First, I appreciate the work people have done to make LW 2 happen. Here are my notes:
Strong feeling—the links and descriptions of the Sequences, the Codex, and HPMOR (while good) should not be at the top of the page. The top should be the newest material.
Please please please include a “hide subthread” option to collapse a comment and all its responses. That is a dealbreaker for me, if a site doesn’t have that feature, I won’t read the comments.
Current LW has a really nice alternating color scheme for comment/reply. One comment will have a grey background, the comment below it will have a beige background. That is a key feature for visually parsing a comment thread.
I liked the concept of having a main section and a discussion section, where the bar for posting in the latter is lower. For whatever reason, people seem to get angry if you post something that they feel is low quality or not relevant.
I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but somehow I don’t quite like the default font. It may be that I like a different font for reading on dead tree paper vs on a computer screen?
It may be slightly evil, but the karma display on the right side of the screen makes the site more addictive, because people love to see if they get upvotes or comment replies.
It seems weird to allow people to upvote/downvote an article right from the home page, do you really want people to vote for an article without reading it?
Strongly agree with 1. I have a plan for a separate thing at the top of the frontpage for logged-in users that takes up much less space and is actually useful for multiple visits. Here is a screenshot of my current UI mockup for the frontpage:
The emphasis continue to be on historical instead of recent content, with the frontpage emphasizing reading for logged-in users. If you don’t have anything in your reading-queue the top part disappears completely and you just have the recent discussion (though by default the HPMOR, The Sequences and The Codex are in your reading queue)
I think it’d be nice to have one main view that everyone visits, organized as a list of posts sorted chronologically or by magic. Writing my mathy stuff on a website and showing it to friends would be easier if the website didn’t have a big banner saying go read this Harry Potter fanfiction or that social issues blogger (much as I love both HPMOR and Scott). Maybe you could put these links in a sidebar instead?
Also as a longtime user I don’t really care if people have read the Sequences. I don’t see much correlation between “this person has read the Sequences” and “this person is interesting” that isn’t screened off by “this person was interested in stuff like the Sequences to begin with”.
So … a new LW2 participant will by default be presented with a front page suggesting to them that they’re supposed to read all of HPMOR and that not having done so means they haven’t yet done their duty? I strongly advise against this.
Better, if feasible: (1) by default a new user has an empty reading queue; (2) by default a new user is presented with a thing saying “Go here to set up your reading queue”; (3) making that go away without actually adding anything to your reading queue is easy, but (4) adding things like the Sequences or HPMOR to your queue is also easy.
I, too, recommend avoiding the “Continue eating your veggies. You have eaten 4 out of 25 turnips. Your progress in eating turnips is 16%” nagware, especially at the top of the front page.
I think an important thing is that the first screen of the first page should contain the most important things both for the newcomers and for the regular readers.
For newcomers, it’s the links to HPMOR, The Sequences and The Codex (and anything else that may be later included). Should be at the top, but don’t need to take much space vertically.
For regular readers, it’s the new articles and featured articles. Perhaps in two columns. This way the whole first page could fit on an average monitor.
The “progress” part feels quite forced. Having the links displayed, either people will read the stuff, or they will not. If they decide not to read it now, no need to rub their faces in it.
EDIT: For people who are logged in, the part for newcomers could be collapsed. If they have an account, they have already see it. But there should be a way to show it again.
Will logged-in users be able to switch off this “top of the frontpage”?
It looks quite condescending: Continue eating your veggies. You have eaten 4⁄25 turnips. Your progress in eating turnips is 16%. Or start eating another veggie… YOU WILL SEE MESSAGES ABOUT TURNIPS EVERY TIME YOU LOAD THE PAGE UNTIL YOU EAT ALL OF THEM.
Much of this is stuff that’s on the development team’s agenda (either to change or to think about).
One thing that’s a significant change that was very intentional is the “Opening up with the sequences, codex, and HPMOR” (albeit with a lot less certainty with HPMOR being included there).
We do plan to have an “All Posts” page that ends up being the primary way you consume the site (with newest content first). And for people who’ve already read the sequences et-al, that’ll be the preferred way for them to interact with the site.
But for newcomers, a major shift with Lesserwrong is essentially, “since the glory days where most good content is from were way back when, and since understanding the sequences really is important for being able to engage productively with the site, we want to be encouraging newcomers to first engage with that content rather than treating it as a forum where newcomers can show up and start posting immediately.” If you don’t have that, then the discussion won’t really have the elements that make Less Wrong particularly valuable.
But for newcomers, a major shift with Lesserwrong is essentially, “since the glory days where most good content is from were way back when, and since understanding the sequences really is important for being able to engage productively with the site, we want to be encouraging newcomers to first engage with that content rather than treating it as a forum where newcomers can show up and start posting immediately.” If you don’t have that, then the discussion won’t really have the elements that make Less Wrong particularly valuable.
I agree. But how about trying to only show it to newcomers? Perhaps anyone less than 200 karma for starters.
Later on, maybe track page views + time spent on each page in order to infer whether or not users have read the sequences (probably needs to be thought out some more, but something like that).
