m already familiar with / I’ve been reading for a while, I am more interested in their recent posts. And I open the profiles of the latter more often than those of the former.
or exercise small mental effort to ignore non-title text (which I have to do now)
Your brain is really good at parsing images! There is a reason why every other website on the internet uses images to convey context and content about a story. An image really conveys a lot!
Perhaps you misunderstood me. It’s not about the images. I meant that this
is more time-consuming to browse through than a list like this
But now that I think about it more, maybe I’m overapplying the heuristics that I adopted for my email, and it’s nice to be able to read the preview without having to hover. But I still will want to scroll through posts sometimes, so some “collapse/show preview” button would be great to have.
ETA: I also loved being able to see the comments without opening the post, and this option is gone now on the profile page.
Yeah, if I am looking for a post with a specific name, or just “I think I wrote a post on this topic”, then seeing lots of article names is more useful than seeing only a few previews.
The flipside that made me excited about the current thing was “now, as I’m browsing posts, I actually have a chance of figuring out whether a post is good before clicking on it.” It’s not that there’s less information density, it’s that it’s differently distributed.
I think there should totally be a view for “dense reading of post titles”, but, it’s not the only thing I might want.
(My current guess is there should be a search filter, and if you’ve typed into the search filter, you get a more dense view)
Perhaps you misunderstood me. It’s not about the images. I meant that this
Ah, yep, I did misunderstand you. Agree that that section is now less dense.
I also loved being able to see the comments without opening the post, and this option is gone now on the profile page.
Yeah, I do also like this, and I might try to add something like it back, but it’s quite a bit of work (the “click on the comment icon to expand just the recent comments” interaction is among the most confusing interactions for new users, so it’s a bit tricky to get right).
I am pretty confident you actually pretty reliably care more about what the highest karma/self-curated posts from a user are, than what their most recent posts are (which is what we’ve always shown first so far)
Aside from bristling a bit at being told that what I care about is wrong, I actually do care about recency more often than historical top-ranked for this view. Of course, sometimes I’m looking for “best of”, but more often I’m checking whether the user is in a snit or otherwise commenting recently in a pattern I should understand/accommodate before I join one of their threads.
Aside from bristling a bit at being told that what I care about is wrong
Much of UI design is figuring out what users care about, which involves disagreeing with people about what they care about! “If I had asked what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse”, etc.
Agree that recent activity is also pretty important. I am thinking about whether we should make the feed view the default view in the section below the top posts, because I do think that’s the second most common use-case for the page. I’ll iterate a bit over the coming days.
In fact, you’re absolutely correct—I retract that part of my response. I also recognize that I use this feature (looking at someone’s profile to see their recent posts/comments) less often that others might use it for other purposes (looking at their best/top contributions).
Too many user-options is worse than slight misses on some defaults. I’m grateful for LW, even when it’s optimized for people who are not exactly me. Carry on experimenting, and see how people react and change their usage.
In fact, you’re absolutely correct—I retract that part of my response
I’m actually a bit confused what you currently believe about your preferences. You think you don’t care as much about recency (but, some?). Or basically you overall prefer top posts when looking at author pages?
Sorry for lack of clarity in my retraction—I’m pretty sure I’m right about my preferences—I am usually looking for recency. That belief hasn’t changed.
I have retracted my annoyance—I should not be, and no longer am bothered by your use of “you” when it’s really “most users” or “our target user”. I hope it was useful for me to give my common use case, but I don’t intend to demand anything—this topic is peripheral enough to my value from LessWrong that I wanted to reduce, rather than increase, any load I’m imposing.
I am pretty confident you actually pretty reliably care more about what the highest karma/self-curated posts from a user are, than what their most recent posts are (which is what we’ve always shown first so far)
This is a user setting that persists. So if you clicked on “Feed” for any profile, you will now always see the feed as the default list in everyone’s profile.
Your brain is really good at parsing images! There is a reason why every other website on the internet uses images to convey context and content about a story. An image really conveys a lot!
Many posts on LW don’t have well-chosen images, but now that image generation is cheap and can be reasonably high-quality, I think that’s a bug, and I want to make images as a way to convey the topic and context and vibe of a post more common across the site.
Hm, for newish-to-me users, yes. But for users that I’m already familiar with / I’ve been reading for a while, I am more interested in their recent posts. And I open the profiles of the latter more often than those of the former.
Perhaps you misunderstood me. It’s not about the images. I meant that this
is more time-consuming to browse through than a list like this
But now that I think about it more, maybe I’m overapplying the heuristics that I adopted for my email, and it’s nice to be able to read the preview without having to hover. But I still will want to scroll through posts sometimes, so some “collapse/show preview” button would be great to have.
ETA: I also loved being able to see the comments without opening the post, and this option is gone now on the profile page.
Yeah, if I am looking for a post with a specific name, or just “I think I wrote a post on this topic”, then seeing lots of article names is more useful than seeing only a few previews.
Perhaps add a checkbox “show previews”?
The flipside that made me excited about the current thing was “now, as I’m browsing posts, I actually have a chance of figuring out whether a post is good before clicking on it.” It’s not that there’s less information density, it’s that it’s differently distributed.
I think there should totally be a view for “dense reading of post titles”, but, it’s not the only thing I might want.
(My current guess is there should be a search filter, and if you’ve typed into the search filter, you get a more dense view)
Ah, yep, I did misunderstand you. Agree that that section is now less dense.
Yeah, I do also like this, and I might try to add something like it back, but it’s quite a bit of work (the “click on the comment icon to expand just the recent comments” interaction is among the most confusing interactions for new users, so it’s a bit tricky to get right).
Aside from bristling a bit at being told that what I care about is wrong, I actually do care about recency more often than historical top-ranked for this view. Of course, sometimes I’m looking for “best of”, but more often I’m checking whether the user is in a snit or otherwise commenting recently in a pattern I should understand/accommodate before I join one of their threads.
Much of UI design is figuring out what users care about, which involves disagreeing with people about what they care about! “If I had asked what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse”, etc.
Agree that recent activity is also pretty important. I am thinking about whether we should make the feed view the default view in the section below the top posts, because I do think that’s the second most common use-case for the page. I’ll iterate a bit over the coming days.
In fact, you’re absolutely correct—I retract that part of my response. I also recognize that I use this feature (looking at someone’s profile to see their recent posts/comments) less often that others might use it for other purposes (looking at their best/top contributions).
Too many user-options is worse than slight misses on some defaults. I’m grateful for LW, even when it’s optimized for people who are not exactly me. Carry on experimenting, and see how people react and change their usage.
I’m actually a bit confused what you currently believe about your preferences. You think you don’t care as much about recency (but, some?). Or basically you overall prefer top posts when looking at author pages?
Sorry for lack of clarity in my retraction—I’m pretty sure I’m right about my preferences—I am usually looking for recency. That belief hasn’t changed.
I have retracted my annoyance—I should not be, and no longer am bothered by your use of “you” when it’s really “most users” or “our target user”. I hope it was useful for me to give my common use case, but I don’t intend to demand anything—this topic is peripheral enough to my value from LessWrong that I wanted to reduce, rather than increase, any load I’m imposing.
Oli told me there would be interactions like this.