LW UI features you might not have tried
Every once in a while I see a comment describing a problem with lesswrong that is fixable with existing features, if only the user knew about them. This post is an attempt to make these highly useful features more widely known.
I am technically a mod on lesswrong, which is why I know about these features. But in practice my only modding is giving opinions to the core team and recommending a few things a year for curation. I have absolutely no power over features. If you would like to criticize or praise these features, please direct that towards the core team.
Personalize your front page algorithm
Seeing way too much AI? Care about postmortem posts even when they have 5 karma? Never want to hear about decision theory again? You can make this happen by going to the front page → click “customize feed” → add a tag → select a bias to apply to that tag. You can hide all, halve their karma for purposes of your front page, +25 their karma for purposes of your front page, or make up a custom modifier.
These don’t affect the post, author, or anyone else’s feed, just what you see.
Ban users from your posts
If you have 1000 karma, you can ban individuals from specific personal posts (as in, posts that haven’t been set to the front page). At 2000 karma, you have the same options for front page posts.
EDIT 10/13: To enable this feature, set moderation guidelines first.
To do this, click on the three dot menu icon in the upper left hand corner of a comment. If you have the power, this will contain options to ban a user from this post or all posts.
Bookmark page (thanks Jozdien)
The Bookmarks page that contains all of your bookmarks, and your reading history and your vote history.
Another feature users might not have seen (I certainly hadn’t until someone directly pointed it out to me): the Bookmarks page that contains all of your bookmarks, and your reading history and your vote history.
edited to include, thank you
Unfortunately the ban-users-from-posts feature has a rube-goldberg of rules around it that were never written down, and because there was no documentation to check it against, I’ve never managed to give it a proper QA pass. I’d be interested in reports of people’s experience with it, but I do not have confidence that this feature works without major bugs.
Doesn’t look like I can ban users from my personal posts.
I have >2500 karma and I also don’t see any ban options on that menu, just a report option and two different ways to subscribe to that user. I’m the kind of person who actually really badly needs this feature, probably for way more important and valuable reasons than the average Lesswrong user (personal preference or dislike is not a factor).
You need to set a moderation guideline on any post from which you want to ban people (and if you just want moderation guidelines on all your future posts, you can just set them on your profile under the moderations option section).