First, I appreciate the work people have done to make LW 2 happen. Here are my notes:
Strong feeling—the links and descriptions of the Sequences, the Codex, and HPMOR (while good) should not be at the top of the page. The top should be the newest material.
Please please please include a “hide subthread” option to collapse a comment and all its responses. That is a dealbreaker for me, if a site doesn’t have that feature, I won’t read the comments.
Current LW has a really nice alternating color scheme for comment/reply. One comment will have a grey background, the comment below it will have a beige background. That is a key feature for visually parsing a comment thread.
I liked the concept of having a main section and a discussion section, where the bar for posting in the latter is lower. For whatever reason, people seem to get angry if you post something that they feel is low quality or not relevant.
I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but somehow I don’t quite like the default font. It may be that I like a different font for reading on dead tree paper vs on a computer screen?
It may be slightly evil, but the karma display on the right side of the screen makes the site more addictive, because people love to see if they get upvotes or comment replies.
It seems weird to allow people to upvote/downvote an article right from the home page, do you really want people to vote for an article without reading it?
Strongly agree with 1. I have a plan for a separate thing at the top of the frontpage for logged-in users that takes up much less space and is actually useful for multiple visits. Here is a screenshot of my current UI mockup for the frontpage:
https://imgur.com/a/GXjTY
The emphasis continue to be on historical instead of recent content, with the frontpage emphasizing reading for logged-in users. If you don’t have anything in your reading-queue the top part disappears completely and you just have the recent discussion (though by default the HPMOR, The Sequences and The Codex are in your reading queue)
I think it’d be nice to have one main view that everyone visits, organized as a list of posts sorted chronologically or by magic. Writing my mathy stuff on a website and showing it to friends would be easier if the website didn’t have a big banner saying go read this Harry Potter fanfiction or that social issues blogger (much as I love both HPMOR and Scott). Maybe you could put these links in a sidebar instead?
Also as a longtime user I don’t really care if people have read the Sequences. I don’t see much correlation between “this person has read the Sequences” and “this person is interesting” that isn’t screened off by “this person was interested in stuff like the Sequences to begin with”.
So … a new LW2 participant will by default be presented with a front page suggesting to them that they’re supposed to read all of HPMOR and that not having done so means they haven’t yet done their duty? I strongly advise against this.
Better, if feasible: (1) by default a new user has an empty reading queue; (2) by default a new user is presented with a thing saying “Go here to set up your reading queue”; (3) making that go away without actually adding anything to your reading queue is easy, but (4) adding things like the Sequences or HPMOR to your queue is also easy.
Concur.
I, too, recommend avoiding the “Continue eating your veggies. You have eaten 4 out of 25 turnips. Your progress in eating turnips is 16%” nagware, especially at the top of the front page.
I think an important thing is that the first screen of the first page should contain the most important things both for the newcomers and for the regular readers.
For newcomers, it’s the links to HPMOR, The Sequences and The Codex (and anything else that may be later included). Should be at the top, but don’t need to take much space vertically.
For regular readers, it’s the new articles and featured articles. Perhaps in two columns. This way the whole first page could fit on an average monitor.
The “progress” part feels quite forced. Having the links displayed, either people will read the stuff, or they will not. If they decide not to read it now, no need to rub their faces in it.
EDIT: For people who are logged in, the part for newcomers could be collapsed. If they have an account, they have already see it. But there should be a way to show it again.
I, too, would advise against doing this.
Will logged-in users be able to switch off this “top of the frontpage”?
It looks quite condescending: Continue eating your veggies. You have eaten 4⁄25 turnips. Your progress in eating turnips is 16%. Or start eating another veggie… YOU WILL SEE MESSAGES ABOUT TURNIPS EVERY TIME YOU LOAD THE PAGE UNTIL YOU EAT ALL OF THEM.
I agree that people should not be able to upvote or downvote an article without having clicked through to it.
I also find the comments hard to parse because the separation is less explicit than on either Reddit or here.
Much of this is stuff that’s on the development team’s agenda (either to change or to think about).
One thing that’s a significant change that was very intentional is the “Opening up with the sequences, codex, and HPMOR” (albeit with a lot less certainty with HPMOR being included there).
We do plan to have an “All Posts” page that ends up being the primary way you consume the site (with newest content first). And for people who’ve already read the sequences et-al, that’ll be the preferred way for them to interact with the site.
But for newcomers, a major shift with Lesserwrong is essentially, “since the glory days where most good content is from were way back when, and since understanding the sequences really is important for being able to engage productively with the site, we want to be encouraging newcomers to first engage with that content rather than treating it as a forum where newcomers can show up and start posting immediately.” If you don’t have that, then the discussion won’t really have the elements that make Less Wrong particularly valuable.
I agree. But how about trying to only show it to newcomers? Perhaps anyone less than 200 karma for starters.
Later on, maybe track page views + time spent on each page in order to infer whether or not users have read the sequences (probably needs to be thought out some more, but something like that).
People who aren’t newcomers can use a bookmark to go directly to another page.
Issue 2 is about to be fixed: https://github.com/Discordius/Lesswrong2/pull/188
For 6, I think users who want to minimize temptation should at least have the option of disabling this. Relevant: http://www.timewellspent.io/.
2, 3 and 7 all seem like pretty noncontroversial and doable things.