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.
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.