I do think that adding the ability to automatically keep track of what posts you’ve read in a sequence is quite valuable, and encouraging you to continue reading in a sequence as you interact with the page.
One of the big problems I see with many discussion platforms is that they make it very hard for old content to still be actively read by its users, I generally want to improve on that on the new LessWrong. Sequences seem like one way to move in that direction.
Habryka
HPMOR Wrap Parties: Resources, Information and Discussion
Why you should attend EA Global and (some) other conferences
Closed Beta Users: What would make you interested in using LessWrong 2.0?
This is now done! Interested in your thoughts on the implementation. We haven’t yet exposed the sequence editor, but the navigation and style can be seen in the three major collections linked from the frontpage.
Feature roadmap link fixed!
All old links will continue working. I’ve put quite a bit of effort into that, and this was one of the basic design requirements we built the site around.
Yeah, that’s roughly what I’ve been envisioning as well.
I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about certain tags on posts requiring a minimum karma for commenters. The minimum karma wouldn’t have to be too high (e.g. 10-20 karma might be enough), but it would keep out people who only sign up to discuss highly political topics.
Thanks! :)
I agree with the content issue, and ultimately having good content on the page is one of primary goals that guided all the modeling in the post. Good content is downstream from having a functioning platform and an active community that attracts interesting people and has some pointers on how to solve interesting problems.
I like your two models. Let me think about both of them...
The hedonic incentive model is one that I tend to use quite often, especially when it comes to the design of the page, but I didn’t go into too much in this post because talking about it would inevitably involve a much larger amount of details. I’ve mentioned “making sure things are fun” a few times, but going into the details on how I am planning to achieve this would require me talking about the design of buttons, and animations and notification systems, each of which I could write a whole separate 8000 word post filled with my own thoughts. That said, it is also a ton of fun for me, and if anyone ever wants to discuss the details of any design decision on the page, I am super happy to do that.
I do feel that there is still a higher level of abstraction in the hedonic incentives model that in game design would be referred to as “the core game loop” or “the core reward loop”. What is the basic sequence of actions that a user executes when he comes to your page that reliably results in positive hedonic reward? (on Facebook there are a few of those, but the most dominant one is “Go to frontpage, see you have new notifications, click notifications, see that X people have liked your content”) And I don’t think I currently have a super clear answer to this. I do feel like I have an answer on a System 1 level, but it isn’t something I have spent enough time thinking about, and haven’t clarified super much, and this comment made me realize that this is a thing I want to pay more attention to.
We hope to bootstrap the chicken-and-egg model by allowing people to practically just move their existing blogs to the LessWrong platform, either via RSS imports or by directly using their user-profile as a blog. My current sense is that in the larger rationality diaspora we have a really large amount of content, and so far almost everyone I’ve talked to seemed very open to having their content mirrored on LessWrong, which makes me optimistic about solving that aspect.
Yeah, we do now have much better word-based search, but also still feel that we want a way to archive content on the site into more hierarchical or tag-based structures. I am very open to suggestions of existing websites that do this well, or maybe even physical library systems that work here.
I’ve been reading some information architecture textbooks (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920034674.do) on this, but still haven’t found a great solution or design pattern that doesn’t feel incredibly cumbersome and adds a whole other dimension to the page that users need to navigate.
I am somewhat conflicted about this. HPMOR has been really successful at recruiting people to this community (HPMOR is the path by which I ended up here), and according to last year’s survey about 25% of people who took the survey found out about LessWrong via HPMOR. I am hesitant to hide our best recruitment tool behind trivial inconveniences.
One solution to this that I’ve been thinking about is to have a separate section of the page filled with rationalist art and fiction, which would prominently feature HPMOR, Unsong and some of the other best rationalist fiction out there. I can imagine that section of the page itself getting a lot of traffic, since fiction is a lot easier to get into than the usually more dry reading on LW and SSC, and if we set up a good funnel between that part of the site and the main discussion we might get a lot of benefits, without needing to feature HPMOR prominently on the frontpage.
I am slightly hesitant to force authors to think about how their posts will look like in different fonts, and different styles. While I don’t expect this to be a problem most of the time, there are posts that I write where the font choice would matter for how the content comes across.
Medium allows the writer to chose between a sans-serif and a serif font, which I like a bit more, but I would expect would not really satisfy Alicorn’s preferences.
Maintaining multiple themes also adds a lot of design constraints and complexity to updating various parts of the page. The width of a button might change with different fonts, and depending on the implementation, you might end up needing to add special cases for each theme choice, which I would really prefer to avoid.
Overall, my hypothesis is that Alicorn might not dislike serif-fonts in general, but might be unhappy about our specific choice of serif fonts, which is indeed very serify. I would be curios whether she also has a similar reaction to the default Medium font, for example displayed in this post: https://medium.com/@pshrmn/a-simple-react-router-v4-tutorial-7f23ff27adf
That was indeed intentional, but after playing around with it a bit, I actually think it had a negative effect on the skimmability of comment threads, and I am planning to try out a few different solutions soon. In general I feel that I want to increase the spacing between different comments and make it easier to identify the author of a comment.
A wiki feels too high of a barrier to entry to me, though maybe there are some cool new wiki softwares that are better than what I remember.
For now I feel like having an about page on LessWrong that has links to all the posts, and tries to summarize the state of discussion and information is the better choice, until we reach the stage where LW gets a lot more open-source engagement and is being owned more by a large community again.
Hmm… I feel that this disincentivizes downvoting too strongly, and just makes downvoting feel kind of shitty on an emotional level.
An alternative thing that I’ve been thinking about is to make it so that when you downvote something, you have to give a short explanation between 40 and 400 characters about why you think the comment was bad. Which both adds a cost to downvoting, and actually translates that cost into meaningful information for the commenter. Another alternative implementation of this could work with a set of common tags that you can choose from when downvoting a comment, maybe of the type “too aggressive”, “didn’t respond to original claim”, “responded to strawman”, etc.
Being aware that this is probably the most bikesheddy thing in this whole discussion, I’ve actually thought about this a bit.
From skimming a lot of early Eliezer posts, I’ve seen all three uses “LessWrong”, “Lesswrong” and “Less Wrong” and so there isn’t a super clear precedent here, though I do agree that “Less Wrong” was used a bit more often.
I personally really like “Less Wrong”, because it has two weirdly capitalized words, and I don’t like brand names that are two words. It makes it sound too much like it wants to refer to the original meaning of the words, instead of being a pointer towards the brand/organization/online-community, and while one might think that is actually useful, it usually just results in a short state of confusion when I read a sentence that has “Less Wrong” in it, because I just didn’t parse it as the correct reference.
I am currently going with “LessWrong” and “LESSWRONG”, which is what I am planning to use in the site navigation, logos and other areas of the page. If enough people object I would probably change my mind.
This already exists! You can see an example of that with Elizabeth’s blog “Aceso Under Glass” here:
We set it up so that Elizabeth has a tag on her wordpress blog such that whenever she adds something to that tag, it automatically gets crossposted to LessWrong. We can do this with arbitrary RSS feeds, as long as the RSS feeds export the full html of the post.
Yeah, the design of the commenting UI is sufficiently different, and more optimized for mobile that I expect this problem to be gone. That said, we are still having some problems with our editor on mobile, and it will take a bit to sort that out.
Yeah, that’s my guess as well. Though we might be able to do something in between where you could visit a page similar to the “Recent Comments” page where you can see all prediction-polls that have been posted in both comments and posts. And maybe feature some of that on the frontpage somehow.