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.”
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).