= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Larks comments on Fall 2010 Meta Thread - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (99)
We're currently have someone working on the LW code. While we can't promise miracles, if you have any ideas, suggestions, or complaints, now might be a good time to air them.
I'd like to see a larger textarea for comments. Some places have it resize depending on how much has been typed into it so far, but I'd settle for one which was simply a bit bigger (or a setting).
Of course, whether this is actually a good idea depends on how much you want to encourage me to write essays in the comments. (The bigger input field only matters when I've written a lot and want to skim back for errors.)
You might want to try Chrome, if you haven't. Every textarea on a page has a little grip at the bottom right with which you can resize it to however large you want. Example: http://i55.tinypic.com/w8828w.png
Edit: As noted below by Spurlock and others, this works in all WebKit browsers, which I hadn't realized.
That IS nice. I've tried Chrome a couple of times and didn't take to it, but I'll put that in its "pro" column for the next time I'm thinking about trying it.
This is a feature of webkit browers in general. Which is to say, anyone who doesn't like Chrome could also use Safari.
As a related side note, Safari's "Reader" feature is a huge improvement for reading HPMoR.
Damn, I've been using Chrome since it was first released and I never knew about that. Thanks.
If you're a Firefox user, may I recommend It's All Text?
Ah, that will help! Thank you.
Man, I was all excited about that plugin and then I saw the confusing, ambiguous notes about whether it would play nice on a Mac. Now I'm spooked and not sure if installing it will break something on my computer.
The bottom-right corner of the comment text-entry box can be dragged to expand the box or change its size. Or is that not what you're referring to?
That is a browser feature, not a LW feature.
Browser feature to which browser? On Mac, it works in Google Chrome, Stainless, and Safari - it didn't in Firefox, but that's it.
All of the browsers you name are WebKit-based.
That would probably explain it.
Huh, I guess I'm spoiled. Apologies for contributing noise.
Record upvotes and downvotes separately, so that we can see the difference between "this post was polarising" and "this post was uninspiring"
ETA: Thanks to Bongo (below), I realise this suggestion is redundant, so instead I suggest that it would be nice to have upvote and downvote totals for users. Although.. I'm not sure how one would distinguish between someone with few downvotes because everything they say is awesome versus someone who is excessively conservative in their commenting (or worse, only posts applause lights)
Oh and in case it hasn't been suggested yet: it would be nice to be able to have a comment feed for single posts, or to filter out comments on posts that we really don't care about. (and while I'm at it, could I also get a pony? Thanks)
You can already "Sort By: Controversial"
That's not very useful for comments that are replies to other comments, though.
It sorts those too, tested it.
Given that it keeps comments that are replies to other comments nested under the comments that they're replying to, I suspect that that only makes a difference when one comment has two or more replies. It's much more common for a comment to have only one immediate-child-level reply, in which case it seems that the sorting doesn't make any difference in how that reply is displayed. So it's useful in some situations, but not in the majority, hence 'not very useful'.
For the clueless among us: how?
http://i55.tinypic.com/2ey8go4.jpg
Never have I been so thoroughly owned in so few characters.
He could do better.
http://is.gd/fjEp7 is 16 characters shorter.
Lo and behold, I am enlightened!
I hereby change my previous suggestion to "let users see a total of how often they've been upvoted and downvoted in total"
I'd like to be able to sort a user's contributions when viewing them, e.g. by score or age, like the posts-by-tag view.
And that reminds me-- it would be nice to be able to tag comments.
What do people think of open tagging?
I posted something which is said to belong here.
Show read/unread comments in a different color.
Before someone posts an article, let them be able to enter a guess as to what it's Karma score will be in three days. After three days reveal the guess.
I'd like to see a way to save comments. Of course, I could just bookmark the permalinks, but it'd be nicer to have an in-site mechanism.
In what way would it be nicer?
I think saving and viewing them in-site would be a more aesthetically pleasing experience for me. Like saving posts in-site. It's probably not important enough to put more than a small amount of effort into though.
I'd like to be able to read the LW archives when I'm without internet. So, it'd be nice to have a dump.
I think best would be a git repository with a file for each article, and another file for the comments.
Require new top-level posts to use a tag that indicates which facet of LW's interest it lies with. So each new post would have to choose on (or maybe more) of tags like "bayes", "selfimprovement", "philosophy". So, if I think that Lesswrong should really dedicate itself to the study of Victory and nothing else, I might read only posts with selfimprovement tags.
You mean a system like tagging?
There already is a tag system (you can see the links on the right). Do you want it to be more prominent?
I think he's actually speaking of a fixed, required taxonomy field, rather than free-tagging (to abuse Drupal terminology).
Free tagging is nice, but there's no way to structurally collapse the terms into a hierarchy, so that one can just browse "self improvement" - which might include akrasia, health, and improving personal rationality skills as subtopics.
You could have a system where the tag "akrasia" is marked as a subtag of "self-improvement", so that any article tagged with "akrasia" is implicitly tagged with "self-improvement".
I think this is also one of the arguments for subfora.
I would like some way to arrange to be notified by email or RSS of additions to my inbox. That way I could be responsive to PMs and replies to my comments even on days when loading LW in my browser to check for the little red envelope is too much of a temptation to procrastinate.
There has always been an "RSS feed for this page" link on the /messages/inbox page, but it has never worked.
Could you be sure to update the instructions for reusing the code? I tried to play around with it months ago and couldn't get it working.
This is hugely awesome software so it should be made as easy as possible to adopt.
What was your roadblock? I got it up and running on MacOS, willing to help if you'll describe where things went wrong.
I don't even vaguely remember, but I'll find you if I have trouble next time.
Suggestion: Two different kinds of voting: good post/bad post, agree/disagree. Only the first would count towards karma - the second would be displayed seperately/adjacently.
Posts that argue for wrong ideas well are the worst kind; they lower the accuracy of everyone's beliefs, and they should not be encouraged. There is precedent for karma systems explicitly discouraging downvotes for well-argued wrong posts on Slashdot, and I believe that policy is partially responsible for the extremely high prevalence of inflammatory but plausible sounding falsehoods found there.
What's right and wrong is rarely as clear cut as that when you're talking about the type of topics discussed here. At any rate I'm not talking about rewarding well-written but clearly wrong posts, but rather posts that are interesting but of uncertain truth value (which is a lot of them on this site). Agree/disagree on the other hand would allow people to register whether they believe something is true/a good idea independently of how interesting it is.
I guess rather than having two ratings that could be given seperately, you could vote a post as "agree" or "interesting", both giving postive karma, or "disagree" or "bad", both giving negative karma, but with visual distinguishment. This would give posters more accurate feedback without fundamentally changing the karma system.
Right now if a post has a high rating it's unclear if people actually agree with it/think it's true or just find it useful/interesting, and similarly for low ratings.
Public expression of (dis)agreement creates emotional binding to beliefs and triggers some associated biases. Seeing how popular a belief is can bias people as well, functioning like an indirect argumentum ad populum. I would rather not know how much popular an opinion is; a well-reasoned disagreement or agreement accompanied by additional arguments are gladly accepted, but unsupported opinion expression ranges, in my opinion, from nearly worthless to actually harmful.
Now the popularity of certain beliefs can be discerned from the present karma system too, but still it doesn't "officially" hold that highly upvoted post -> probably true. The less explicit meaning karma has, the less likely it produces biases, or at least I think so.
Also, I agree with jimrandomh. To maintain that a post brings relevant, valid and good argument supporting X and simultaneously disagree with X seems irrational; rationalists are supposed to change their beliefs with new evidence. Upvoting an argument whose conclusion one doesn't accept means either that one values sophistry, or that one has an opinion (enough strong to be willing to express it by voting) in spite of accepting arguments to the contrary. I can imagine few situations when that may be appropriate, but not enough to justify existence of two voting scales.
I think my most upvoted posts have been the jokes. Perhaps there should be a fun/useful distinction.
Personally, I use comments to specify. I notice that a lot of other people do not, and wonder if I'm violating a social more against relatively informationless comments by doing it (although I've gotten upvoted for it).
I agree with the problem, though. I can't tell if the upvotes on this are meant to give me the confirmation I'm asking for, or join in the asking.